.... In 2006, John Ewing, Christopher Robbins and Matey Odonkor formed the Ghana Think Tank in response to their experiences working in international development. We sent a set of US community development briefs to ad-hoc think tanks formed in Ghana, Cuba and El Salvador. The problems addressed in these briefs ranged from broad, societal issues (Homelessness and Obesity) to more personal, light-hearted quandaries (Bo Can't Dance and Powerpoint).
After receiving the think tanks' solutions, we set about formulating specific plans of actions based on these responses, and began to enact them. The project was an attempt to transpose parts of one culture into another, to take a solution generated in one context and apply it elsewhere. The hope was that the friction caused by these applications would generate interesting results, and that we could learn something further about our own assumptions as well as those of our counterparts in the other countries.... (more)
Brusssels, Belgium - Aug 07: Congolese student Mbutu...Bienvenu poses for a photo with a 'Tintin' car model... Mbutu...Bienvenu who lives in Brussels has filed a motion to have the comic book 'Tintin in the Congo' by Belgian cartoon icon Herge pronounced racist and withdrawn from sale in bookshops. (Photo by Mark Renders/Getty Images)
The lawyer Mbutu Bienvenu is at it again. Thanks for raising the price of the original, at the next auction, through the roof, man. That said, we still found this old report a blast:
And how does Tintin himself feel about all this rearview political correctness trying to walk him and Snowy off a cliff after all these years? Cover yor ears:
Reuters Africa Journal's Rainer Schwenzfeier and Anjali Nayar report that once upon a time, Mali's transport minister, after a visit to China, introduced motor rickshaws to Mali and, well, a whole new industry and all kinds of sustainable development "hell" broke loose.
It's Soyinka, therefore most of the above went right over my head. The following in turn is an attempt to drop what he said, pick up the shards and stick it back together via some application - or glue. Soyinka's argument impugns a political correctness coming from a place which holds all cultural identities sacrosanct and all cultures as equal, hence its uncritical stance or paralysis. He seems to be saying that, in the long run, such an uncritical stance is condescending because by failing to "interrogate" powers which hide behind the claim that a culture or tradition permits them to do whatever destructive thing it is they do, those bound by political correctness to retreat are in fact not acknowledging or respecting said culture; in fact, all they are doing is kissing the ass of whoever at that point in time wields the power to make such a claim.
The subtle point here is by kissing the ass or ring of some kind of cultural relativism such purveyors of political correctness actually, as Soyinka said, are "condescending" because they fail to recognize that, like with their own culture, all cultures are only equal in the sense that they are all good and they are all bad. The condescension simply sides with the blanketed claim of a despot or pocket of power within that culture. It condescends because it fails to find out--or even conceive of--what repressed pockets in the same culture are constructive and progressive, and by failing to discover and interrogate, it fails to speak up on their behalf.
What we find so cool about Soyinka's deconstruction is that it helps, me thinks, those in development and such to frame a way to argue back against power hiding behind misconstrued interpretations of multiculturalism and cultural relativism. Or at least Soyinka's deconstruction here is a way to correctly reframe theories like David Brooks' "progress resistant culture", applied a while back to what happened in Haiti. I'd say dammit if Brooks' take on Haiti isn't the kind of interrogation of power Soyinka is asking for in a world of political correctness gone awry, but where Brook's interrogation condescends and fails--as we harped on before-- is in refusing to realize that the sustainable solutions to Haiti and in much of the developing world rests not just in the people from these places but in their cultures as well.
Many have already heard of the colonial phenom referred to as "Francafrique" and what appears to be its slow but gradual death. The death of Francafrique has been broken down - here, here, here and seen in real time here. If, alas, all culture is political, then against the backdrop of a dying French imperialism (minus its hold over the franc CFA) and Michael Kimmelman's essay in NYT bemoaning/analyzing the changes in use, influence and relevance of the French language, these two contrasting passages sorta stand out:
...to a contemporary writer like the Soviet-born Andreï Makine, who found political asylum here in 1987, French promises assimilation and a link to the great literary tradition of Zola and Proust. He recounted the story of how, 20-odd years ago, his first manuscripts, which he wrote in French, were rejected by French publishers because it was presumed that he couldn’t write French well enough as a foreigner. Then he invented the name of a translator, resubmitted the same works as if they were translations from Russian, and they won awards. He added that when his novel “Dreams of My Russian Summers” became a runaway best seller and received the Prix Goncourt, publishing houses in Germany and Serbia wanted to translate the book from its “original” Russian manuscript, so Mr. Makine spent two “sleepless weeks,” he said, belatedly producing one. “Why do I write in French?” he repeated the question I had posed. “It is the possibility to belong to a culture that is not mine, not my mother tongue.”
