6 ms·

The deadly accordion wars of Lesotho

43 points by janpio 4y ago

AlanYx 4y ago
>"They come to a house looking for you - and you are not there. And they kill the wife, they kill the children, eliminate everybody in the family. Villages and villages are orphanages, because of Famo music," says one of its original promoters, Sebonomoea Ramainoane. There's got to be more to this than what's in the article. Does anyone have more information about what's going on? The article briefly mentions connections to gold mines and politicians as possible aggravating factors, but some of it seems so petty, like this: >"When you are on the radio, you have to make sure that every day you play all the groups. If you leave one out, they say: 'You don't like us.' Then they shoot you."
- DFHippie 4y ago
  I don't think we humans need better excuses. Believing honor is everything and that your honor requires someone else's dishonor is all it takes. Here's Shakespeare's holding forth on the topic in Othello: > Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial. This is why the Hatfields fought the McCoys. This is largely why Putin's troops are raping, murdering, and pillaging in Ukraine. It's how you demonstrate who has lost honor and who has gained it. It's why "owning" your rhetorical opponent is so vicious, why revenge porn exists. People in thrall to this version of honor feel they must utterly destroy their enemy to restore their honor. To those of use who haven't recently been slighted this looks like the opposite of honor, but it seems less insane after an insult.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    in thrall to this version of honor One could say honor/status is a proxy for the the amount of force you can deploy if attacked. Conflict anthropologists note that in highly stratified societies there are strict rules on the distribution and use of military technology. Japanese samurai could challenge each others' swordsmanship and engage in fatal duels, and even chastise any peasants that failed to acknowledge his class. But a samurai that went about killing peasants for fun would be quickly branded a criminal, like a cancer on the social body.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  some of it seems so petty It's the harsh logic of resource mobilization. Artists compete for a share of (mostly poor) people's leisure budget by producing songs, hoping that people will like them so much that they'll pay money to hear them from the source. Songs' popularity is a function of novelty and longevity. Radio station operators can't make songs, but they have transmitters that can amplify songs. People listen to the radio to hear songs for free. Radio station operators get kickbacks from the artists or sell advertising, or some mix off the two. There are more songs than the market can bear at any one, because most people get bored of most songs after a while. The time to play all available songs equally exceeds the number of hours in the day people can listen to the radio (this is the allocation problem streaming solves, at the cost of fragmenting the audience). The radio station wants people to listen as much as possible, so the operators want to play the most popular songs. The listeners decide what is popular, but it takes time for those choices to be communicated back to the station operators and artists, so the station operators try to predict based on the combination of their own musical taste and their ability to get audience information (answering phones at the radio station, using information gained at promotional events etc). Whereas artists might once have simply trekked from village to village playing their songs and being rewarded with food and sex, that is no longer a viable way to compete against people whose songs are played on the radio. Thus the radio station is now able to hold artists livelihood hostage by their decisions on what 'the popular taste' is at any given time, a symbiotic relationship that can go bad if either party's assessment of the music's popularity drifts too far from reality. In more advanced societies, media corporations or nations function as amplifiers for ideological or territorial claims which are articulated by