The Other Side with Nathaniel Manheru
In his Anti-Memoirs, Andre Malraux wrote that if our caves and their flint implements remind us that man invented the tool, “it is in Egypt that we are reminded that he invented the tomb”.
I don’t know what Malraux meant by that. I just hope he meant the prodigious and majestic pyramids attesting to both Egyptian architectural excellence and the hard slave labour their grandeur belie. If that is what he meant, I might just agree, even then reluctantly. If he meant to mischaracterise Egypt as the place of death or the deathly, maybe I might need more persuasion.
Egypt, apart from being the birthplace of world civilisation, invented irrigation technology, invented paper — that far reaching technology and platform that made human experience recordable and preserve-able. Egypt chose to call it papyrus, not paper, but frankly who cares about a name? I hope my readers remember that the giant Sphinx only lost its precious nose when some short Frenchman called Napoleon realised the nose that squatted on that giant face had an African flatness about it. Leaving it there would then have given an African identity and name to the crib and citadel of human civilisation, something no European was ready to accept, something no European is ready to concede to this day. There is a way in which black Africa navel-connects with ancient Egypt. Read Cheikh Anta Diop for more if you so wish more on this subversive narrative.
I don’t know what Malraux meant by that. I just hope he meant the prodigious and majestic pyramids attesting to both Egyptian architectural excellence and the hard slave labour their grandeur belie. If that is what he meant, I might just agree, even then reluctantly. If he meant to mischaracterise Egypt as the place of death or the deathly, maybe I might need more persuasion.
Egypt, apart from being the birthplace of world civilisation, invented irrigation technology, invented paper — that far reaching technology and platform that made human experience recordable and preserve-able. Egypt chose to call it papyrus, not paper, but frankly who cares about a name? I hope my readers remember that the giant Sphinx only lost its precious nose when some short Frenchman called Napoleon realised the nose that squatted on that giant face had an African flatness about it. Leaving it there would then have given an African identity and name to the crib and citadel of human civilisation, something no European was ready to accept, something no European is ready to concede to this day. There is a way in which black Africa navel-connects with ancient Egypt. Read Cheikh Anta Diop for more if you so wish more on this subversive narrative.
The day Tunisia angered Zimbabwe
I recall one prominent Zimbabwean politician who broke away in protest from a guided tour in Tunis a few years ago. This minister politician had gone for the second leg of the World Summit on Information, WSIS as it was called. In between sessions, he chose to tour Carthage, home of Hannibal the great conqueror who crosses the implacable Alps to subdue and subjugate Europe. In spite of the well known fact that Carthage was an African city, its denizens decidedly African, the Tunisian guide maintained after what the minister hoped was a confirmatory enquiry that Hannibal was an Arab. That upset the honourable minister who then decided short of punching the Arab guide, the only other sane thing to do was to protest with his feet. He walked away, quite angry, quite embittered by this great pillage from the black man’s great past.
Boil in the land of the Pharaohs, Hannibal
Today, these two sites of great African grandeur and heroism are on the boil. Western media networks are having a field day, half-hourly spewing images of deadly confrontation in Egypt, the land of the Pharaohs, themselves part of our collective ancestry as Africans, or at the very least, as of Africa. And these networks deliver these images with a conspicuous grin of macabre cynicism. They do much more. Where Egypt is not illustrating enough Marlovian atavism, their reporters are goading them into it, all for “great television”.
Egypt shall go down in history as the first civil conflict or unrest to reach our homes in real time, to reach us live. In that sense it shares the same dubious fame with its Arab cousin Iraq, which also made history as the setting for the first televised war. Of course both situations raise fundamental ethical dilemmas for broadcast journalism, dilemmas schools of journalism and human rights agitators run away from by invoking the myth of “freedom of expression”.
You do not need to be an employee of any government to start wondering whether or not it makes sense for societies to allow “live” transmission of civil unrest, thereby inadvertently encouraging it, directing it, compounding it and, quite frankly further causing it once it has begun. Yes, cameras do cause human actions, do incite destructive human behaviour. Yes, networks delivering such images do make big money from enhanced ratings as a result. They thus do make money from the gory scenes, from spilt blood. When blood and tears do make good broadcast business, reporters very easily slip into the zone of agitation, very easily cause — not cover — events. Therein lies the ethical dilemma which no amount of chanting of First Amendment will ever change.
So much noise, so little light
Malraux called Egypt that country where man invented the tomb. Today I say Egypt is that country where the media invented contents for that tomb. And that had nothing to do with the genius of the Pharaohs. Quite the very opposite, it has a lot to do with the West and its worst media habits. In Tunisia and now in Egypt, we have had noise, too much noise masquerading as journalism. I do not know if after watching so much on Egypt from western networks and their Arab decoy — principally Al Jazeera and Al Arabyia — I stand any wiser, any better informed about those two situations.
I see the media magi shouting every day, every hour, behind them agitated Egyptian crowds and behind these plumes of fire, wisps of smoke from a burning city, burning country, but I come no nearer to understanding what is at stake. I can only suspect it must be enormous. Otherwise how does a country self-immolate so tremendously for so little or nothing?