However, in a more polygot and globalized world, French, out of many language options, might end up winning by being a stylistic, or the convenient, choice...
... of an empowered diversity, rather than a victim of it:
“The truth,” Mr. Diouf [Abdou Diouf, former president of Senegal, who is the secretary general of the francophone organization] said the other morning, “is that the future of the French language is now in Africa.” There and elsewhere, from Belgium to Benin, Lebanon to St. Lucia, the Seychelles to Switzerland, Togo to Tunisia, French is just one among several languages, sometimes, as in Cameroon, one among hundreds of them. This means that for writers from these places French is a choice, not necessarily signifying fealty, political, cultural or otherwise, to France. Or as Mr. Diouf put it: “The more we have financial, military and economic globalization, the more we find common cultural references and common values, which include diversity. And diversity, not uniformity, is the real result of globalization.”
Track: Lumumba by Lalcko. Album: Conflict Diamonds. 2007.
While we were away, a hip hop lyrical genius passed away. Like a lot of other JJCs out there, we only got to know of Olaitan Olaonipekun, aka Da Grin, post-the "Pom, Pom, Pom" music video meme. But since then we haven't lost sight of him or a slew of music videos showcasing some awfully talented Yoruba hip hop artists with mind bending lyrical skills, anchoring some of the most innovative and memorable use of the medium (here, here, here and here) to come out of Nigeria of late.
To show Da Grin is still on a lot of minds, this early report on his fatal car accident refuses to budge, all week, from the top of allAfrica.com's top 10 "most read" stories. A lot of his unreleased tracks are popping up on the internet, including the prophetic "if I die":
That funny reparations scene from Barber Shop (2002) starts: 0:33 in:
Arguing against reparations for slavery (yawn), prof. Henry Louis Gates' recent NYT op-ed complicates the prosecution's case with the long known fact of African complicity in slavery:
But the sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time. Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold. Queen Njinga, the brilliant 17th-century monarch of the Mbundu, waged wars of resistance against the Portuguese but also conquered polities as far as 500 miles inland and sold her captives to the Portuguese. When Njinga converted to Christianity, she sold African traditional religious leaders into slavery, claiming they had violated her new Christian precepts.
Did these Africans know how harsh slavery was in the New World? Actually, many elite Africans visited Europe in that era, and they did so on slave ships following the prevailing winds through the New World. For example, when Antonio Manuel, Kongo’s ambassador to the Vatican, went to Europe in 1604, he first stopped in Bahia, Brazil, where he arranged to free a countryman who had been wrongfully enslaved. African monarchs also sent their children along these same slave routes to be educated in Europe. And there were thousands of former slaves who returned to settle Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Middle Passage, in other words, was sometimes a two-way street. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to claim that Africans were ignorant or innocent. Given this remarkably messy history, the problem with reparations may not be so much whether they are a good idea or deciding who would get them; the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted.
But to redistribute the blame, Gates appears to be making the assumption that the people and kingdoms we now call "Africans" felt, back then, such a pan-Africanist kinship, though the assumption easily allows us to now look back and judge them through the racial demographics of today. Ta-Nehisi begs to differ:
Gates implicitly asserts that in trading slaves, Africans somehow violated a common, fraternal "African" spirit. Thus Gates, laments "African selling other Africans into slavery," and, in his Times piece, shakes his head at the "sad truth" of African slave-trading. What goes unasked, is whether the Fanti, the Ga or the Mende of the past even saw themselves as "African." The crude nationalist and Gates come out blaming different people, but both commit the fallacy of judging the sins of the past via the racial tribalism of today.
Columbia University's Eric Foner says, it's the aftermath, stupid:
But the great growth of slavery in this country occurred after the closing of the Atlantic slave trade in 1808.It was Americans, not Africans, who created in the South the largest, most powerful slave system the modern world has known... Identifying Africa’s part in the history of slavery does not negate Americans’ responsibility to confront the institution’s central role in our own history.
But the demand for reparations has less to do with the mechanism that delivered the African captives than what happened to them during the hundreds of years of working without compensation. The economic disadvantage of black workers extended beyond the long night of slavery into the iniquitous era of Jim Crow.
