– Rahmane Idrissa on Nigerien hip-hop

– Magdi El Gizouli on the massacres in Al Fasher, Sudan

– Ben Moser: “Anti-Zionism is now something that is sayable”

Rahmane Idrissa

The most striking difference between Sovietmania and Statemania is that the first was intensely ideological whereas the second seemed to know no ideological horizon. In Sovietmania, the dream world was to come, after cataclysmic struggles pitting class to class, the wretched of the earth to Capital; in Statemania, the dream world was within reach – indeed, it was the American Dream.

Yet this is perhaps too easy a contrast to make. Young people, in both eras, were moved by idealism against the rot in the world. It’s just that they expressed it differently. The Sovietmaniacs read a lot, and made long speeches against the exploitation of man by man, alienation and other wounds of imperialism. The Statemaniacs made music, and rapped about social and political wokeness. The inspiration came from Tupac, not Lenin. Wokeness was the word, though in its French expression: la génération consciente, ‘the woke generation.’

Hip-hop was big in Niger, in part, because it was big in France – still today the second-largest rap market in the world. But Niger’s contribution was remarkable for such an apparently marginal place. Hip-hop began to trend in the late 1980s, with breakdance posses, some with Nigerien names (Mazari, Gabero), others with names reflecting African-American influences (Home Boys). It truly emerged in the mid-1990s, not yet in the mood of the woke generation, more in that of the glee characterizing early Statemania, a freedom to be joyful with a music that seemed the tune of democracy. The pioneers had silly names like Tod One or Les Massacreurs – “the Slaughterers.”

But by the end of the decade, wokeness (of a sort) was the mainline atmosphere of the music. Hip-hop became a conduit for expressing frustration and revolt about social problems, political ills, and the ways in which these things were made worse by the weight of traditional society and the oppressions of conservative elites. This was connected to how young Nigeriens imagined the revolt of young Americans, in particular young Black Americans. A hit of the group Lakal Kanay was titled Ghetto Life, and the scathing rapping in three languages (Hauza, Zarma, and French) is intertwined with a soft English chorus proclaiming “I am a ghetto boy, we are the ghetto boys.” The two great hip-hop crews of Zinder – the country’s second-largest town – called themselves Black Power and BSB, the latter being a French acronym for “the mouth of the mouthless.”

Thus, before being recently mainstreamed into the opinions and activism of the West’s Gen Z, wokeness was a big deal among Niger’s millennials. In the main, this came from the fact that their version of Statemania was attuned to Black America, the part of American society that sees most acutely through the American Dream, and into its trials and its sores.

Magdi El Gizouli

The killing of Al Fasher was a tall order, an extensive operation involving the airlift of war materiel including Chinese drones equipped with precision-guided bomb communication systems and Colombian mercenaries arriving through Bosaso in Somalia’s Puntland, a node in a network of the UAE’s military facilities. Al Fasher fell to an Emirati war effort.

In the last round of imperial avarice targeting Darfur, it was the Royal Air Force that did the aerial bombing. A detachment of ‘C’ Flight, of the Number 17 Squadron in the Royal Flying Corps, was transported by sea from Suez to Port Sudan on the Red Sea and from there by train to El Rahad in Kordofan. There they were assembled to carry out reconnaissance and strike operations ahead of an advancing column of troops. The campaign captured Al Fasher in May 1916; hunted down its sultan, Ali Dinar, who was killed with a shot to the forehead on November 6 in Jebel Juba, not far from Al Fasher; and incorporated his dominions into the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.

The British planes also dropped leaflets calling on the Sultan and his forces to surrender and on the civilian population to evacuate the town: “As for you, the men of the Army of Darfur (…) I know well that you were of a truth in the service of this tyrant until now against your will in fear of the punishment he would met out to you if you refused.” The British kindly nodded to the faith of Al Fasher’s people and promised the “Aman [Arabic for safety] of God and His Prophet” in return for unconditional surrender. The pamphlet ended with the threatening Quranic verse: “The sole of their feet shall be cut off that do injustice and thanks be to God the Lord of the World.”