But my suspicion of the bona fide status of these so-called global broadcast networks is fortified. A reporter who asks an irate crowd when it will march on President Mubarak’s palace cannot pass for reporting. Etymologically, “reporting” comes from “re-” which means “again”, and “-port” which means “carry”. “Reporting” then means to “carry again”. You do not carry, let alone again, what you are fomenting, instigating or actively wishing “live”, do you? But in their infinite wisdom, the Egyptians allowed that to go on for a long time. It is their prerogative.
The day Egypt dwindled to a effervescing capsule
I said my wish against suspending disbelief is fortified. Indeed it is. For the days of the “live” unrest, Egypt became yelling Cairo and fitfully uneasy Alexandra. Vast Egypt dwindled into its restive urban conurbations. For those days of unrest, Egypt has become the few thousands of its agitated dissenters. Egypt is no longer the 87,7 million, only a demographically marginal country of thousands of irate citizens yelling for their native president’s departure.
Journalism, it seems, is not craft for scales. A little is all. Much worse, I am left with a new word up my small vocabulary. The new word is “mubarak”, decidedly Arabic. All along I thought it was a proper noun for a human being who is a president of a big North African country. Not any more.
There has been a seismic semantic shift. Mubarak is a name for something evil, totally and irreducibly evil. It is not the name of a human creature, a living being who is important enough to have been an
Afro-Arab man, a hero in soldiery, a fighter pilot who became a sung hero in the fight against Zionist imperialism, a president America found good enough to turn into a partner for decades.
The frenzied media has moulded a vignette out of a whole man, a fully grown Arab, an African, a President, a leader. From nowhere too. AS is true, just a few days back, President Mubarak was cast as the presidential face of moderate, constructive and engaging Islam. In American conventional narrative, his real foils where the so-called mullahs manning deadly madrassas (radical Islamic schools). And in simplified American and European journalism, whole countries such as Iran, became one madrassa that must be bombed out of existence! That is America’s simplified dictionary and nations do pay a heavy price for its semantic validation.
America’s Ben Ali
It is the same with Ben Ali, formerly of Tunisia. A short bio-check tells me Ben Ali was an intelligence officer who one American day decided to topple his own president, an old man called Bourghiba. American day because for a long time, Ben Ali was America’s security intern, who later became an American covert tool, who then became America’s human means for ousting his president, who then became America’s president in a country called Tunisia.
Ben Ali was never a case of innate Arab autocracy, if there is anything like that. Rather, Ben Ali was America’s outward autocracy, America’s autocracy abroad, planted on Afro-Arab soil. It is the same in Jordan. It is the same in Saudi Arabia. It is the same in Iraq, both before and after the second Gulf War. Indeed it is the same in Yemen, in Kuwait, Qatar and in many other Middle East autocratic dynasties which America has made and propped.
Islamic CNN, BBC?
Sorry reader, I have another puzzling paradox. The framing concept for the broadcast media has been changing practically everyday. It has changed from straightforwardly descriptive framing phrases like “Upheaval in Egypt” or “Crisis in Egypt” to the highly inflammatory or incendiary “Departure Demonstra-tions” or “Defiant Demonstrations”. Or “Day of Departure”. Huge, Eurocentric networks have been picking their vocabulary from quivering Arab lips, yelling Arab streets, indeed from mosques they have always told us are replicated birthplaces of deadly Osamas.
Since when has Atlanta borrowed words and syntax from the traditionally suspicious Arab, useful vocabulary from the racially profiled Arab whose presence in Europe and America invites terrorist screening? And how does a neutral media pick a framing punch-line from one side in the conflict, nay even allow this one side access into the control room?
Add to all this the so-called “citizen journalism” by which raw, untested, unverified footage squats respectably on a global network as refined news, all from one side. Clearly on Egypt, newsrooms have become rarefied, air-conditioned Tahrir Squares which are so offensive and yet so far away from danger. And once CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera become Tahrir or Liberation Squares, we all — those networks’ global audience — automatically become disaffected and demonstrating Egyptians demanding that Mubarak goes, at the very least vicariously.
When small became all
And because of all this, western networks make wonderful and spectacular ellipses. The whole of Egypt is demonstrating and wants President Mubarak to go. True until one day when business interests organised as vigilantes begin to impose their will on otherwise riotous and looting streets of Egypt, and do so in a way too unobtrusive for the cameras to ignore. Only then are we then told there is a “small” section of Egyptians opposed to the demonstrations. And of course to make that concession is to admit that the demonstrators are not one hell of righteous angels demanding an end to the sinful Mubarak. It is to admit that many of the demonstrators are hungry and disempowered Egyptians looking for succour from the chaos which the networks have re-christianed “revolution”.
The day the monolith of dissent collapsed
On another day, the national Egyptian media shows many farmers and businessmen along the rich Nile Valley decrying the destructive demonstrations, indeed pledging full and unstinting support to Mubarak.
Nile TV is on satellite, which creates a bit of a problem for the networks. They cannot ignore this counter-story without raising questions about their journalistic probity. Grudgingly, they cover the story, ensuring it has the shortest time and life, well away from peak viewing.
Day nine, something very dramatic happens. A phalanx of aggressive pro-Mubarak supporters invades the Square and beats the demonstrators foolish. There is blood on the streets and a few bodies are carted to Cairo’s waiting morgues. The sane viewer wonders where these pro-Mubarak demonstrators come from, given the picture of unanimity, of a demonstrating monolith we were being fed on.