I may be reading Ta-Nehisi's "nationalist" argument all wrong. However, my take would be that the economics of capturing and trading slaves for Africans would still thrump any spirit of solidarity kingdoms back then might have had for a shared skin color; in other words, if the tables were turned and back then Africa had the means to absorb and profit from such serious amounts of surplus labor, whites would sell each others' asses off as slaves too. Furthermore, laying the accent for reparations on the100 years aftermath of slaves working in America without compensation rather than on the mechanism of Africans who sold one another into slavery sounds like you are now, in retrospect, trying to tax the better capitalist.
A Yemeni journalist working for ABC News laid his hands on what looks like Umar Abdulmutallab blasting an Ak-47 in some training camp video. NYT's lede has the raw ABC footage - here.
These were dropped in our inbox a few weeks back. Arts Meets Commerce agency commissioned the creative production company Shilo to produce a broadcast spot for the Broadway musical "FELA!"-- credits - here.
Above, a 2004 speech by the late Dr. John. Some in depth Sudan election post-game analysis have harped on late SPLM leader's dream of a "New Sudan" and how the dynamics of that dream play into the post election deeper North-South split. Africa Confidentialtakes itfrom the top:
...Another NCP tactic has been to present boycotts as merely reflecting the opposition’s fear of failure. ‘It is obvious that the opposition parties want to escape the competition because its leaders discovered that they are unable to convince the voters after two decades of splendid isolation during which they lost most of their active cadres,’ trumpeted the government’s Sudan Vision on 7 April. The isolation and loss of activists is true – regime harassment and cooption combined with opposition ineptitude and poverty have ensured that. Yet despite all this, it is clear that much traditional support remains for the religiously based mega-parties, the National Umma Party and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), and that in transparent elections they would do well. So would the main secularist alternatives, the Sudan Communist Party (SCP) and, most of all, the SPLM, which among Northerners has taken off from nowhere. This was fed by the ecstatic welcome for the late SPLM Chairman, John Garang de Mabior, in Khartoum in July 2005 and the fact that many Northerners embrace his vision of a ‘New Sudan’, politically secular and giving some of the Nile Valley elite’s power to the country’s marginalised peoples.Foreign optimists also constructed the edifice of the CPA on the broad shoulders of the stubborn and charismatic Colonel Garang. This is one reason many Sudanese nation-wide believe ‘Doctor John’ was assassinated by the NCP. The crash of the Ugandan presidential helicopter in Equatoria on 30 July 2005 has never been fully explained.
The most visible of the fault lines running through the SPLM, and perhaps most relevant to the future of all Sudanese, lies between its northern and southern wings, or “sectors”. For years, the two have pursued different, but supposedly complementary goals: the northern sector has worked to unite opposition forces against the Khartoum government to forge a so-called “New Sudan”. The southern sector has been more involved in achieving varying degrees of self-determination for the long-marginalized south, for Abyei (an oil-rich county which straddles the north-south border), and for the states of Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile, which although lying on the northern side of the border, fall under the aegis of the SPLM’s southern sector. The two sectors have co-existed since the late SPLM leader John Garang established them in 2005. But as the New Sudan focus dimmed following Garang’s death that same year - and as the prospects of southern secession grew sharper - the party’s twin movements appeared increasingly disjointed. During the lead-up to the elections - critically important for the northern sector, but seen by some in the south as little more than a bump on the road to the referendum - strong disagreements between the two camps broke into the open.“This is an ideological difference in the first place," said one SPLM member in Khartoum. “Some people in the southern sector do not think beyond the borders of Southern Sudan.”
Two reports on the winner of the Goldman Environment Prize for 2010, Thuli Brilliance Makama. The prize, announced on the 19th, cites Makema's grueling three-year legal battle reinforcing the right to public participation in environmental decision making in Swaziland, but prize furthermore sheds light on wildlife preservation and game industry, whom Makama says aren't just killing poachers, but are killing poor people.
Conservatives with license to kill poachers reminds us, again, of Jefferey Goldberg's much talked about piece in last month's New Yorker. One of the winners of the 2009 Goldman prize was Marc Ona Essangui from Gabon.
