documentary

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: Emperor Bokassa and the Central African Empire

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I had heard about Jean-Bédel Bokassa‘s Napoleonic coronation in 1977 before, but it was always a vague “oh look at this crazy dictator”. But focusing on these extravagances in a vacuum makes takes away the human element – you can laugh at dictators claiming eleven holes in one, or renaming the months after their mother, but this overlooks the real people who had to live under these governments.

Bokassa had served as CAR’s President for about a decade before the coronation – he had fought for France in WWII, and was part of the crop of post-independence leaders supported by France across its former African colonies in the 60s (see La Françafrique).

However, Bokassa went down that well-trod path of dictatorial excess, to the point of declaring himself Emperor and blowing the equivalent of a quarter of CAR’s budget on the coronation to mimic Napoleon. It was partially bankrolled by the French, to keep their trade deals flowing. Here’s a good look from New Africa on Bokassa’s coronation – you can see why many African thinkers see the whole thing as an embarrassment:

The French, however, were not going to prop him up indefinitely – a few years after he declared himself Emperor, the French took part in Operation Barracuda, a coup to remove Bokassa and replace him with the government of David Dacko.

This, however, also kicked off the cycle of coups, rebel insurgencies, and instability that still plague the Central African Republic. This reporting below from France 24’s English channel looks at Bokassa’s rise and fall, and how he’s seen today in CAR. 50 years later, there’s a sense of nostalgia for Bokassa – including by his son, who is now a cabinet minister. Even more striking are Bokassa’s surviving opponents – while they’re still opposed to his rule, they too feel a nostalgia for strongman rule in the face of CAR’s current instability:

BANGLADESH: Shipbreaking

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The shipbreaking yards of Chittagong really made the media a few years back – videos and pictures of giant container ships being manually taken apart by workers with no protection at all were everywhere. There’s a lot of news reporting from that time, like this good Vice short from 2013:

I’d also recommend this Dhaka Tribune article “Planning ahead: The ship recycling industry must transition to a more sustainable future” by Afsana Rubaiyat for a good recent overview of the issue from a Bangladeshi perspective.

The industry is still going strong – you can even see the ships individually on Google Maps. While the Bangladesh government has attempted to regulate this industry – banning child labour, stopping ships carrying toxic material, setting safety and work conditions – the informal nature of the industry and high corruption makes these rules extremely difficult to enforce.

It’s also not an industry Bangladesh wants to ban completely, since it desperately needs the metals from the scrap to fuel its massive urban growth, and the industry employs thousands of workers. However, deaths and accidents still happen – the NGO Shipbreaking Platform reports at least 18 serious accidents in the first half of 2022 alone – and these are documented, reported ones.

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Interestingly, the Bangladeshi NGOs also recognize the economic importance of shipbreaking to the country – Shipbreaking Platform works for better environmental protection and worker safety, including COVID protection and stopping child labour.

BANGLADESH: Walking tour and traffic

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I love these casual, no-talking walking tours – it’s immersive, like you’re there yourself. This one is of Dhaka – I’ve also found some cool ones of San Salvador, Porvoo and Tel Aviv.

Of note is just how bonkers the traffic is, and that doesn’t even seem like a bad day! Dhaka has some of the worst traffic congestion in the world – infrastructure is totally overwhelmed, and there’s basically no public transit. There’s a really good documentary about Dhaka’s traffic from 2010, including what it’s like to drive a rickshaw, below.

It hasn’t gotten any better in the last decade – I saw a Bangladeshi news articles from this year lamenting the lack of progress on traffic and the wasted opportunity during the pandemic lockdowns. It’s so bad, in fact, that researchers estimate that 6-10% of Bangladesh’s GDP is lost indirectly to traffic.

Dhaka traffic – Source: Daily Star

BANGLADESH: The easternmost Indo-European language

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Bengali is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. If you go by total speakers, it’s the 7th most spoken, and if you only look at native speakers, it’s the 5th most spoken language (and has way more native speakers than widespread languages like French). Speakers are almost all concentrated in Bengal, both on the Indian and Bangladeshi side, and the fight to make Bengali an official language beside Urdu was a big spur in that Bengali nationalism that led to the eventual breakup of the two Pakistans in 1971.

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Bengali is the easternmost Indo-European language (or depending how you cut it, Assamese is, but the point stands). I love the evolution of languages, it’s like the evolution of species, and the spread of the Indo-European family always blows my mind. English and Bengali both descended the same Proto-Indo-European language spoken only about 5000 years ago in the Eurasian steppe – as well as almost every other language spoken between the North Sea and the Bay of Bengal.