At that point the tables turn and the hunter — the networks included — become the hunted. Our brave war correspondents vanish from sight, remarkably fearful of own life and limb, forgetting the story, forgetting their just ended macabre delight in the death of a nation they have been aiding and abetting, they have been wishing to great commercial broadcasting success. It is a great commercial game, is it not? Never mind that the casualty is some small big country called Egypt, some once big but now severely reduced leader called Hosni Mubarak. Fundamental questions which never go away.
When the star falls
Let us sink our teeth right deep into the meat of the whole situation. The fault-line of the so-called Maghreb revolution has dogged countries which only a while ago were hailed as star economies of the Afro-Arab world, of the Middle East.
In terms of IMF, World Bank and World Economic Forum manuals, Tunisia and Egypt ranked highest as most liberal economies where, thanks to permissive policies and privatisation, foreign direct investments (FDI) were a staggering billions runaway. Their tax regimes became a standard of how to do it. Attitude to the West became a lesson for all Arabs — from the Mediterranean shores of Africa right through to Persia. Yes, their reading and interpretation of the Koran became the very antithesis of radical Islam against which Europe and America were ranged, all in the name of “war on terror”. So what has gone so awfully wrong in the sweet, jasmine-smelling garden of a GDP of coy abundance? First major question.
Unity of disparate classes
In both Tunisia and Egypt, we have seen inner city agitation that quickly and inexorably snowballs until it ignites whole cities and towns. Demonstrations too whose participants cut across the whole social gamut, albeit with a face of markedly youth indigence.
The trigger has been a harassed youth, the igniting self-immolation again from a poor youth. Indeed the raw material, the traction, has come from the same youthful demonstrator, of course assisted by the middle-aged and the old, all poor or precariously perched on the middle class borderline. We have seen professionals clinging just at the helm of a class of comfort, but feeling the pull but fearing to stare the wide-mouthed, bottomless pit of working class and unemployed misery. It is not a crowd of political hopefuls, both by status and aspiration. It is not a sophisticated crowd, which is why it needed a political shorthand like "Mubarak must go". But it is very angry, too angry to be easily appeased or pacified. What is it that has soldered such disparate classes and social types? Second major question.
Ooops, we have to find a leader!
In both Tunisia and Egypt, these raging movements had no leader, still have no leader to this day. They represent a unique political experience where a robust movement is spontaneously born, gathers pace, wins and then frantically looks for a Maximilian Robespiere. The leader follows the crowd, often not emerging from it, often getting rejected in the process. Shoe-like, he is tried on its unmarked feet and the size seems uniquely big, too big, well away from the standard size 8. Lots of trimming. Not of the sole, not of leather, not of the shoe, but of the feet. In the case of Tunisia, no new leader emerged, with the people finding themselves victorious too soon, sooner than they could sire a leader, some kind of checking into the maternity wing before the pregnancy. Thanks to the quick thinking and mutation of Ben Ali's party, the pregnancy came from the very husband the wife had kicked out of the nuptial bed. It has been a delicate, borderline mating, one with a very thin line between fornication and lawful, Christian mating. The issue is a nondescript political bastard which leaves political science baffled.
The search continues and a government is struggling to be, well ahead of a leader, well ahead of an election. Tunisia's only known leader is the one it has just hounded out. The one to replace him is as real as the numberless images and imaginings in each demonstrator's head. What that means anger and frustration moved and triumphed faster than form, which is why Tunisia today runs on the gas of mere raging impulse now trying to settle into some recognisable form. Tunisia's contribution to African political architecture is the possibility of forming a government with no leader, indeed without any eye on any manifesto, but with all ears on a riotous mob outside. Does it accept this name or reject it, this leadership combination of that one? Now we know that angry streets do have compelling manifestos. It has been a trial and error, a huge gamble with the lives of more than ten million inhabitants.
America searches for a leader
Egypt is too much, too many and too important for such uncertainty. It has the anger, it has the numbers. It is too close to the Suez Canal, too enmeshed in radical Islam to be left to a Tunisia-like chance. Above all, it houses too much foreign investment to be left adrift. See how the bourses have across the Middle East, Dubai included, started catching a cold at her sneeze. Its nondescript revolution has to have a leader and the forces on both sides of the Atlantic - not Egypt's Afro-Arab, 87-million strong citizenry - are frantically searching for that leader, conceiving him through sinful fornication which America is well known for. Al Baradei? Hassan Moussa? Who else? The one is a Nobel laureate, well famed at the International Atomic Energy through or behind which Bush and Blair invaded and destroyed Iraq. The other seems like a native son at the helm of the Arab League, previously Mubaraki's foreign minister. The western world is not certain. How can it be? This is Egypt, the land of the unpredictable. Did not Ghali subvert US interest once he got in as UN secretary general? Did not the Moslem Brotherhood nurture Omar, Bin Laden's deputy? This is well before you even test the fitness of these two characters. So the engrafting starts. What American games have created out of Egypt so far is to divide its ruling caste of years.