social movements appealing to the tastes of populations, and which mostly provide strategies or tactics for their adherents within those populations to maximize their own take from a limited resource pool from which said populations compete to draw. So, the current political spat over a Supreme Court opinion is the equivalent of one group of legal scholars releasing a diss track of another bunch of legal scholars, delighting or enraging their respective fans. All the intellectual depth and complexity of legal opinions is partly a function over how long the arguments last, in this case ~50 years rather than the few minutes of a typical pop song. The war in Ukraine is a language/cultural identity conflict that has played out over hundreds of years about who gets access to the good agricultural land. I would argue that all social conflict is just elaborated competition over limited environmental resources.
nradov 4y ago
There are ongoing smaller scale cycles of violence and retribution in parts of the US driven by rap diss tracks posted on social media. https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/entertainment/music/yungeen-ace-julio-foolio-jacksonville-rappers-rival-groups-atk-kta-in-deadly-beef-who-i-smoke-when-i-see-you/77-6d993faa-b014-4d8c-99be-de8d9fcdb948 https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/entertainment/music/y... https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/criminal-justice/ct-chicago-gang-killing-fbi-investigating-20191202-uilr6i7pvra5zkybzwpxkyxjpy-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/criminal-justice/ct-chic...
photochemsyn 4y ago
This one buries the lead: Now, though, the murders are not just over accordion music. Rival Famo groups also battle for control of the lucrative illegal gold mines in South Africa where many of their followers work. "The deadly gold wars of Lesotho" would probably have been a more accurate title. There seems to be politician and police involvement as well. So it's fair to guess that this is really a struggle over economic power in an area where there's no independent judiciary and police and politicians are involved in the cash flow generated by the 'illegal' mining activity. It's also the BBC, the state propaganda organ of the UK, comparable to Russia's RT, and so they don't mention the interesting and relevant fact that the major foreign outfits mining in Lesotho are UK firms, and they're probably pulling most of the profits out of an impoverished country, paying kickbacks to the politicians, good 'ol colonial extraction style: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_industry_of_Lesotho https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_industry_of_Lesotho But no, says the BBC it's about the music. Come on, now. It's more like cartel drug wars on the Mexican border, yes, they have narco-music too, but nobody claims that's what they're fighting over.
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  I've noticed that BBC's bias is subtle and sparkled sparingly, in stark contrast to say ridiculous Russian propaganda machine. But for sure if you know certain topics well, you'll notice from time to time lack of objectivity, for whatever reasons. In general I still like them, one view/source on given topic. But its best if the topic is not about Britain's darker parts of history or present.
- shellac 4y ago
  > "The deadly gold wars of Lesotho" would probably have been a more accurate title Not really. The involvement in illegal mining comes later, and violence was part of the Famo before that. There's some suggestion that it was tensions over funeral funds, which is where these groups came from. Edit: and I should add that the illegal gold mining happens in South Africa, not Lesotho (which afaik has no gold mines). See, for example, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-africa-34589143 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-africa-34589143.
- drcongo 4y ago
alkaloid 4y ago
What a travesty of exploitation that has occurred on most of the African continent. Beautiful land, beautiful people, exploited for labour and commerce for centuries. That bill is going to come due at some point. In the meantime, the people suffer.

