Legitimacy and exile
Aliens must go

Papers and passports
Inspection of identity

Stamp of approval
Proof of residency

Overstayed welcome
Fairweather friends

Fiasco
Exigency

Scapegoats
Contingency

Indefinite leave to remain
There's a price to be paid

Fraught deadlines
Tight timetable

Hasty evacuations
Explicit threats

Swift deportation
Fractured boundaries

Unkind labels
Verbal taunts

Herd of illegals
Circling touts

Overnight precarity
Status in doubt

Expulsion orders
Border crossings

Crowded ports
Land checkpoints

Dispersed families
Rushed upheaval

Overstuffed bags
Hurry

Tension, loss
Worry

Official decisions
Informal penalties

Enforcement actions
Emboldened gatekeepers

Entry permits
Mournful exits

Brethren
Neighbors

Rivals
Strangers

State of emergency
Failure of diplomacy

Ancestral memory
Histories of dislocation

Politics of closures
Season of migration

Internally displaced
Traditional evacuees

Modern travelers
Sudden refugees

Aliens must go, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Gone baby, don't be long by Erykah Badu
• Uptown by Raphael Saadiq
  The plaintive refrain and coda is the sound of wist: "I'm leaving this town"
• I gotta get away by Gloria Barnes
• Pack'd my bags by Rufus ft Chaka Khan
• Leavin' by Tony Toni Tone
• I gotta go by Lizz Fields
• Don't talk to strangers by Prince
• Gone baby, don't be long by José James
• Don't talk to strangers by Chaka Khan

Bonus beats: Don't leave me this way by Thelma Houston


See previously Bags and Stamps (Ghana must go) and Expulsion orders

...

Postscript (June 3, 2025)

My current publishing schedule means that what you read above today was written three years ago (Indeed, if I don't pick up the pace, the trifle I wrote today will only see the light in 2038, 12 1/2 years from now). That being said, I am struck that the above musings on displacement, forced and otherwise, that I wrote in 2022 still seem timely.

I was then in the process of digitizing the Talking Drums archive and taking in the reverberations of arbitrariness and the reign of strongmen in khaki in what I read in those pages. The ripple effects continue over the surface of our regional politics.

My friend Senam had just published her dissertation and was sharing some of the stories that she'd unearthed in her excavation of this, our signal topic. Ghana must go has a very tangible legacy beyond Nigeria and Ghana. It is a living history, disclosed often by artful omission and subject to the opacity of our elders. It a family history and, in its sweep, marks its bearers.

More recently, I've been thinking about the exodus from Sudan and what that country has suffered in the past two years, the reign of locusts, if you will. You don't hear much about the strain on the surrounding countries and the fodder for resentment that any old demagogue could harness if they chose to do their worst. I've been thinking of the smaller but no less disruptive waves in the Sahel region where many leaders are indeed inclined to do their worst for fear of losing their positions. Displacement seems to be the rule and many of our neighbors' houses are on fire.

This is a time of brutes.

And here, again, I welcome the US to the Third World. The Stephen Miller incited and Trump led assault on everything is hitting many near and dear to me. Things have long moved far beyond rhetoric. Livelihoods and personal safety are affected, even moreso than usual for those darker than blue. Unspoken threats now explicitly verbalized. And horizons have contracted. Many now adopt a fetal pose to shield from the incoming blows heeding the warning: protect yourselves at all times.

This is a time of precarity.

And exhaustion. Take, say, immigration for example. Many of my cousins are on student or other immigrant visas in the US, and are currently weighing the calculus of just being themselves versus adopting a studied pose of neutrality and normalcy.

No sudden moves is the refrain, don't become a target etc. It looms, that culture of silence. It's present, the retreat to that mask of civility that we wear all too well.

This is a time of erasures.

People disappear, sometimes literally pulled off the streets, bodies are snatched with glee. But worse is the eclipse of the soul. Pieces of identity are being erased. The spark and joie de vivre in many is being extinguished, curtailed by cruelty and disembodied by vindictiveness. I can't recognize so many folk.