Small shoes on non-standard feet
Frightened America and Europe have been trying these two shoes on the big, unmeasured feet of the footloose Egyptian demos. You saw the clumsy attempts, again tried through the dutiful western media networks who talent-sport for these formidable interests. Both looked, look incongruous in relation to the people and movement they are being grafted onto. It is a beginner's graft and hey, the sap will not seep through to nourish the new graft. America would very much love a Mubarak, reforming Mubarak. Or his alter ego by way of anyone from his NDP. But the anger is just too much and, witch-like, demands tender meat of another baby. This is why America prevaricates between condonation and condemnation of what Mubarak is doing to survive. Or the obverse, prevaricating between embracing street power that can become anything, good or nasty to American interests, or containing it. The ever-changing statements from Obama, or his minion Clinton, show no depth or un-fathomability, only ambivalence stemming from deep-seated uncertainty. Is it leadership from within NDP, leadership from America's newfound international bureaucratic scions, or is it a little bit from either camp, all to pre-empt the emergence of a leadership organically connected to the radical anger on the streets of Cairo, anger getting its benediction every Friday from the mosque? And the mosque is what sets America, Europe goose-fleshing.
Whose structures drove Egypt to the streets?
Much worse, America finds the structures that spewed or inherited, or sustained the massive street crowds scary. Who owns them? Who runs them? To what end? Could it be the Moslem Brotherhood, itself a massive show of force by radical or unpredictable Islam? And you notice the Brotherhood a busy sprucing up their image, projecting uncharacteristic moderation, and even embracing el Baradei as their "leader" for purposes of negotiating with government. Such a stance aggravates America's fears, indeed resurrect the ogre of 1979 Iran, and what followed. Is this genuine? Is it subterfuge? I do not think the Brotherhood is in a strategic relationship with el Baradei. They don't know him, do not need to know him. He brings nothing to the table, only his contacts with the evil empire, something the Brotherhood has fought since the 1930s. But tactically, they need him to capture state power, or be near it. After all, they have little to fear; they have the structures which el Baradei will badly need but may never have a month or so down the line, when the poll is called. NDP has already made itself unelectable, which means it cannot be a threat, except in the drastic sense of wielding proscription laws, wielding the infrastructure of coercion.
The social question, condition
All of which means what? Well, that what has happened on the streets of Tunis and Cairo cannot be America. To say so is not to say that the end may not be American. America is well known for fishing in troubled waters, for trawling really deep to made advantage of adversity. It is just to say the roots of the rebellion are deeply embedded in the inner city of Tunis and Cairo, indeed in both countries as western neo-colonies. Neo-colonies do provide excellent home to FDI, to western interests, to telegenic investments, spew out good GDP statistics. But they do not pay the common man and woman's survival bills. They never do, which is why both Tunisia and Egypt have such wonderful FDI and GDP statistics, but abysmal social indicators all round. Where these appear to exist, they are rigged to flatter a leadership into persevering with an exploitative relationship. Or the good indicators are coincidental, having arisen as manpower requirements of imperialism's offshore investments. The key to understanding what has happened in Tunisia and Egypt is to interrogate the social conditions of the people, common people.
A pushcart more potent than Bastille
That is why a pushcart not even half-full of discoloured apples and worth so little, became far more potent for the revolution that the Bastille, became too much for a dictator of years. In fact, the demonstrators only looked for the Bastille, far much later into the revolution, more to steal from it than to demolish it as a symbols of indifferent power, unchecked profligacy. The creator of that debilitating social condition is America and its European allies, the real eating chief of the so-called FDI for which both countries were until now prided for. The model of that creation is neo-liberalism which imperialism has been selling to all of us, in our case using MDC as its sales agent. It now stands fiercely rejected from below, which is why the issue of empowerment has crept onto the Egyptian and Tunisian agenda, unheralded, without a point-man.
The so-called political reforms will not remove the issue of youth unemployment; will not remove net disempowerment that has been the bane of the Arab world and its African cousin. What is worse, a pro-American leader seeking to reform the neo-colony can only defer Egypt's popular anger; he can never appease it. Which is what one finds baffling about Tsvangirai and his MDC-T crew who read history while standing on their heads. The mayhem in Tunisia and Egypt trapped his political alter egos, at the very least from the point of view of attitude towards the West, at the very least as protégés of the West. Even then the latest victims were better, more functional alter egos who did not require any massive hand holding that the American doctor called Dell prescribes for him. Yet they still fell or failed.
Mubarak al Gaddafi?
This piece will not speculate on President Mubaraki's fate. It is no site for clairvoyance. Equally, it will not wish for any outcome, something it finds repugnant. A people must choose its leadership, to deserve it soon after. But one thing is clear to me. Mubarak can now describe America's friendship and partnership with him. He feels cheated, betrayed. Far from being all-weather, America is for those good times when the demos are still in check, are less truculent. Should things change, should the mood get vile and militant, America will drop a Government, present its credential to a rabble in a riotous street, indeed will jettison a government for an a novel, nondescript, however inchoate. America cuts and runs. A surviving Mubarak can never be the Mubarak of America's yesteryears. He can only be an angry man who discovers his people through a hefty betrayal. May be not quite a Gaddafi, but something akin to what is happening in Libya by way of a leader who unleashes socially conscious public investments, well ahead of the crowning of his own son.
Welcome to Egypt, Mugabe.
