Artworks and immigrants: coats cut from the same cloth

Provenance is valued way above function

I was recently talking about flies to Henrik Hageland over on Die Deutsche Ecke. He grew up on a farm and a plethora of flies in the house meant it was time to have a jolly good clean-out of the byre. I don’t particularly know where flies come from in my own kitchen, but, if they’re not too flight of foot, they get to see the business end of my swat. Just imagine if, instead of flies, they were dogs. What a swat that would be!

While I don’t precisely know where the flies in the kitchen hail from, I do know why they’re in the kitchen. And, truth be told, if they were dogs, I’d know why they were there as well: food and water. Yet we call dogs man’s best friend, and flies are pests.

Arguments rage about the thinking capacity of a dog. There are fewer concerning the thinking abilities of flies, but the one thing that tends to keep us humans in each other’s company—gregariousness, or yearning for company, or love, or pure economic need—while attractive is more of a cherry than the cake upon which it sits. Man can, in fact, live on bread alone. But love is something man can live without. Many do. Those who don’t, can find they do as well. Love is a fickle add-on to life, and yet we place it central to our existence. If only it were.

I used to work at an institution where I had a Canadian colleague. We were not especially close, but cordial and friendly. One day, the department did a Myers-Briggs assessment and it transpired that she and I were the two occupants of a particular letter combination within the group. That brought us that bit closer together.

Although she came to Belgium from Canada, she did not start life there. She was born in Uganda. When she was a small child, her family had been hounded out of Uganda under threat of extermination by the then President—the Last King of Scotland he is dubbed by one film—Idi Amin.

Now, if you want to know all about Idi Amin, there are plenty of sources. I can recommend one at The Wayward Rabbler. The reason why, in 2025, some are buzzing about like flies talking about Idi Amin, who ruled Uganda with a very cruel iron fist from 1971 to 1979, is that Zohran Mamdani came from there, albeit not under the same conditions as my erstwhile colleague or those of someone else I wrote about a few years back, who fled from Uganda, where homosexuality is a capital crime, to Kenya, where it only gets you 14 years in prison: Mamdani is conscious of his privilege, by all accounts at least. Brad takes a hindsight view. He looks at who Amin was, what he did and why some, who seem to know very little about him, think that Amin was a hero.

Image: Zohran Mamdani. By Dmitry Shein - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=168609238.

Immigration is similar to antiques: good provenance can skyrocket value. Bad provenance can see the article destined for the black market, or even destroyed. Perhaps it is emblematic that even the date and place of birth of Idi Amin are uncertain. Dealers in antiques will rhapsodise over exquisite artefacts, their grace, beauty and immaculate condition, whilst what preoccupies them most is the value at auction.

There are tales aplenty of antiques discovered hanging on the walls of old ladies’ houses, unrecognised for the Caravaggios that they are, or propping open scullery doors, yet worth millions to avid collectors. What induces someone to use an object worthy of a museum for an everyday function is likely the fact that, with its value to those who have no interest in what it actually does unknown, it performs the everyday function perfectly, and in a museum it performs no function whatsoever.

So, while Brad’s explanations are certainly a good read, they take the reader on an historical journey that explains why Mamdani is there. It tries to counter the narrative that Mamdani ought not to be there. And that somewhat overlooks the obvious observation that he is there. And he has something to say that some people would like to hear.

But others will not hear him because of the journey itself. It is the journey of persecution, and it is journeys of that ilk that result in those who live them having something to say that those who don’t should think seriously about listening to. We are told that the modern age is one where it’s not what you know, but who you know that will get you on in life. The query into who someone is has been reduced, however, to a check list. You will find explicit reference to this in an article in yesterday’s Guardian, by Carolin Würfel, an East German art curator who was confronted with arrant racism when she moved to West Germany. Check lists are not just for aeroplane cockpits.

All this melds into the line of thinking that got an arguably very good documentary banned from the BBC because the narrator, who narrated pre-scripted texts presented to him for the purpose by the production company, had a father who was associated with Hamas. The phrase sins of their fathers comes but fleetingly to mind, because there is no evidence whatsoever of the boy’s father having committed any sins at all, whereupon one meets the objection guilt by association, and one ends up asking in desperation: has no one any interest in what the boy is actually saying?

Wherein lies the value of an election candidate depends in large measure on wherein lie the values of the electorate.