Sidenote: one of my cousins was recently accepted by Harvard, all his hard work paying off. After the initial celebrations, however, everyone in the family has been holding their breath as we watch that institution and others being targeted. The saving grace is that he was born in the USA and so is somewhat shielded from the trials of non-citizens. (I'm still somewhat curious about whether the currenly stymied attack on birthright citizenship would notionally affect him, or if that strange interpretation would only affect births going forward). I don't envy him. He gets to wear multiple mantles as a living embodiment of Stephen Miller's worst fears, a foreign student but also an American-African and that's before he even opens his mouth. I really don't envy him. What paradise have we lost?

Anyway... Perhaps, this is all background noise, and, as I'm often reminded, the virus sets the timeline. The ongoing pandemic can make all this turmoil in the world moot, a sideshow at best, in very short order.

Aliens must go. I too will make my accommodations. I continue to focus on small things and move to my own tune. The present collection of toli, being doled out every week, bears a title that is all I aspire to: A Comfortable Unease.


File under: Ghana, Nigeria, culture, immigration, displacement, exile, memory, Africa, history, politics, dictator, coup, loss, observation, perception, refugee, Things Fall Apart, Ghana must go, poetry, toli

Writing log: September 6, 2022

Past remedies for a double heart:
Chocolate ice cream, or better yet, butter pecan
Revenge affairs and crying, nay, sobbing at the betrayal
Screaming into a pillow (loudly)
Screaming into the air (silently)
Disturbing tranquility and causing a scene
Do note that cackling with maniacal laughter is no catharsis
Consult your physician before dispensing these treatments
In many cases they only provide palliative relief

Past remedies for a broken heart:
Staring forlorn into space for hours on end
Mum's comfort soup and a long cry
Kleenex (two-pack), and apathy
Dark rooms and music (blues preferably)
Curating a heartbreak playlist
Revising the heartbreak playlist
A book in times past, a poetic trifle is recommended
A b-movie - suitably mindless, you can't get too invested
Social media these days - fashions change, gossip is cleansing
Long walks, solitude, communing with nature
Short runs, working out, lots of company
Copious amounts of alcohol - religion permitting
Wistful perusal of letters and photos (moderate quantities for greater effectiveness)
Inventory of digital artifacts featuring the loved one
Making lists, revising lists, tearing them up and starting again
A night out with old friends or siblings
Revisiting old haunts, macabre and weighted with meaning
Rebound flings in extremis, calling up exes
Booty calls and, if necessary, meaningless sex
(Always practice safe sex in such circumstances
Caveat emptor, you do not want to add to your predicament)
Truth in advertising notice, the label is indeed accurate:
Meaningless, and only providing palliative relief

Past remedies for a grieving heart:
There are none, pursuant to the laws of grief
Experiments confirm the lack of even a placebo effect
Patient advisory on sorrow: there is only palliative relief



After: And wilt though leave me thus? by Sir Thomas Wyatt

Heartbreak, a playlist

I have curated many a heartbreak playlist in my time, I am built that way - my go-to of late is Meshell NdegeOcello's Bitter album, or parts of Portishead's Dummy album if I want to be cinematic, or anything by Cesária Évora. Still, for the purposes of devising a soundtrack to this note, here's a literal heartbreak playlist, your mileage might vary (spotify version)

• You're Breaking my heart by Otis Rush
• Heartbreak Hotel by The Jacksons
• Tuesday Heartbreak by Stevie Wonder
• Heartbreaker by Dionne Warwick
• How can you mend a broken heart by Al Green
• Unbreak my Heart by Toni Braxton
• Heartbreaker by Alice Russell
• I'll never let you break my heart by Lyn Collins
• Heartbreaker by Ray Charles
• N.E. Heartbreak by New Edition
• Don't break my heart by UB40
• Somewhat Loved (There you go breakin' my heart) by Jam & Lewis and Mariah Carey
• Breakin' my Heart by Mint Condition
• Don't Go Breaking my Heart by Sergio Mendes
• Heart breaking Decision by Meli'sa Morgan
• A Broken Heart Can Mend by Alexander O'Neal
  Ever the optimist, Alex believes there is more than palliative relief

File under: humour, life, culture, observation, loss, perception, grief, betrayal, poetry, toli

Writing log: September 9, 2022

The Trump-Ramaphosa meeting was classic Trump: a made-for-TV spectacle complete with dramatic video reveal and condescension.