In Egypt and Tunisia, American values face a monumental collapse and failure in a way that shall take a generation to recover and reocnstruct. Afghanistan and Iraq marked the epicentres of the rejection of political America by the Arab world, a rejection which needed American armies and arms to oppose. Today Tunisia and Egypt mark epicentres of the rejection of American economic and social model. The political and the economic have now met. It's a real fatwa, which is why Malraux may have been right after all. Except Egypt today has invented a cemetery for the burial of American neo-liberalism and its neo-colonial political superstructure.
We now have a new weapon in the fight against imperialism, a new arena. True, imperialism may very well buy another day through Moussa, el Baradei, Mubarak or some such made-in-America leader. But the people have tested street power and now know how to enforce notice. The American project in the Arab world can only collapse and die. Such an odious, vampire-like system does not deserve the grand pyramid of Egyptian kings. Only a dirty graveyard which is what Egypt has now invented for manking. In the meantime, welcome to Egypt, Comrade President Mugabe, welcome to a second Egypt of Nasser, indeed the Egypt of militant Afro-Arab solidarity. Icho!
I recall one prominent Zimbabwean politician who broke away in protest from a guided tour in Tunis a few years ago. This minister politician had gone for the second leg of the World Summit on Information, WSIS as it was called. In between sessions, he chose to tour Carthage, home of Hannibal the great conqueror who crosses the implacable Alps to subdue and subjugate Europe. In spite of the well known fact that Carthage was an African city, its denizens decidedly African, the Tunisian guide maintained after what the minister hoped was a confirmatory enquiry that Hannibal was an Arab. That upset the honourable minister who then decided short of punching the Arab guide, the only other sane thing to do was to protest with his feet. He walked away, quite angry, quite embittered by this great pillage from the black man’s great past.
Boil in the land of the Pharaohs, Hannibal
Today, these two sites of great African grandeur and heroism are on the boil. Western media networks are having a field day, half-hourly spewing images of deadly confrontation in Egypt, the land of the Pharaohs, themselves part of our collective ancestry as Africans, or at the very least, as of Africa. And these networks deliver these images with a conspicuous grin of macabre cynicism. They do much more. Where Egypt is not illustrating enough Marlovian atavism, their reporters are goading them into it, all for “great television”.
Egypt shall go down in history as the first civil conflict or unrest to reach our homes in real time, to reach us live. In that sense it shares the same dubious fame with its Arab cousin Iraq, which also made history as the setting for the first televised war. Of course both situations raise fundamental ethical dilemmas for broadcast journalism, dilemmas schools of journalism and human rights agitators run away from by invoking the myth of “freedom of expression”.
You do not need to be an employee of any government to start wondering whether or not it makes sense for societies to allow “live” transmission of civil unrest, thereby inadvertently encouraging it, directing it, compounding it and, quite frankly further causing it once it has begun. Yes, cameras do cause human actions, do incite destructive human behaviour. Yes, networks delivering such images do make big money from enhanced ratings as a result. They thus do make money from the gory scenes, from spilt blood. When blood and tears do make good broadcast business, reporters very easily slip into the zone of agitation, very easily cause — not cover — events. Therein lies the ethical dilemma which no amount of chanting of First Amendment will ever change.
So much noise, so little light
Malraux called Egypt that country where man invented the tomb. Today I say Egypt is that country where the media invented contents for that tomb. And that had nothing to do with the genius of the Pharaohs. Quite the very opposite, it has a lot to do with the West and its worst media habits. In Tunisia and now in Egypt, we have had noise, too much noise masquerading as journalism. I do not know if after watching so much on Egypt from western networks and their Arab decoy — principally Al Jazeera and Al Arabyia — I stand any wiser, any better informed about those two situations.
I see the media magi shouting every day, every hour, behind them agitated Egyptian crowds and behind these plumes of fire, wisps of smoke from a burning city, burning country, but I come no nearer to understanding what is at stake. I can only suspect it must be enormous. Otherwise how does a country self-immolate so tremendously for so little or nothing?
But my suspicion of the bona fide status of these so-called global broadcast networks is fortified. A reporter who asks an irate crowd when it will march on President Mubarak’s palace cannot pass for reporting. Etymologically, “reporting” comes from “re-” which means “again”, and “-port” which means “carry”. “Reporting” then means to “carry again”. You do not carry, let alone again, what you are fomenting, instigating or actively wishing “live”, do you? But in their infinite wisdom, the Egyptians allowed that to go on for a long time. It is their prerogative.
The day Egypt dwindled to a effervescing capsule
I said my wish against suspending disbelief is fortified. Indeed it is. For the days of the “live” unrest, Egypt became yelling Cairo and fitfully uneasy Alexandra. Vast Egypt dwindled into its restive urban conurbations. For those days of unrest, Egypt has become the few thousands of its agitated dissenters. Egypt is no longer the 87,7 million, only a demographically marginal country of thousands of irate citizens yelling for their native president’s departure.
Journalism, it seems, is not craft for scales. A little is all. Much worse, I am left with a new word up my small vocabulary. The new word is “mubarak”, decidedly Arabic. All along I thought it was a proper noun for a human being who is a president of a big North African country. Not any more.