43 points by janpio 4y ago

>"They come to a house looking for you - and you are not there. And they kill the wife, they kill the children, eliminate everybody in the family. Villages and villages are orphanages, because of Famo music," says one of its original promoters, Sebonomoea Ramainoane. There's got to be more to this than what's in the article. Does anyone have more information about what's going on? The article briefly mentions connections to gold mines and politicians as possible aggravating factors, but some of it seems so petty, like this: >"When you are on the radio, you have to make sure that every day you play all the groups. If you leave one out, they say: 'You don't like us.' Then they shoot you."

DFHippie 4y ago
I don't think we humans need better excuses. Believing honor is everything and that your honor requires someone else's dishonor is all it takes. Here's Shakespeare's holding forth on the topic in Othello: > Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial. This is why the Hatfields fought the McCoys. This is largely why Putin's troops are raping, murdering, and pillaging in Ukraine. It's how you demonstrate who has lost honor and who has gained it. It's why "owning" your rhetorical opponent is so vicious, why revenge porn exists. People in thrall to this version of honor feel they must utterly destroy their enemy to restore their honor. To those of use who haven't recently been slighted this looks like the opposite of honor, but it seems less insane after an insult.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  in thrall to this version of honor One could say honor/status is a proxy for the the amount of force you can deploy if attacked. Conflict anthropologists note that in highly stratified societies there are strict rules on the distribution and use of military technology. Japanese samurai could challenge each others' swordsmanship and engage in fatal duels, and even chastise any peasants that failed to acknowledge his class. But a samurai that went about killing peasants for fun would be quickly branded a criminal, like a cancer on the social body.
anigbrowl 4y ago
some of it seems so petty It's the harsh logic of resource mobilization. Artists compete for a share of (mostly poor) people's leisure budget by producing songs, hoping that people will like them so much that they'll pay money to hear them from the source. Songs' popularity is a function of novelty and longevity. Radio station operators can't make songs, but they have transmitters that can amplify songs. People listen to the radio to hear songs for free. Radio station operators get kickbacks from the artists or sell advertising, or some mix off the two. There are more songs than the market can bear at any one, because most people get bored of most songs after a while. The time to play all available songs equally exceeds the number of hours in the day people can listen to the radio (this is the allocation problem streaming solves, at the cost of fragmenting the audience). The radio station wants people to listen as much as possible, so the operators want to play the most popular songs. The listeners decide what is popular, but it takes time for those choices to be communicated back to the station operators and artists, so the station operators try to predict based on the combination of their own musical taste and their ability to get audience information (answering phones at the radio station, using information gained at promotional events etc). Whereas artists might once have simply trekked from village to village playing their songs and being rewarded with food and sex, that is no longer a viable way to compete against people whose songs are played on the radio. Thus the radio station is now able to hold artists livelihood hostage by their decisions on what 'the popular taste' is at any given time, a symbiotic relationship that can go bad if either party's assessment of the music's popularity drifts too far from reality. In more advanced societies, media corporations or nations function as amplifiers for ideological or territorial claims which are articulated by social movements appealing to the tastes of populations, and which mostly provide strategies or tactics for their adherents within those populations to maximize their own take from a limited resource pool from which said populations compete to draw. So, the current political spat over a Supreme Court opinion is the equivalent of one group of legal scholars releasing a diss track of another bunch of legal scholars, delighting or enraging their respective fans. All the intellectual depth and complexity of legal opinions is partly a function over how long the arguments last, in this case ~50 years rather than the few minutes of a typical pop song. The war in Ukraine is a language/cultural identity conflict that has played out over hundreds of years about who gets access to the good agricultural land. I would argue that all social conflict is just elaborated competition over limited environmental resources.

nradov 4y ago

There are ongoing smaller scale cycles of violence and retribution in parts of the US driven by rap diss tracks posted on social media. https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/entertainment/music/yungeen-ace-julio-foolio-jacksonville-rappers-rival-groups-atk-kta-in-deadly-beef-who-i-smoke-when-i-see-you/77-6d993faa-b014-4d8c-99be-de8d9fcdb948 https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/entertainment/music/y... https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/criminal-justice/ct-chicago-gang-killing-fbi-investigating-20191202-uilr6i7pvra5zkybzwpxkyxjpy-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/criminal-justice/ct-chic...

photochemsyn 4y ago

This one buries the lead: Now, though, the murders are not just over accordion music. Rival Famo groups also battle for control of the lucrative illegal gold mines in South Africa where many of their followers work. "The deadly gold wars of Lesotho" would probably have been a more accurate title. There seems to be politician and police involvement as well. So it's fair to guess that this is really a struggle over economic power in an area where there's no independent judiciary and police and politicians are involved in the cash flow generated by the 'illegal' mining activity. It's also the BBC, the state propaganda organ of the UK, comparable to Russia's RT, and so they don't mention the interesting and relevant fact that the major foreign outfits mining in Lesotho are UK firms, and they're probably pulling most of the profits out of an impoverished country, paying kickbacks to the politicians, good 'ol colonial extraction style: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_industry_of_Lesotho https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_industry_of_Lesotho But no, says the BBC it's about the music. Come on, now. It's more like cartel drug wars on the Mexican border, yes, they have narco-music too, but nobody claims that's what they're fighting over.

saiya-jin 4y ago
I've noticed that BBC's bias is subtle and sparkled sparingly, in stark contrast to say ridiculous Russian propaganda machine. But for sure if you know certain topics well, you'll notice from time to time lack of objectivity, for whatever reasons. In general I still like them, one view/source on given topic. But its best if the topic is not about Britain's darker parts of history or present.
shellac 4y ago
> "The deadly gold wars of Lesotho" would probably have been a more accurate title Not really. The involvement in illegal mining comes later, and violence was part of the Famo before that. There's some suggestion that it was tensions over funeral funds, which is where these groups came from. Edit: and I should add that the illegal gold mining happens in South Africa, not Lesotho (which afaik has no gold mines). See, for example, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-africa-34589143 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-africa-34589143.
drcongo 4y ago

alkaloid 4y ago

What a travesty of exploitation that has occurred on most of the African continent. Beautiful land, beautiful people, exploited for labour and commerce for centuries. That bill is going to come due at some point. In the meantime, the people suffer.