The Executive Secretary of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), Workneh Gebeyehu, expresses his deep concern on the recent border escalation between Ethiopia and Sudan.
Workneh calls on the two sisterly countries to exercise utmost restraint and avoid actions that can further heighten tensions and to actively seek diplomatic means to find a lasting and sustainable solution on the matter.
IGAD Executive Secretary calls for calm on the Ethiopia–Sudan border tension
Celebrate Somali Week: A how-to guide for learning about Somali culture, arts, and history
Somali history and culture is diverse and complex. These movies, books, music, podcasts, and more explore its nuances and depth.
By AMINA ISIR MUSA
As we come up on July 1, Somali Independence Day, Somalis around the world will celebrate their flag and nation. But it’s the culture, people, and land that keep us all tied together. I was born in the U.S. in the early 1990s, a time when humanitarian and political crises gripped Somalia back home. For those of us in the diaspora, this embedded a consciousness of our Somali identity from a young age.
My childhood experiences with Soomaalinimo involved community connections, activism, and pride in being Somali. In English, Soomaalinimo roughly translates as an innate pride in community and self a sense of being God’s chosen child. As a practical manner, we embraced our culture through activities like attending riwaayads (plays) in places like Boston, Toronto, and Hartford; attending community picnics; and of course, listening to Somali music.
Somalis in Minnesota can do all these things and more! during Somali Week taking place from July 2nd to July 17th. The organizers have a diverse range of activities bringing together art, history and culture. This festival has run in Minneapolis for eight years and has brought together over 40,000 people to enjoy Soomaalinimo at its finest. This festival originally started as a community festival on Lake Street, and will start off this year’s celebration with one on Saturday, July 2nd.
Those in the city have the pleasure of seeing the legendary Suldaan Seeraar performing at the Target Center!! This year’s festival will include events such as “Xasuuso (Remember): 1960”, (the year Somalia gained independence) taking place on July 6th and “Celebrating Somali Women” on July 7th. Take a look at the full agenda so you don’t miss any part of this year’s Somali Week celebrations in MInneapolis!
As a child of the diaspora who has spent a long time understanding and promoting our narratives, culture, and history, I also wanted to put together a list for how Somalis–in Minnesota and across the globe–can learn more about our culture, traditions, and current socio-cultural trends. I’m so excited to share some resources such as books, movies, and music that have strongly informed my understanding of Somali identity and culture!
If you don’t have the chance to join some community celebration, read below on ways you can celebrate Soomaalinimo at home, all year round.
The Political Economy of Liberalism
Despite its recent origins, of its key role in modern Western society. The two great revolutions, in America in 1776 and France in 1789 refined some of the key ideas behind liberalism: democracy, equal rights, human rights, the separation between State and religion and freedom of religion, and the focus on the individual well-being.
Nineteenth century was a period of intense refinement of the values of liberalism, which had to face the novel economic and social conditions posed by incipient industrial revolution. Not only authors such as John Stuart Mill gave a fundamental contribution to liberalism, bringing to the philosophical attention topics such as freedom of speech, the liberties of women and of slaves; but also the birth of the socialist and communist doctrines, among others under the influence of Karl Marx and the French utopists, forced liberalists to refine their views and bond into more cohesive political groups.
In the twentieth century, liberalism was restated to adjust to the changing economic situation by authors such as Ludwig von Mises and John Maynard Keynes. The politics and lifestyle diffused by the Unites States throughout the world, then, gave a key impulse to the success of liberal lifestyle, at least in practice if not in principle. In more recent decades, liberalism has been used also to address the pressing issues of the crisis of capitalism and the globalized society. As the twenty-first century enters into its central phase, liberalism is still a driving doctrine that inspires political leaders and individual citizens.
No matter where we live, all societies carry baggage and a considerable amount of it. But, in a nutshell, what distinguishes successful societies from those that are not is that dynamic societies are the ones that know what to abandon and when. China, for example, is essentially a Confucianist culture. Confucianism is an ideological system that places education at a very high level of priority. But it is also a system which strongly discriminates against women.