It’s also hard to wrap my head around the fact that Bengali is more closely related to English than it is to Burmese, spoken right next door in Myanmar. (And likewise, that Swedish is more closely related to Bengali than it is to Finnish). Here’s a really interesting video on the Indo-European language family, and how people reconstruct Proto-Indo-European:

Bengali has a reputation as a poetic and “sweet” sounding language. There’s actually a lot of linguistic work that goes into why people perceive languages as sweet or harsh – it’s called sound symbolism – but this Indian video gives a good look at what about Bengali makes people perceive it as sounding sweet.

There’s also some fun slang in Bengali – this article on “The funky side of Bangla” from the Dhaka Tribune gives a primer on slang used in Bangladesh. I really like these ones:

  • Fatafati – awesome!
  • Toofan – lit. “tempest”, but means you’re totally supportive of something
  • Chokh palti – turncoat
  • Osthir – lit. “restless” but is used for positive things the same way “sick” is

BANGLADESH: Sheikh Hasina

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I mentioned yesterday that a lot of credit for Bangladesh’s recent economic and social improvements has been given to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. She first served as PM from 1996-2001, and then returned to power in 2009, and is currently on her fourth term. She is the daughter of Bangladesh’s founding father Sheikh Mujib, who was assassinated in a coup shortly after Bangladesh’s independence. Currently, Sheikh Hasina is the longest-serving elected female head of government anywhere in the world.

She has been both praised for stable leadership and improving standards of living and criticized for democratic backsliding – she has been accused of graft and suppressing opposition, particularly Islamist groups. Bangladeshi elections have also been marred by violence, and corruption and political influence run deep. Still, there’s multiparty elections, and a vigorous press. Hasina has also survived assassination attempts, jail, and led the country back to parliamentary democracy after Bangladesh suffered a major constitutional crisis and was under a military caretaker government.

Here’s a good interview with her from DW, the German public broadcaster. It’s not a softball interview either; the narrative she sticks to is one of the larger improvements to social indicators, the rights of women, reduction in poverty, economic growth, while she is challenged on her strong hand on the opposition and on freedom of expression.

As an aside, despite being very male-dominated countries and still all scoring objectively low on gender equality, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India all have a tradition of very powerful female leaders. In Canada, we’ve only had a female Prime Minister for a few short months back in the 90s (and she lost her first election), but South Asia has a long string of electorally successful women.

With Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia as leaders of the Awami League and the Bangladesh National Party, the Prime Ministership has been held by one of these two women since the early 90s (they’ve also both spent time in jail when not in office). Famously, there’s also Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan and Indira Gandhi of India – though there’s a common element of all these women share: they’re part of larger political family dynasties in each country. That being said, none of them can be called figureheads – they all have the power (and controversy) that comes from real political leadership.

BANGLADESH: A wealthy country?

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Slum vs well-off neighbourhood, Dhaka – Source

I grew up with the stereotype of Bangladesh as a terribly poor country – if Bangladesh was in the news, it was either about a natural disaster or sweatshops and terrible working conditions. However, while it still isn’t the richest country, it’s got a growing middle class, an established manufacturing, export and tech sector, and in recent years, a booming economy.

It’s something that’s been noticed by its neighbours. Long considered a poor cousin by India, Indian news has been reporting on a recent IMF report that Bangladesh has overtaken India in nominal GDP per capita. A lot of Bangladesh’s indicators are also passing India’s – economic growth, life expectancy, health outcomes, female workforce participation, access to the internet, poverty, women in parliament, etc. It’s causing a lot of worry in India – not out of any animosity towards Bangladesh, but as a warning sign of India’s own stagnation:

So why is Bangladesh on it’s way up? It’s manufacturing industry for global exports, especially clothing, is booming – fuelled by cheap labour, the same way China was a decade ago. There’s also been a big focus on tech and expanding into high-end manufacturing like pharmaceuticals. There’s still massive problems of corruption, poor infrastructure, inequality, and environmental damage, but the trend has been widely positive.

Political stability is also crucial. A lot of this credit goes to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. I could do a whole other post on her and female political leadership in South Asia (and I will, tomorrow.) But the long and short of it is in a region that has known a lot of political and sectarian strife, Bangladesh is now getting room to breathe and grow, and grow impressively.

BANGLADESH: Independence, borders, and introduction of Islam

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A couple interesting videos on Bangladesh to get started – first a look at Bangladesh’s independence in 1971, and how it is an extremely rare case of unilateral secession that was accepted by the wider global community. Independence movements try to secede unilaterally all the time (that is, break away against the wishes of the parent country), but since WWII, that rarely leads to acceptance as your own country by the UN or the wider global community.