Trump got what he wanted—a moment to energize his base, especially by pushing the debunked narrative of political crimes against white South Africans and dominate the headlines till the next story. And he did: most channels played the chaotic scenes that followed when he asked an aide to play the video of speeches by an opposition MP (who has never been in government) and fake scenes of supposed white deaths taken from rightwing chat groups, white South African “civil society” and X. (I was interviewed on the BBC late Wednesday night and had to listen to that being the framing as I was being cued for a five minute — yes, that’s TV — interview.

Predictably, Trump’s framing of South Africa ignored its broader epidemic of violence affecting all races. He distorted complex issues into simplistic political theater.

Most Americans don’t care about this, and liberals here know it is a lie. But at best, they feel sorry that South Africa has to be subjected to this. But there is little to no solidarity. Also, the way white politics work here is that there is the hesitancy about “hey, how do I know it is not true,” despite all the evidence to the contrary. Even The Daily Show didn’t spend much time on it (“a fake international crisis”), except to warm up jokes about Trump’s sale of gold Trump-branded watches, erectile dysfunction honey, and Trump’s proposed missile defense system, you guessed it, the “Gold Dome.”

The basic takeaway is that Musk has coached Trump into embracing the false “white genocide” narrative, which conveniently dovetails with the neuroses of Trump’s base. The South Africa conjured up is a cautionary tale of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies gone too far that ends in a white genocide.

Ramaphosa was in a challenging position. It was a lose-lose scenario on Trump’s turf, with Trump’s history of publicly undermining guests. When Trump played his “gotcha” video of fake farmer graves—actually protest props—Ramaphosa looked momentarily caught off guard but regained composure. He didn’t take the bait, stayed calm, and offered flattery (including a book about golf to someone who doesn’t read). He impressed. In the UK Independent newspaper, Simon Walters opined: “I never thought I’d want to join the Cyril Ramaphosa fan club—until I saw him take on Trump.” He added that there were two heads of state in the Oval Office — but only one statesman: Ramaphosa. This was not an isolated view. Ramaphosa’s restraint was deliberate, but I'm not sure it always worked during a live TV broadcast.

Ramaphosa attempted to counter with facts—clarifying that Julius Malema is an opposition MP, has freedom of speech (something in short supply in the US at the moment), that South Africa operates under the rule of law, or that it is not government policy to exterminate whites —but this part of proceedings, in front of media, had already been co-opted for Trump’s narrative, which was not about facts. Ramaphosa could have said more, but the press corps—each seemingly vying for their own “moment”—limited the opportunity. The parochialism of some American journalists was evident, particularly in a question about New York State Attorney General Tish James, which felt out of place. Credit goes to the black South African journalist (who I later learned is Tshidi Madia) who persistently called for Ramaphosa to be allowed to respond to the propaganda video. In contrast, some of her South African colleagues appeared more focused on lobbing leading questions at Trump, perhaps with an eye toward boosting their social media profiles.

On the issues that were projected to dominate (South Africa’s affirmative action policies, South Africa’s case against Israel at the ICJ, or South Africa’s leading role in BRICS), either didn’t come up or appeared half-hearted in the case of the ICJ, Trump claimed he didn’t expect much from the case and was unsure what the ruling would mean. However, this ambiguity may have been strategic, as some have suggested, as a way to signal to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that MAGA support for Israel isn’t guaranteed. Notably, as Tony Karon pointed out to me, Trump avoided parroting the Zionist wing of his movement, instead doubling down on white victimhood, maybe suggesting a shift in the political factions influencing him.