Contemporary Chinese societies have continued to carry the emphasis on education. But they have smartly discarded the traditional discrimination against women baggage. Rest assured, as Jean-Pierre Lehmann, an emeritus professor of international political economy in Switzerland argued, if China were still binding its women’s feet, there would be no spectacular economic growth in China, Hong Kong or Taiwan. According to him, the fact that China no longer binds women’s feet may make the Chinese feel less “Chinese”. But it lets China move ahead economically, politically and socially.
The following are the most crucial questions at this point. What has allowed the Chinese to make these choices? What allows similar changes to occur in other regions and cultures? Ultimately, what has transformed cultural legacies into dynamic engines of growth, welfare and prosperity in both the material and spiritual domains has been the liberating force of liberalism.
Jean-Pierre Lehmann stated that Confucianist scholars such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, the Hindu scholar Ram Mohun Roy and the numerous Christian liberals and humanists are all from different cultures. But also all share a common goal of sorting out their respective ideological baggage to see what works and what doesn’t.
Jean-Pierre Lehmann further noted that the potential for change is evident even in cultures which are today widely seen as almost a lost cause. Consider the Arab/Muslim world. Perhaps surprisingly to outsiders, a liberal tradition, a tradition of sorting through the cultural baggage, does exist in Arabic and Islamic thought. The Tunisian scholar, the late Albert Hourani, demonstrated this vividly in his magnificent book, “Arabic Thought” in the Liberal Age of 1968.
Albert Hourani described how, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, thinkers and writers such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani developed a powerful stream of Muslim thought along lines comparable to the evolution of secular and liberal thought in Europe. And, surprising as that may sound, Al-Afghani’s agenda of reform and liberalism did not prevent him from being a fervent nationalist and anti-imperialist.
Ultimately, however, as Hourani’s book shows, liberalism came to be aborted in most of the Middle East. How so? Well, opponents of liberalism in the Islamic world opted for an easy, but effective, move. They equated liberalism with “Westernism”. And that allowed them to dictate that all that old baggage whether effective or not be retained. Had the equivalent happened in China, the Chinese would still be binding women’s feet.
Jean-Pierre Lehmann argued that in fact, we would all do well to remember that the West’s ideological origins are not at all liberal even though it is correct that liberalism has emanated primarily from the West. After all, dogmatic literal interpretations of the Bible allowed the Florentine government to place Galileo under house arrest just for saying that the earth turned around the sun. Even today, fundamentalist Christians in the United States appear not prepared to give up the fight when they seek to ban the teaching of Darwinism in schools, for example.
Now it is realised that intellectual curiosity and cultural openness are not permanent features of any society. Take Japan as an example. In the 1960s, Japan was a hothouse of cultural curiosity, openness, import and experimentation. For whatever reason, in the course of the 1980s, Japan switched off. It has become far, far more inward-looking. In fact it has strangely turned into a somewhat masochistically narcissistic society, which, despite its great potential, goes a long way to explain its present social and economic decline.
All of that is why people are convinced that liberalism is a universal doctrine, the most basic premise of which is to oppose dogmatism in any form. Hence its advocacy of tolerance, openness and pluralism. And hence its attraction across many cultures. So, Jean-Pierre Lehmann kindly requested us that the next time we hear criticisms of “neo-liberalism,” keep in mind the huge value of the underlying premise in that concept on a broader scale.
Whatever is bothersome about the “neo” part, liberalism as such appears to be nothing less than the key to allowing a society to operate successfully in the modern, globalized world. I think that is indeed a blessing, not a curse.
IN BLACK & WHITE & LIVING COLOR
“Water Life” is a series of photographs, presenting the plight of water faced by the women of Afar, by Ethiopian photographer Aida Muluneh. Her vividly intense photos are now part of author and curator, Ekow Oshun’s African Art and Photography book, launched in London this week during “In the Black Fantastic,” exhibit. Oshun has provided another platform for Artist/activist Aida’s unapologetic advocacy through art. “Our continent has many layers…however we have been at the mercy of the international media that does not show the complexities of our challenges. My approach…tell a story from my perspective…not based on cliches…by foreign photographers,” says Muluneh in the Guardian. The exhibition which echoes these sentiments, interrogates racism and all its appendages with keen attention to African identity and culture from 11 artists living and working in the African Diaspora. Curator Ekow states, “We see artists work across a range of art forms – painting, photography, collage, sculpture, film – all of whom are conjuring new possibility, new ways of exploring space, new sets of dreaming that assert or insist upon blackness as a zone of discovery, as a territory that remains and continues to be open to further definition. These are works that reach back in time towards myth, towards history, and towards African cultural survival.”