There has been a seismic semantic shift. Mubarak is a name for something evil, totally and irreducibly evil. It is not the name of a human creature, a living being who is important enough to have been an
Afro-Arab man, a hero in soldiery, a fighter pilot who became a sung hero in the fight against Zionist imperialism, a president America found good enough to turn into a partner for decades.
The frenzied media has moulded a vignette out of a whole man, a fully grown Arab, an African, a President, a leader. From nowhere too. AS is true, just a few days back, President Mubarak was cast as the presidential face of moderate, constructive and engaging Islam. In American conventional narrative, his real foils where the so-called mullahs manning deadly madrassas (radical Islamic schools). And in simplified American and European journalism, whole countries such as Iran, became one madrassa that must be bombed out of existence! That is America’s simplified dictionary and nations do pay a heavy price for its semantic validation.
America’s Ben Ali
It is the same with Ben Ali, formerly of Tunisia. A short bio-check tells me Ben Ali was an intelligence officer who one American day decided to topple his own president, an old man called Bourghiba. American day because for a long time, Ben Ali was America’s security intern, who later became an American covert tool, who then became America’s human means for ousting his president, who then became America’s president in a country called Tunisia.
Ben Ali was never a case of innate Arab autocracy, if there is anything like that. Rather, Ben Ali was America’s outward autocracy, America’s autocracy abroad, planted on Afro-Arab soil. It is the same in Jordan. It is the same in Saudi Arabia. It is the same in Iraq, both before and after the second Gulf War. Indeed it is the same in Yemen, in Kuwait, Qatar and in many other Middle East autocratic dynasties which America has made and propped.
Islamic CNN, BBC?
Sorry reader, I have another puzzling paradox. The framing concept for the broadcast media has been changing practically everyday. It has changed from straightforwardly descriptive framing phrases like “Upheaval in Egypt” or “Crisis in Egypt” to the highly inflammatory or incendiary “Departure Demonstra-tions” or “Defiant Demonstrations”. Or “Day of Departure”. Huge, Eurocentric networks have been picking their vocabulary from quivering Arab lips, yelling Arab streets, indeed from mosques they have always told us are replicated birthplaces of deadly Osamas.
Since when has Atlanta borrowed words and syntax from the traditionally suspicious Arab, useful vocabulary from the racially profiled Arab whose presence in Europe and America invites terrorist screening? And how does a neutral media pick a framing punch-line from one side in the conflict, nay even allow this one side access into the control room?
Add to all this the so-called “citizen journalism” by which raw, untested, unverified footage squats respectably on a global network as refined news, all from one side. Clearly on Egypt, newsrooms have become rarefied, air-conditioned Tahrir Squares which are so offensive and yet so far away from danger. And once CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera become Tahrir or Liberation Squares, we all — those networks’ global audience — automatically become disaffected and demonstrating Egyptians demanding that Mubarak goes, at the very least vicariously.
When small became all
And because of all this, western networks make wonderful and spectacular ellipses. The whole of Egypt is demonstrating and wants President Mubarak to go. True until one day when business interests organised as vigilantes begin to impose their will on otherwise riotous and looting streets of Egypt, and do so in a way too unobtrusive for the cameras to ignore. Only then are we then told there is a “small” section of Egyptians opposed to the demonstrations. And of course to make that concession is to admit that the demonstrators are not one hell of righteous angels demanding an end to the sinful Mubarak. It is to admit that many of the demonstrators are hungry and disempowered Egyptians looking for succour from the chaos which the networks have re-christianed “revolution”.
The day the monolith of dissent collapsed
On another day, the national Egyptian media shows many farmers and businessmen along the rich Nile Valley decrying the destructive demonstrations, indeed pledging full and unstinting support to Mubarak.
Nile TV is on satellite, which creates a bit of a problem for the networks. They cannot ignore this counter-story without raising questions about their journalistic probity. Grudgingly, they cover the story, ensuring it has the shortest time and life, well away from peak viewing.
Day nine, something very dramatic happens. A phalanx of aggressive pro-Mubarak supporters invades the Square and beats the demonstrators foolish. There is blood on the streets and a few bodies are carted to Cairo’s waiting morgues. The sane viewer wonders where these pro-Mubarak demonstrators come from, given the picture of unanimity, of a demonstrating monolith we were being fed on.
At that point the tables turn and the hunter — the networks included — become the hunted. Our brave war correspondents vanish from sight, remarkably fearful of own life and limb, forgetting the story, forgetting their just ended macabre delight in the death of a nation they have been aiding and abetting, they have been wishing to great commercial broadcasting success. It is a great commercial game, is it not? Never mind that the casualty is some small big country called Egypt, some once big but now severely reduced leader called Hosni Mubarak. Fundamental questions which never go away.
When the star falls
Let us sink our teeth right deep into the meat of the whole situation. The fault-line of the so-called Maghreb revolution has dogged countries which only a while ago were hailed as star economies of the Afro-Arab world, of the Middle East.
In terms of IMF, World Bank and World Economic Forum manuals, Tunisia and Egypt ranked highest as most liberal economies where, thanks to permissive policies and privatisation, foreign direct investments (FDI) were a staggering billions runaway. Their tax regimes became a standard of how to do it. Attitude to the West became a lesson for all Arabs — from the Mediterranean shores of Africa right through to Persia. Yes, their reading and interpretation of the Koran became the very antithesis of radical Islam against which Europe and America were ranged, all in the name of “war on terror”. So what has gone so awfully wrong in the sweet, jasmine-smelling garden of a GDP of coy abundance? First major question.
