1975
TRIBAL WAR * JOHN HOLT * HIT BOUND * JA
John Holt with a plea to Africans to stop their "tribal wars", a situation that has changed little in the twenty years since he made this recording. There has, however, been many things that have changed vis-à-vis the struggles of Africans and African states. One change has been in the language used to assess and understand many of the problems both real and perceived of this continent and its peoples. Take the title of the above record; Ebere Onwudiwe of The Central State University, was as long ago as 1980, referring to the hostilities in Africa not as 'tribal wars' but as ideological wars, evidenced in the United Nations reports that between 1980 and 1988 when over 1.5 million Africans (925,000 of them infants) died in such ideological wars as that between "capitalist" RENAMO (Mozambique National Resistance) and the "Marxist" government of Mozambique and "capitalist" UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) and the "Marxist" government of Angola. Then there was the change, both in symbolic and real terms, of black majority rule in South Africa.Yet another important difference is the appearance of HIV Aids, an enormous health problem that only emerged twenty five years ago at the beginning of the 1980s, and finally amongst these and many other 'internal' changes, both good and bad, that is transforming the culture, economics and politics of Africa and its people, there has, in my opinion, been the single biggest determining factor of changes that are about to affect Africa on an unprecedented scale; Globalisation. Globalisation in short means global capitalism. Although in the West we were, in an earlier phase, sold the idea of globalisation as something 'social' as in 'the global village', the shrinking world - there is a shrinking world it is of power in the hands of fewer and fewer corporations and institutions, there is also a contrasting 'growing' world that of disenfranchisement and control of the multitude. This shift to a global economy in the form of a post industrial 1st world has brought about a need for more of its old manufacturing and other pre informational requirements to be 'out-sourced' in the second and third world, hence the need for Africa and other, previously largely mining and agrarian economies, to step up a gear and take up the industrial role once the preserve of the 1st world. Of course the multinational corporations have been in the country a long time; gold, oil, and more recently the giant pharmaceutical companies, most notably with their retroviral drugs in the treatment of HIV Aids, but now new corporations are moving in, no longer just to exploit the country's vast mineral wealth (remember we are always told Africa is poor, when in fact it is one of the wealthiest continents in the world) but to capitalise the human resource and secure another nation of producers and consumers, who are being enfeebled by the multiplicity of choice, to feed its insatiable appetite for profit and control. So while, from a perspective of time, as a singer and voice for his people John Holt's plea seems a little naive yet well meaning, it is, in my opinion, infinitely preferable to the self serving and 'informed' multi millionaire moralising Pop stars of today supporting and indeed promoting the precepts of global capitalism and it's enforcers in the obscure and amorphous name of 'poverty' while at the same filling the already bloated coffers of the entertainment industries (record companies), the powerful and totalising telecommunications companies (Setting a world record more than 26.4 million people from around the world sent text messages Saturday July 2nd in support of the Live 8 campaign) not to forget the always corporate complicit media can profit from and indulge in what they do best speculate and pontificate while fanning the flames of hysteria and the spectacle, then there's the bank balances and global profiles of the said Popsters . . . That the whole 'Live 8' spectacle closely resembled something from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is deeply, deeply troubling - given the direction the New Labour government is taking us - but that it was organised as some sort of anti-capitalist, anti-government, anti-rich and complacent West, type of 'protest' event, while actually being backed by the those same institutions, including: governments (revolting images of Blair and Brown alongside Geldof in the UK, and Bush and Rice alongside Bozo in the US) , the telecommunication industries (with over a million calls for tickets as mobile phones were even incorporated as a scam for obtaining tickets to events, this pernicious tactic also helps to embed the mobile phone into the culture and psyche of the population) and various rich Westerners (Bill Gates was on stage, ha) and just about everybody performing. In short the whole thing reeks, the way I see it is, it is at best not in my interest if governments and the global corporations are behind it and if the rich and powerful flock to 'support' it (they didn't go anywhere near 'Sail 8'). Of course I am painfully aware of taking part in the whole globalology and supporting and tacitly endorsing the telecommunications industries with the very medium I am using to criticise them, this and similar concerns is a constant source of vexation to me, that I strive to resolve yet in the meantime musically, compared to little Reginald Dwight, or the dressed up to look like a rebel Bonzo Hewson, or any other of the old rock celebrities performing, give me the excellent Tribal War by John Holt: which was also released out as a 12" with this expressive drawing reproduced on the cover.
TRIBAL WAR * JOHN HOLT * CHANNEL ONE * JA
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