At a time when conversations on identity conjures a spectrum of feelings from pride to prejudice, new views can add to the much needed narratives on African’s self-view. Eshun shares, “What these artists are doing is offering other ways of looking and other ways of seeing that grapple with the racialised every day and reach beyond some of the ways that Black people have been confined and constrained by a Western imaginary that offers them, historically, as figures who come out of a cultural tradition that is somehow less sophisticated, less contemporary, less modern, and less present than the Western world.” The title “In the Black Fantastic” is indication of self-determination and ‘…use fantastical elements to investigate alternative realities and confront ideas about race through folklore, myth, science fiction, spiritual traditions, pageantry and the legacies of Afrofuturism.’ So with the western world trying to determine Ethiopia’s destiny based on outdated colonial contracts and through manipulation on all levels, including use of mainstream media, photographers and curators like Aida and Ekow help to fill gaps in the African social fabric and psyche amidst foreign forces perception on Africa.
South of London, across the European continent in Malta, Ethiopian artist Dereje Shiferaw’s provocative collection of mixed media paintings entitled, “Obliterated Childhood” is on display at Christine X Gallery until Friday 8th July. As a proud African husband, father and humanitarian, the conflict is taking its toll and he worries about the children in Ethiopia and all war-torn countries, hence his prognosis, ‘obliterated childhoods’. “Oblivious to what is happening in the world around us, most of us wouldn’t be able to comprehend what it is like to be living in a war-torn country. Perhaps when it gets closer to home it gets to sink in but the world has been experiencing wars ever so often,” says Dereje. He confronts the notion that society has a duty to protect children, yet the deafening sounds, sights and smell of war encircle the youngest of us all. Dereje documents the myriad emotions in real time.
The father of two appropriated pages from his son’s school notebook to comment on the conditions, locally and globally. In fact, he illustrates the intersection, the injustice and even the opportunity for hope. In one painting, the Eiffel tower in Paris serves as a backdrop for a Black man ripping a visa application in half, while in another a little girl sits comfortably or hopelessly, amidst an array of items from guns and ammunition to flowers and flags. ‘Most artists remain in their safe space refining and defining their work but Dereje does quite the opposite of what these formally taught artists do. The signature of this avante-garde artist lies in how he paints his figures: he accentuates the melanated figures with illustrious lips, stylized facial features and huge contorted hands. “The Intriguing dialogue between the subject’s message and the viewer is compelling…physically and emotionally invested in the subject’s story, my aim is to capture the sprit, essence and heritage of my subject and use this as an opportunity for the world to peer into the lives and struggles of people whose stories are yet to be told…” says Dereje.
Back home in Africa, Addis Abeba Professional Photographers Association along with USAID have mounted “Photography for Peace” in the Addis Ababa Museum at Meskel Square. Closing on Tuesday July 3rd, leading Ethiopian photographers: Antonia Fiorente, Abate Damte, Michael Tsegay, Mekbib Tadesse, Aron Simineh, Samuel Habtab, Hilina Tafesse and Eyoeal Kefalew have added their voices to the country’s clarion call for peace. To quote Bob Marley, “There’s a natural mystic flowing through the air… .” Artists of Ethiopia, throughout Africa, and in the Diaspora are converging organically through shared experiences and concerns to deliver a message to the western world. The Memo: Africans are ready, willing and able to determine their destiny and tell their own stories, while expressing and shaping their visions for the future on their terms. Bekka!
Dr. Desta Meghoo is a Jamaican born Creative Consultant, Curator and cultural promoter based in Ethiopia since 2005. She also serves as Liaison to the AU for the Ghana based, Diaspora African Forum.
