Maryse Condé recently won the Alternative to the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Guadeloupean writer is best known for her work dealing with race and gender in the Caribbean.
When I was in college, I minored in postcolonial studies, which looks at the political and cultural history of formerly colonized people. My family is from Jamaica, and I always struggled with understanding the relationship between this Caribbean island and its “mother” country, England. I learned in school that many formerly colonized country have the same issues with identity.
A colleague asked me to list the best books for learning more about the topic. I think it is safe to say that any book by Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney or Edward Said is a good start, but there are many other great authors that you should look at as well. Most of these books below I read in college. Please note: most of these books focus on the African Diaspora. Of course, this isn’t the definitive list; just some books that came to mind.
Last week I attended a special viewing of Ousmane Sembene’s classic film La Noire de… (The black girl of… or Black Girl). With the recent “snub” of Ava Duvernay’s Selma at the Academy Awards, seeing Black Girl reminds us that the African diaspora has struggled to have fair and balanced portrayals in film since the dawn of the medium.
I had the pleasure to ask at this viewing Samba Gadjigo, a French professor at Mount Holyoke College and the official biographer of Sembene, about Sembene’s legendary life and racism in the film industry. He has spent the greater part of his academic career researching Francophone African cinema and in particular Sembene’s career.
“Sembene was a freedom fighter in African film,” Gadjigo said. “Black Girl was a gift to the world. Before Sembene, there was a law against Senegalese taking up cameras. Black Girl was pioneering and revolutionary, as it put Africa on the map.”
Gadjigo is referring to the “Laval Decree”, a 1934 French law that prohibited Francophone Africans from making films. This was done to control the messaging about colonialism, while stifling free expression by Africans. Most films about Africans prior to independence were made by white filmmakers and were incredibly racist.
After independence, a new crop of young idealist African filmmakers came onto the forefront who saw the medium as a force for political change. According to Gadjigo, Sembene decided to make films the day Patrice Lumumba was assassinated. Black Girl is loosely based on a real story that happened in the 1950s and Sembene wrote about it in a short story before the film was made.
Black Girl tells the story of Diouana, a young Senegalese woman hired by a white couple as a maid in France. Notice that Diouana is “voiceless.” Her thoughts are only said through a voice over narration. Sembene did this to show that Africans still didn’t have a voice in the post-colonial era. Her white employers still had a colonial mentality, by treating Diouana as a slave that can only be appeased by money.
The use of the mask also represents the relationship between Diouana and her employers. While the mask represents the culture and history of the colonized, the white employers only see it as wall decoration.
Black Girl is known today as the first film directed by a Sub-Saharan African to receive international acclaim. However, Sembene had limits on the length of the film due to French regulations. Black Girl was dubbed in French to “use the language of the master.” The film was made on a shoestring budget, but that was done on purpose by Sembene. He also preferred to hire unknown actors, or as Gadjigo said, “people off the street” because Sembene didn’t want to become part of Hollywood. (By the way, you can read an awesome interview with Thérèse M’Bissine Diop, who played Diouana in the film.)
Sembene’s goals was to make films about Africans by Africans. He was concerned that Senegalese were losing their culture. French colonial education was limited to a select few, and African history was entirely left out of it. Wolof and many other native languages were banned in Senegal during colonialism. Sembene saw film not only as a tool of liberation, but also as a way to preserve the oral histories of his people.
Gadjigo said he didn’t see a moving still until the age of 12, but he knew then the power of “hearing with your eyes and seeing with your ears.” His political awakening came at aged 17 when he read Sembene’s book God’s Bits of Wood, a strong rebuke of colonialism. Sembene’s literary and cinematic canon have had a strong influence in the post-colonial era to preserve African identity.
“It was important to tell those stories,” Gadjigo said. “When you lose your language, you lose your history.”
In preparation for my “busy season” – UN Week – I do my usual research on the latest trends in public diplomacy, media development and strategic communication. As you may recall from last year, I did some interviews with those working in those fields and wrote an article on how technology is redefining diplomatic relations. New media has created some opportunities, as well as new challenges, for public diplomacy officers worldwide. However, in order to understand the future of this ever changing field, you have to also understand the history of strategic global communications, especially with regards to the United States.
Public diplomacy is a very broad term, and means different things in different countries. For the purposes of this article, I will use definitions used by the U.S. State Department over the years.
The United States Information Agency (USIA), the U.S. government’s public diplomacy arm and, from 1953 to 1999, the largest full service public relation organization in the world said this about their mission: “Public diplomacy seeks to promote the national interest and the national security of the United States through understanding, informing, and influencing foreign publics and broadening dialogue between American citizens and institutions and their counterparts abroad.”
Also, “Public Diplomacy refers to government-sponsored programs intended to inform or influence public opinion in other countries; its chief instruments are publications, motion pictures, cultural exchanges, radio and television,” according to the 1987 edition of the Dictionary of International Relations Terms.
According to Empire of Ideas, the United States unofficially started doing public diplomacy with China in 1900 through educational exchanges in accordance to the Open Door Policy of 1899. However, American public diplomacy began in earnest following the Buenos Aires Conference in 1936, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy in Latin America. The policy was an effort to project the United States as a promoter of goodwill instead of the commonly held view at the time that it was the “Big Stick” interventionist to the North.