Unity of disparate classes
In both Tunisia and Egypt, we have seen inner city agitation that quickly and inexorably snowballs until it ignites whole cities and towns. Demonstrations too whose participants cut across the whole social gamut, albeit with a face of markedly youth indigence.
The trigger has been a harassed youth, the igniting self-immolation again from a poor youth. Indeed the raw material, the traction, has come from the same youthful demonstrator, of course assisted by the middle-aged and the old, all poor or precariously perched on the middle class borderline. We have seen professionals clinging just at the helm of a class of comfort, but feeling the pull but fearing to stare the wide-mouthed, bottomless pit of working class and unemployed misery. It is not a crowd of political hopefuls, both by status and aspiration. It is not a sophisticated crowd, which is why it needed a political shorthand like "Mubarak must go". But it is very angry, too angry to be easily appeased or pacified. What is it that has soldered such disparate classes and social types? Second major question.
Ooops, we have to find a leader!
In both Tunisia and Egypt, these raging movements had no leader, still have no leader to this day. They represent a unique political experience where a robust movement is spontaneously born, gathers pace, wins and then frantically looks for a Maximilian Robespiere. The leader follows the crowd, often not emerging from it, often getting rejected in the process. Shoe-like, he is tried on its unmarked feet and the size seems uniquely big, too big, well away from the standard size 8. Lots of trimming. Not of the sole, not of leather, not of the shoe, but of the feet. In the case of Tunisia, no new leader emerged, with the people finding themselves victorious too soon, sooner than they could sire a leader, some kind of checking into the maternity wing before the pregnancy. Thanks to the quick thinking and mutation of Ben Ali's party, the pregnancy came from the very husband the wife had kicked out of the nuptial bed. It has been a delicate, borderline mating, one with a very thin line between fornication and lawful, Christian mating. The issue is a nondescript political bastard which leaves political science baffled.
The search continues and a government is struggling to be, well ahead of a leader, well ahead of an election. Tunisia's only known leader is the one it has just hounded out. The one to replace him is as real as the numberless images and imaginings in each demonstrator's head. What that means anger and frustration moved and triumphed faster than form, which is why Tunisia today runs on the gas of mere raging impulse now trying to settle into some recognisable form. Tunisia's contribution to African political architecture is the possibility of forming a government with no leader, indeed without any eye on any manifesto, but with all ears on a riotous mob outside. Does it accept this name or reject it, this leadership combination of that one? Now we know that angry streets do have compelling manifestos. It has been a trial and error, a huge gamble with the lives of more than ten million inhabitants.
America searches for a leader
Egypt is too much, too many and too important for such uncertainty. It has the anger, it has the numbers. It is too close to the Suez Canal, too enmeshed in radical Islam to be left to a Tunisia-like chance. Above all, it houses too much foreign investment to be left adrift. See how the bourses have across the Middle East, Dubai included, started catching a cold at her sneeze. Its nondescript revolution has to have a leader and the forces on both sides of the Atlantic - not Egypt's Afro-Arab, 87-million strong citizenry - are frantically searching for that leader, conceiving him through sinful fornication which America is well known for. Al Baradei? Hassan Moussa? Who else? The one is a Nobel laureate, well famed at the International Atomic Energy through or behind which Bush and Blair invaded and destroyed Iraq. The other seems like a native son at the helm of the Arab League, previously Mubaraki's foreign minister. The western world is not certain. How can it be? This is Egypt, the land of the unpredictable. Did not Ghali subvert US interest once he got in as UN secretary general? Did not the Moslem Brotherhood nurture Omar, Bin Laden's deputy? This is well before you even test the fitness of these two characters. So the engrafting starts. What American games have created out of Egypt so far is to divide its ruling caste of years.
Small shoes on non-standard feet
Frightened America and Europe have been trying these two shoes on the big, unmeasured feet of the footloose Egyptian demos. You saw the clumsy attempts, again tried through the dutiful western media networks who talent-sport for these formidable interests. Both looked, look incongruous in relation to the people and movement they are being grafted onto. It is a beginner's graft and hey, the sap will not seep through to nourish the new graft. America would very much love a Mubarak, reforming Mubarak. Or his alter ego by way of anyone from his NDP. But the anger is just too much and, witch-like, demands tender meat of another baby. This is why America prevaricates between condonation and condemnation of what Mubarak is doing to survive. Or the obverse, prevaricating between embracing street power that can become anything, good or nasty to American interests, or containing it. The ever-changing statements from Obama, or his minion Clinton, show no depth or un-fathomability, only ambivalence stemming from deep-seated uncertainty. Is it leadership from within NDP, leadership from America's newfound international bureaucratic scions, or is it a little bit from either camp, all to pre-empt the emergence of a leadership organically connected to the radical anger on the streets of Cairo, anger getting its benediction every Friday from the mosque? And the mosque is what sets America, Europe goose-fleshing.
Whose structures drove Egypt to the streets?