Regarding the delegations, it was unmistakably a Trump production on the American side. Elon Musk was in the room but remained silent, as did J.D. Vance. Marco Rubio was absent. The previous day, Rubio had embarrassed himself with his knowledge of South Africa.

On Ramaphosa’s side, one striking detail was the underwhelming presence of the white men—Ernie Els, Retief Goosen, and Johann Rupert. If their presence was a “trump card,” it worked only insofar as it reinforced Trump’s bigotry: he felt more at home speaking to these white okes as equals.

Two things about the white men: Their contributions underscored the broader mediocrity of South Africa’s white elite and the tendency to center whites and their “anxieties” in South Africa at moments like this. As journalist Richard Poplak joked at one point on X: “I’m no woke academic, but let’s just say we’re centering whiteness today.” They were incoherent and actually repeated some of the lies about white suffering. Els reminisced about the Angolan war, effectively applauding US support for apartheid-aligned forces. Goosen spoke about his family’s supposed hardships on their farm. Rupert’s remarks were muddled and incoherent, including speaking affectionately about a visit to a disgraced sex pest, TV host Charlie Rose. Both in the live reporting and afterwards, the South African press cleaned up these men’s babble to make them seem insightful. (Rupert did speak one truth, though: exposing the dirt of the “well-governed” Western Cape province, which has the highest murder rate in the country, which is confined to poor black people, including townships, away from the predominantly white suburbs and the tourist zones downtown and along the Peninsula’s beachfronts.)

I could only imagine Ramaphosa’s disappointment at Goosen, Els, and Rupert’s performance. Except for some lapses on crime and xenophobia, the unionist Zingisa Losi's eloquence made Goosen, Els and Rupert come across as garbled and exposed their selfishness and entitlement. (From watching, it seems Trump wasn’t interested in her input.)

As for John Steenhuisen, the leader of the Democratic Alliance, the reactionary, mostly white-led party, in a governing coalition with the ANC at the national level, when Ramaphosa called him (because he is white) he muted some of the genocide language (while not completely disavowing it). But his more significant, and disturbing, contribution was to reassure the Americans about the moderating role of the DA, presumably as a rightwing white-led party, on real political change, i.e. forms of racial and class redistribution: that the DA is what’s stand between South Africa and chaos (“those people,” “the rabble” was his reaction to two black-led parliamentary parties).

Ramaphosa should have let two of the five government ministers who accompanied him, Parks Tau and Ronald Lamola, both black, speak instead. Lamola is an experienced representative of South Africa internationally (he drives the ICJ case), while Tau is an impressive technocrat and former mayor of Johannesburg where he did a capable job.

Although the meeting was meant to focus on trade and possibly a Starlink deal (Ramaphosa’s team previewed that in the days leading up to the meeting), it seems no meaningful economic agreements emerged from the whole encounter. (Musk’s frustration with operating Starlink in South Africa has been cited as one of the motivations behind his spreading fake news about a white genocide in South Africa.) As I noted already, discussions around BRICS or any concrete cooperation were notably absent. Instead, the event became a platform for Trump’s white nationalist messaging, with, on the face of it, virtually no diplomatic or economic gains for South Africa from the US.

The meeting proved one other thing: It is easier to make fun of the neurotic whining of a privileged minority, but they have real consequences. Afriforum’s lobbying, combined with Musk’s use of his platform to spread falsehoods, is a large part of the problem, and we can’t do much about it for now except debunk it. But that feels like bringing a knife to a gunfight. My sense is that calls to regulate the activities of social movements and political groups in South Africa that spread fake news may be flouted.

Near the end, Trump did not exactly say no to attending the G20 summit in South Africa in November 2025. But he also has little regard for multilateralism.

The broader and more enduring challenge lies with South Africa: to disentangle itself from an exploitative relationship with the West, particularly the United States, and to harness its growing influence within the Global South. This means deepening economic alliances and building political solidarity with countries like Brazil, Mexico, Malaysia, and key members of BRICS. It’s a chance to imagine a future beyond the decaying legacy of white nationalism, increasingly visible in both the US and parts of Europe.