India and Bangladesh used to share the messiest and most complicated border, with enclaves, second-level enclaves, and even a third-level enclave (a piece of India, surrounded by a piece of Bangladesh, which is surrounded by a piece of India, which is surrounded by Bangladesh). These borders were cleaned up recently, and but why they happened in the first place, and why it took so long to fix is up to both pre-Raj history, and India’s disputes with countries other than Bangladesh.

Bangladesh is one of the most populous Muslim countries, at around 150 million Muslims (90% of the country’s population, and Bangladesh makes up about 10% of the world’s Muslims). Bengal was a heavily Muslim region long before Partition, and the video below covers the spread of Islam into the subcontinent, the establishment of the Sultanate of Bengal, and Bengal’s incorporation into the Mughal Empire. It’s a good bird’s eye view of pre-British history.

UKRAINE: Tanks in Chernobyl

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Chernobyl today – Source

We’re all pretty familiar with the Chernobyl disaster (I’d recommend Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy by Serhii Plokhy for a good book on it, or even the well-researched HBO drama from a few years ago), but it was back in the news recently for being caught up in the Russian invasion. Russian convoys kicked up nuclear dust in the Red Forest and there were rumours of Russian soldiers digging positions without even using protective equipment. The plant is now back in Ukrainian hands, and media has been allowed in:

However, there’s an interesting story that doesn’t frequently get told – that among the abandoned vehicles and buildings are several WWII Soviet tanks, rusting away and too radioactive to move. They were part of a plan to blow a hole into the plant to drain the water before a steam explosion happened – a plan that never went through, and instead divers, miners, and plant workers drained the tank manually.

For a longer, more comprehensive history of Chernobyl, Plainly Difficult did an excellent documentary into the disaster itself:

UKRAINE: Kievan Rus and St. Olga of Kyiv

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Like many pieces of history right now, there’s a deep divide over who it truly “belongs to”. The Kievan Rus are claimed as foundational nations by Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, and is part of competing narratives over Ukraine and an independant nation vs. a “brotherly nation”/subset of Russia, as the Kievan Rus were based in Kyiv, and originated Russian royal families. However, the Kievan Rus’ foundational dynasty were originally Varangian – Swedish vikings that had traded, raided, and settled down the rivers into Eastern Europe, and they largely held a loose confederation of land, not a single unified empire.

One of the best stories of the Kievan Rus is the tale of St. Olga of Kyiv – a woman who was probably sainted to stop her from murdering more people (this actually happened a lot in the late viking era). Her story is likely largely embellished in the historical record, but boy it is a hell of a tale. This is where the reference of “sending pigeons” from Ukrainian stand-up comes from – to destroy an enemy city by requesting a bird from the rafters of each house of the city as her wedding gift, then tying burning cloth to all the birds and letting them fly back to the thatched roofs. The whole great gory story is here, worthy of an action movie:

UKRAINE: Jewish Chernobyl

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The ruins of Chernobyl’s synagogue – Source: Pierpaolo Mittica

The town of Chernobyl didn’t just spring out of nowhere on April 26, 1986 – it was a long-standing town in northern Ukraine. Chernobyl the town is about 15km south of the power plant (most plant workers lived in Pripyat, the company town built around the reactor). The town has a deep Jewish history, and has been a site of Hasidic pilgrimage for decades – there still is the Chernobyl Hasidic dynasty today.

The Jewish community in Chernobyl, like other Jewish communities in what was the Pale of Settlement, faced pogroms and violence through the centuries. The majority of the Jewish population was murdered during the Holocaust. After the war, the surviving Ukrainian Jews faced the repression of organized religion in the Soviet Union, and many left for Israel or North America. Those who emigrated over the years still feel deep ties to the region, like the Twersky family of Chernobyl Hasidic lineage (warning: Holocaust footage):

When the nuclear disaster happened in 1986, the town of Chernobyl was evacuated and abandoned, with the Ukrainian and Jewish populations scattering across the Soviet Union. Most of the USSR’s Jewish population would later emigrate to Israel, the US, and Canada at the end of the Cold War, though there still is a solid Jewish population in Ukraine today, including Ukrainian President Zelenskyy.

Ukraine still remains an important site of pilgrimage for Hasidic Jews, including the Chernobyl dynasty’s tombs (as well as the location of many family graves). For a personal account of reconnecting with Chernobyl, I’d recommend the article “Why Chernobyl’s Jewish History Still Matters — 31 Years After The Accident” by Anna Khandros, plus Pierpaolo Mittica’s photoessay “Chernobyl before Chernobyl: The Hasidic Jews’ Pilgrimage“.

If you’re interested in learning about other Jewish communities in the former USSR, I covered the Bukharan Jewish community in Uzbekistan last year.