The sloppy Islamism of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan might come as a surprise, but power employs all possible means available to prevail. The new terror in Al Fasher has a purpose not far removed from that of colonial British Islamist propaganda. It is meant to demonstrate that Sudan is in the clutches of monstrous atavism, not the cannibalism of imperial power, and salvation lies in surrendering to the will of the very powers orchestrating its destruction.

Benjamin Moser

How does your Equator essay fit into the larger project of this book, which you started working on shortly after 7 October 2023?

My book is a history of 150 years of Jews opposed to Zionism, told from five continents – Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and North America – and all kinds of of people: right-wing, left-wing, Sephardic, Ashkenazic, feminist, gay, atheist, Orthodox, Reform, communist. The piece for Equator comes out of the same impulse, of asserting that I don’t want to be co-opted into this Zionist identity that people are trying to impose on me – often with great violence, threats to one’s career, threats to one’s family. We all know how scary Zionists are. We have all seen how violent they are. They’ll stop at nothing. And still a lot of people have said: no thank you. My piece for Equator is really a kind of Bildungsroman, about coming to realise what a specific background I came from.

You told me that a lot more people are now critical of Zionism than one would think. Could you say more about that?

When I became openly anti-Zionist – not just somebody who's troubled by Israeli policy, as I would be troubled by the government policy of Germany or Japan or Spain or Ireland – and came to understand that the actual state itself was the problem, and that the very existence of a settler-colonial state in the heart of the Arab world is a horrible idea that has caused endless pain and suffering, I felt quite lonely, because that was just not something that was said. It wasn’t said by many Jews. And it certainly wasn’t said by non-Jewish Americans, because Americans were very Zionised and very bound by the rules that govern speech about this topic. There is now a seismic debate across the country, and certainly among the Jewish community. People have their different opinions, obviously. But anti-Zionism is now something that is sayable. It wasn’t sayable before.

Can you tell us about one of the people you’ve profiled in your book?

In South Africa, I interviewed a man called Ronnie Kasrils, a Jewish kid from Johannesburg who grew up [contributing money for] planting trees in Israel – something so many people did, including me. Only much later did he realise that the trees were planted in a place called the South African forest, and that this forest was planted on the ruins of a bulldozed Palestinian village. So Ronnie grows up and he becomes a resistance hero. He’s exiled, almost killed many times, as a lot of people were, but he ends up leading the armed wing of the African National Congress. And his is a triumphant story, because he comes back to democratic South Africa and becomes a member in the first democratic government of Nelson Mandela. But besides his incredible personal story, I wanted to know: how does a South African Jew look at apartheid? What does apartheid mean? It’s a word that’s thrown around, but South Africans know exactly what it means, and when a South African Jew says that Israel is an apartheid state, that’s not just vague description.

Did spending so much time on Sontag influence your writing about this subject?

Sontag is obviously very influential to me in terms of her moral courage, which, as her biographer, I know was not always easy, or natural, or comfortable for her. And she didn’t always get it right, but she did believe that a writer and an artist has a duty to society. That the person who has the access to being interviewed, as you’re interviewing me now, and the person who has access to publishing his thoughts in Equator, as I have just done – that can’t be just for self promotion. If you’re a writer, you have been given a rare gift. And we all know that the gift of speech is not given to many of us. If you get the option at all, often it's because you’re lucky or privileged. So what are you going to do with that privilege? Are you going to sit there and, like, try to promote your reading in Brooklyn next week? Or are you going to actually try to make a difference? That was the Sontag question.

Certainly over the last two years of genocide, I have seen disgustingly, nauseatingly, how many writers and artists do not use their voice. There has just been one pang of disappointment after the next, of people that I looked up to, people I admired, who just don’t say anything. Actually, disappointment is just not even 10% of what I feel – I feel appalled, I feel outraged. The people I looked up to growing up were the ones arrested protesting the Vietnam War, or going down to Selma, Alabama – those are the people I feel grateful towards, as a Jewish person, as a gay person. I’m the heir to so many people who didn't shut up.