But this is hard work, and it’s unclear whether Ramaphosa has the stomach for it—this is his final term—or the mandate, given that the ANC now governs in coalition with an alphabet soup of rightwing parties whose worldview is firmly anchored in the West. Nor is it clear whether the electorate, often reactionary and parochial, will offer the mass political support needed to take that leap.

• This post has been edited, updated and extended since it was first published on May 22, 2025.

The erosion of norms
Weariness upon despair
The burden of loss

Inured to outrage
Mollified by distractions
Shapeless sense of dread

Acceptable loss
A comfortable unease
This fine dislocation

Failure to protect
The slaughter of innocents
The worth of a life

Recriminations
The bodies accumulate
Shame runs off slowly

Ritual hand wringing
To dust we shall all return
Silt and sediment




After the bloodbath in Uvalde, Texas

File under: blood, USA, grief, violence, guns, USA, culture, observation, perception, despair, Heart of Darkness, poetry, toli

Writing log. May 27, 2022

The slightly stilted language, as if through a veil of translation
The rhythm and cadences came from a different place
Performing with a twinkle in the eye, full of hints and allusion
The marked confidence, the groove, we've got our own thing

Speaking of heaven, but not hell
Singing of love, but not hate
Trickster tales that leave you in the lurch
But, crucially, clear-eyed about death

...

Laments and celebrations walk hand in hand
And comfort lies in the company you walk with
The hidden realms one passes on the journey
The dreamy truths revealed along the way
Hold tight, for friends will one day sway off the road
And, at the tail-end of the journey, your traveling companion will be your shadow


After seeing Ebo Taylor perform at age 89

Love and Death, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Heaven by Ebo Taylor
• Love and death by Ebo Taylor
• Atwer Abroba by Ebo Taylor
• Kwaku Ananse by The Apyaga Showband
• Aba Yaa by Ebo Taylor
• Bue me by Pat Thomas and Ebo Taylor
• Amponsah by Pat Thomas and Ebo Taylor
• Ohiani Sua Efir by Ebo Taylor
• What is life? by Ebo Taylor
• Love and death by Ebo Taylor and Uhuru-Yenzu

I caught Ebo Taylor and Pat Thomas on the former's farewell tour in Austin on May Day 2025. Then aged 89, he relied on his very capable 6 piece band (helmed by two of his sons) to do the heavy lifting. Ageless afro-funk grooves, nasty keyboards and the horns. Pat Thomas's voice too, still had that honey-coated baritone and the vocal range that could hit the high notes that would excite you. They still had it, they still had that ineffable style that emerged fully-formed in their Seventies heyday. Heaven for this exiled soul.

Bonus beats: I captured a few snippets of their live performance with my cell phone: Heaven , Love and Death and Kwaku Ananse, some mellow highlife Ene Nyame A Mensuro, encore

File under: music, appreciation, Ghana, virtuosity, Ebo Taylor, Africa, highlife, funk, afrobeat, culture, observation, perception, review, poetry, toli

Writing log: May 2, 2025

Happy Friday everyone – I find myself wanting to expand on an offhand remark I made at a conference a while ago, where I suggested that at the present level of development, it was possible to get a bit of perspective by using the rough heuristic that “Generative AI” could be replaced by “an offshore centre in Chennai”, and seeing whether your argument still sounded convincing.

I actually do think that my perspective on AI has been very shaped by spending ten years in and around the global knowledge process outsourcing industry – it was certainly one of the things that initially got me interested in cybernetics and the idea that information transfer and processing was central to economic organisation. But in general, if we’re thinking about “Will All The Jobs Be Replaced By The Computer”, it seems to me to be very relevant to have a look at a group of people who a) were the previous thing that was going to Replace All The Jobs, and b) are quite likely to be in the front line themselves of being Replaced By The Computer. So here’s three things I learned:

People who don’t make the investment in making it work properly, tend to have a very wrong understanding of what can be achieved. I always liked to pretend in my mind to be the Harvey Keitel character from Pulp Fiction when troubleshooting an offshore project that had run into trouble. And like that character, a lot of what was needed to do was just to ask obvious questions and give obvious instructions. Nine tenths of my consulting fee was earned by the time I’d asked the question “Whose job is it to handle communication with the offshore team”?