Much worse, America finds the structures that spewed or inherited, or sustained the massive street crowds scary. Who owns them? Who runs them? To what end? Could it be the Moslem Brotherhood, itself a massive show of force by radical or unpredictable Islam? And you notice the Brotherhood a busy sprucing up their image, projecting uncharacteristic moderation, and even embracing el Baradei as their "leader" for purposes of negotiating with government. Such a stance aggravates America's fears, indeed resurrect the ogre of 1979 Iran, and what followed. Is this genuine? Is it subterfuge? I do not think the Brotherhood is in a strategic relationship with el Baradei. They don't know him, do not need to know him. He brings nothing to the table, only his contacts with the evil empire, something the Brotherhood has fought since the 1930s. But tactically, they need him to capture state power, or be near it. After all, they have little to fear; they have the structures which el Baradei will badly need but may never have a month or so down the line, when the poll is called. NDP has already made itself unelectable, which means it cannot be a threat, except in the drastic sense of wielding proscription laws, wielding the infrastructure of coercion.
The social question, condition
All of which means what? Well, that what has happened on the streets of Tunis and Cairo cannot be America. To say so is not to say that the end may not be American. America is well known for fishing in troubled waters, for trawling really deep to made advantage of adversity. It is just to say the roots of the rebellion are deeply embedded in the inner city of Tunis and Cairo, indeed in both countries as western neo-colonies. Neo-colonies do provide excellent home to FDI, to western interests, to telegenic investments, spew out good GDP statistics. But they do not pay the common man and woman's survival bills. They never do, which is why both Tunisia and Egypt have such wonderful FDI and GDP statistics, but abysmal social indicators all round. Where these appear to exist, they are rigged to flatter a leadership into persevering with an exploitative relationship. Or the good indicators are coincidental, having arisen as manpower requirements of imperialism's offshore investments. The key to understanding what has happened in Tunisia and Egypt is to interrogate the social conditions of the people, common people.
A pushcart more potent than Bastille
That is why a pushcart not even half-full of discoloured apples and worth so little, became far more potent for the revolution that the Bastille, became too much for a dictator of years. In fact, the demonstrators only looked for the Bastille, far much later into the revolution, more to steal from it than to demolish it as a symbols of indifferent power, unchecked profligacy. The creator of that debilitating social condition is America and its European allies, the real eating chief of the so-called FDI for which both countries were until now prided for. The model of that creation is neo-liberalism which imperialism has been selling to all of us, in our case using MDC as its sales agent. It now stands fiercely rejected from below, which is why the issue of empowerment has crept onto the Egyptian and Tunisian agenda, unheralded, without a point-man.
The so-called political reforms will not remove the issue of youth unemployment; will not remove net disempowerment that has been the bane of the Arab world and its African cousin. What is worse, a pro-American leader seeking to reform the neo-colony can only defer Egypt's popular anger; he can never appease it. Which is what one finds baffling about Tsvangirai and his MDC-T crew who read history while standing on their heads. The mayhem in Tunisia and Egypt trapped his political alter egos, at the very least from the point of view of attitude towards the West, at the very least as protégés of the West. Even then the latest victims were better, more functional alter egos who did not require any massive hand holding that the American doctor called Dell prescribes for him. Yet they still fell or failed.
Mubarak al Gaddafi?
This piece will not speculate on President Mubaraki's fate. It is no site for clairvoyance. Equally, it will not wish for any outcome, something it finds repugnant. A people must choose its leadership, to deserve it soon after. But one thing is clear to me. Mubarak can now describe America's friendship and partnership with him. He feels cheated, betrayed. Far from being all-weather, America is for those good times when the demos are still in check, are less truculent. Should things change, should the mood get vile and militant, America will drop a Government, present its credential to a rabble in a riotous street, indeed will jettison a government for an a novel, nondescript, however inchoate. America cuts and runs. A surviving Mubarak can never be the Mubarak of America's yesteryears. He can only be an angry man who discovers his people through a hefty betrayal. May be not quite a Gaddafi, but something akin to what is happening in Libya by way of a leader who unleashes socially conscious public investments, well ahead of the crowning of his own son.
Welcome to Egypt, Mugabe.
In Egypt and Tunisia, American values face a monumental collapse and failure in a way that shall take a generation to recover and reocnstruct. Afghanistan and Iraq marked the epicentres of the rejection of political America by the Arab world, a rejection which needed American armies and arms to oppose. Today Tunisia and Egypt mark epicentres of the rejection of American economic and social model. The political and the economic have now met. It's a real fatwa, which is why Malraux may have been right after all. Except Egypt today has invented a cemetery for the burial of American neo-liberalism and its neo-colonial political superstructure.
We now have a new weapon in the fight against imperialism, a new arena. True, imperialism may very well buy another day through Moussa, el Baradei, Mubarak or some such made-in-America leader. But the people have tested street power and now know how to enforce notice. The American project in the Arab world can only collapse and die. Such an odious, vampire-like system does not deserve the grand pyramid of Egyptian kings. Only a dirty graveyard which is what Egypt has now invented for manking. In the meantime, welcome to Egypt, Comrade President Mugabe, welcome to a second Egypt of Nasser, indeed the Egypt of militant Afro-Arab solidarity. Icho!
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