It was interesting to read that there were many discussions at the time about what that goodwill should look like. Should the United States promote high culture (poetry readings, art exhibits) or popular culture (jazz music)? Vice President Henry Wallace championed the need for more technical assistance over educational exchanges, as most of the Latin American populace worked in the agrarian sector. Coincidentally, Wallace, a former Security of Agriculture and a farming business owner, introduced the Honeydew melon to China in the 1940s where it is still referred to today as the Wallace melon. Wallace’s technical assistance proposals made an impact in how U.S. development aid is orchestrated today.
Since the beginning of the “America Century,” public diplomats have had to straddle the fine line between information sharing and propaganda. There was always this dilemma of at what point does information become disinformation and a loss of credibility. Should unfavorable information about America be countered with favorable information, avoid any appearance of justification, or should it simply be ignored? Should American public diplomats distribute unfavorable information about America if domestic and/or foreign media is or isn’t reporting about it first?
The overarching unfavorable information the United States had to deal with internationally over the years is its dark racial history. During World War II public diplomats had to grapple with the hypocrisy of promoting the United States as a beacon of democracy and equality to the world while at the same time treating African-Americans poorly under Jim Crow. American public diplomats were the first U.S. policymakers to address the negative effect of American racism on the country’s image because they were the first to methodically look at image as a foreign policy issue.
The Office of War Information (OWI) created films like “The Negro Soldier” and “Negroes and the War,” as well as a 70-page pamphlet to go with the latter film, to present better images of African-Americans and boost morale. “Negroes and the War” was intended to show white Americans the important role black soldiers played in World War II, while getting African-Americans to support the fight and this idea of “democracy.” The OWI spent more money on “Negroes and the War” than on any other wartime material at the time. However, it back-fired as African-Americans found it patronizing and white Southerners thought it was promoting “racial equality.” Meanwhile, “The Negro Soldier” is now considered a breakthrough film that not only rallied civilians of all races to enlist at the time, but it also changed the way African-Americans were portrayed in films going forward.
Likewise, OWI had to deal with how people of color around the world viewed the United States. Japanese public diplomats advertised their country as the “champion of the darker races” and were fighting to expel Western colonialism to audiences in other Asian nations and, to a lesser extent, African-Americans.
Not only were American public diplomats not able to defeat Japan’s “empire of ideas,” but they were never able to effectively deal with the racial and colonial politics in the postwar era and the emerging Cold War.
When Mao Zedong’s Chinese Revolution happened in 1949, American public diplomats didn’t know how to deal with it and, in a really bad move, treated the rise of China and its concerns as if they were the same concerns as other poor countries. Also, America’s Euro-centric approach to foreign policy didn’t help things either. When the United States developed the Marshall Plan for Europe, the colonial world viewed the project as an effort to strengthen Western colonial powers and embolden American interests. Soviet public diplomats were able to seize on this opportunity to undermine America’s credibility by promoting the idea that the United States didn’t care about advancing the economic and development interests of the Third World.
American public diplomats also struggled with the hypocritical idea of “democracy” during the McCarthy era, when books written by suspected Communists were censored or banned altogether in USIA overseas libraries, and Congressional hearings investigated alleged Communists working for Voice of America. Public diplomats also attempted to censor Hollywood films that portrayed America in a negative light.
Today with all the new technologies available, it is easier for the U.S. government to strategically reach previously untapped populations worldwide. From President Obama’s Cairo speech to Arab audiences, to Twitter and Facebook chats hosted by U.S. ambassadors, the Obama administration has run the most tech-savvy public diplomacy campaign in American history.
While the communication tools may have changed, the message remains the same. Nonetheless, American public diplomats today still have to deal with going around the same unfavorable information. Despite having an African-American president, the Trayvon Martin case and New York City’s “Stop and Frisk” policy convey to the world that America still has a race problem. The United States promotes this idea of “democracy” and human rights, but many people around the world still believe the United States is a neo-colonial “big stick” interventionist. The United States government promotes the idea of protecting the civil liberties of its citizens, while it allows its National Security Agency to spy on the emails and phone calls of ordinary Americans.
President Obama’s recent trip to Africa is a perfect example of modern American public diplomacy. The main goal of the trip was to promote better economic and development ties with the continent; however, there were a few teachable moments. The first one happened in Senegal when Obama held a very awkward joint press conference with the country’s president, Macky Sall. A day after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA); Obama took the opportunity to say that Africa should also embrace gay marriage and human rights for LGBT individuals. To the contrary, President Sall said that the Muslim country is tolerant, but doesn’t condone homosexuality. Furthermore, Sall pointed out that Senegal has eliminated the death penalty and that the United States hasn’t, and that both countries should respect their differences. Many Senegalese applauded Sall standing his ground.
Obama’s faux pas can be viewed in two ways: one, by Obama imposing his own values onto another country and not understanding the full cultural context of that country; and two, Obama’s assumption that gay marriage is a universally accepted human right. Interestingly, it is hard to find any online video of the Obama/Sall exchange. And it is also not surprising to find very little video footage – and American media coverage – of the anti-Obama protests in South Africa. Finally, Obama’s US$7 billion energy plan for the continent can be viewed as a goodwill contribution, or a desperate effort to catch up with the growing Chinese dominance in Africa.
So what does this all say about the future of American public diplomacy? In order to create an effective public diplomacy campaign, the United States might need to seriously re-evaluate its own domestic and foreign policies that create unfavorable information. As the old saying from Winston Churchill goes: “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
Maryse Condé recently won the Alternative to the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Guadeloupean writer is best known for her work dealing with race and gender in the Caribbean.