It is classic cybernetics stuff – part of the cost of setting up a system is the cost of setting up information infrastructure to make sure that information flows in and out of the black box, to the place where it can be useful, in a form in which it can be the basis for decision making and in time to be useful. As Stafford Beer’s “First Principle of Organisation” puts it, information flows will always obey the Law of Variety (the capacity of the control system is at least equal to the variety of what it’s trying to regulate) – the task of management is to make sure that this inequality is satisfied in the most productive way with the least strain.

In an outsourcing arrangement, this means that the useful output of the offshore centre will resize itself according to the capacity provided to communicate with the onshore client. Allocating resources to this task can be done in smart or dumb ways, and I hope I learned a few clever tricks of information attenuation and amplification to make it work. But the problems typically arose when no specific resource was allocated at all.

The ick factor should not be underestimated. It’s enough to make an anthropologist out of you. My CEO and the founder of FLA has a lot of thoughts on this, and maybe I’ll try and get a guest post out of him. But from my perspective, at least as important as old-fashioned racism, economic protectionism and don’t-care-don’t-like-it-ism (all of which certainly exist, and which people were to my mind surprisingly forthright in expressing to a complete stranger) is the fact that lots of people don’t like giving orders. Just like the nouveau riche of the 1920s allegedly didn’t know how to deal with servants, Anglo-European middle managers have to go through a bit of a mental adjustment to stop using the “colleagues” style and relying on shared understanding and tacit communication, and start giving specific orders for what they want and when they want it by. People don’t like being put into the role of being a boss with no warning. Often the nicest people are the biggest problems, because they are the ones who feel the most powerful sense of dissonance and awkwardness at suddenly being told they’re now in charge of a dozen human beings earning much less money than them, in the former British Empire. I tended to chuck them a copy of one of the books in the Wyndham and Bannerjee historical detective novel series, I don’t know if it helped.

I think the point I’m trying to make here is that ChatGPT, for some reason, doesn’t have the same affect; it sits in the uncanny valley between “talking to a person” and “going on the computer”, and people are able to trick themselves into giving it orders. That’s a big advantage for it in terms of my previous point, as in my experience, people are very very bad judges of how much time and effort they are spending on things. Somone will spend as much as ten minutes out of every hour explaining things to a graduate trainee on their desk, then swear blind at the end of the day that the trainee needs hardly any supervision; the same person will then cut up rough about not having time for this BS when you ask them to set up a half-hour call once a week with the offshore team. The fact that it’s so easy to get into a rabbit hole and lose track of time when trying to train the chatbot to do something is actually quite important.

Getting bad news is always the problem. Anyone who knows me will have heard the anecdote, but I firmly believe that the very worst possible case for offshore knowledge work is the combination of a Canadian client and a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology. On one side, you have someone who has been trained to never refuse anything to someone in authority, and that all problems can be solved by working or studying harder. On the other side, you have an extremely conflict-averse culture, with someone who wants to think of their colleagues as friends. This more or less guarantees that nobody will find out about problems or miscommunications until they have become literally disastrous.

I don’t know whether to be interested or amused by the fact that ChatGPT is even worse at saying “no” or “I don’t understand the question” than a room full of enthusiastic offshore workers.I suspect that the problem has the same root – it is really difficult to provide reinforcing but negative feedback. We don’t have the human language to make a sentence like “That is bad news and I am annoyed, specifically I am annoyed with you for doing something wrong but thank you for telling me, I am pleased with that bit” sound convincing.And it seems like we don’t have a mathematical loss function for it either; maybe that should be the frontier of new research.

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