Transparency and mistrust: Who or what should be made transparent?

It is increasingly recognized in public administration that the relationship between trust and transparency is not straightforward. Recently, right‐wing populists have risen to power, rejecting transparency requirements based on documents while claiming that they “hide nothing.” Clearly, existing scholarly conceptualizations are insufficient for understanding how transparency operates as a value in real‐world political contestation. An analysis of state‐ and national‐level politics in Nigeria reveals that, while always retaining a core informational component, there are multiple competing conceptions of transparency. Popular demands for transparency express a belief that not only should data be made transparent, but also the social networks in which politicians are embedded. “Transparency in people” can clash with more traditional, technocratic transparency practices centered on data. By rethinking who or what should be made transparent—data, things, or people—this article offers fresh theoretical insights on the complex politics of transparency and trust.     

Black music and pan-African solidarity in Keorapetse Kgositsile’s poetry

The African American revolutionary poetry outfit and purported grandfathers of rap The Last Poets coined their name from Keorapetse Kgositsile's poem “Towards a Walk in the Sun”. This is relatively common knowledge. However, no sustained academic research has been conducted on this crucial exchange in diasporic studies. In this paper, I show how Kgositsile's poem in question harvested the rich oral, aural, and literary practices of his native Setswana, which in turn enabled The Last Poets to not only draw a name from Kgositsile's poetry, but also a language and poetic. This way, I demonstrate multivalent streams of influences between black South Africa and black America, as opposed to the current one-way exchange in scholarship that almost always presents black South Africans as emulators and mimickers of Afro-American culture. I expose how Kgositsile's poetry trans/figures both Afro-American literary and musical histories. Functioning within the framework of pan-Africanism, I uncover black music's transatlantic arch in Kgositsile's poetry, which unifies Africa, the Caribbean, and black America. I offer a deep analysis of that arch, and demonstrate its dynamic and complex networks which span generations and centuries, and continues to be generative till today. I focus particularly on the evolution of orality and aurality in black expressive cultures, understood as practices that express the black cultural continuum on both sides of the Atlantic.