VOA's Scott Sterns reports that Nigeria's stock market, rallying mainly due to increasing confidence in bank stocks, is a testament to 2 things: 1) CBN governor Lamido Sanusi's banking reforms, and 2) confidence in Goodluck Johnathan. For a closer look at what's actually going on, yesterday's ABND Lagos stock market update with Damilola Runsewe says a lot of the activity in bank stocks is being dictated by a lot of short term investors and it seems some banks are ready to chase that fickle liquidity by not just declaring good numbers but, even in their recovering states, also declaring dividends as well:
And on an investment side note, a good idea to re-route some of the country's Dubai shopping dollars picks the wrong location and seems to have been built on a zero understanding of the country's wealthy or their shopping habits:
In light of what's still going on in Dafur and what many activists consider as Sudan's just concluded sham elections, ISIS' Jacqueline Shire and Inner City Press' Matthew Lee conclude in the above clip that Bashir holds a gun to the head of South Sudan's referendum hence the UN and the Obama administration's uncritical stance towards Khartoum. They also talk about the pragmatism of the UN and the Obama administration, and where does pragmatism end and incompetence begin.
Last week Boing Boing (who else?) met up with the Zef crew after Coachella and scored the interview below. Yolanda and Ninja explain why Americans would find them even funnier if all their Afrikaner expletives, puns and bad jokes didn't just fly over their heads.
Boing gots lots more --here-- especially this nice piece we missed on the group's artist, Leon Botha. Below is also a family act out of SA and titled by Khayav, "Not Quite Die Antwoord." But it looks to us like Tobias Fünke from the show Arrested Development managed to escape from the set, ran off to SA, got married and raised the family of his dreams.
Those who've caught the trailer for Alex Gibney's new documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money, about the rise and fall of Washington super lobbyist Jack Abramoff, will no doubt have caught the footage of what looks like the Jamboree in Jamba...
...a 1985 get together organized by Abramoff and hosted by UNITA rebel leader Jonas Savimbi , who, even though he was said to be a Marxist, was fighting the pro-Soviet MPLA and was a hero for American conservatives. Other anti-Communist militants there were Nicaruguan Contras, South African Security Forces and the Afghan Mujaheddin.
Looking back at Cold War logic and alliances, you just can't help gasping, "WTF!"
But, apparently, Abramoff's anti-commie love for Savimbi did not stop there. We never knew the Dolph--"the Swede"--Lundgren's character in the cold war action clunker, Red Scorpion (1989), was also inspired by Savimbi:
The whole Abramoff-Savimbi-Hollywood triangle must have been such a head scratcher back during Abramoff probe that, googling back, you find everyone covered it one way or another: Salon's James Verini's Tale of the Red Scorpion from 2005 is still up. There's is TNR's Franklin Foer's 2006, Mr. Abramoff Goes to Hollywood, which lays out how Abramoff started off the film in Swaziland (funded by South Africa), ended up in Namibia and ran head long back home into the New York Times and the anti-apartheid lobby - somewhere in there is also Grace Jones and The Namibian newspaper. For the less severe right wing take, there's the Weekly Standard piece by Mark Hemmingway - My Dinner with Jack: The Jamboree in Jamba, the making of 'Red Scorpion,' and other tales of the Abramoff era. According to Hemmingway, the origins of Red Scorpion actually began in Jamba:
But for Abramoff, the pivotal moment in Jamba came when he was approached by someone trying to secure funding for a documentary about Savimbi. Abramoff scoffed. Rambo: First Blood Part II had just been released in theaters three weeks earlier, becoming the first film to open on more than 2,000 screens. "Why would you want to make a documentary? Nobody watches documentaries," he told me. "I said to the guy, 'You should make an action film.'"You can also say this for Abramoff--the man has a gift for making wild ideas a reality. Jack revisited his movie idea in an entertainment law class he took while finishing his degree at Georgetown a few years later. He sketched out a story based loosely on what he knew about Savimbi's plight and the Soviet operations in that part of Africa.
Fore fills us in on the script:
Washington conservatives overlooked the abundant evidence suggesting that Savimbi was an ideological chameleon with little compunction about stomping on human rights. But never mind the nuances--Abramoff had found his muse... A script doctor turned Abramoff's folkloric version of Savimbi into a bad parody of the loud whiz-bang cold war thriller then popular with audiences. Red Scorpion, described as the "African Rambo," tells the story of a Soviet-trained assassin (Lundgren) sent to murder a Savimbi-like character. In the end, Lundgren comes to understand the virtues of the rebel cause and turns on his communist bosses, killing lots of Cubans in the process. (Red Scorpion's potty-mouthed dialogue bears tonal similarities to Abramoff's infamous e-mail exchanges: "An American can swear whenever, wherever, however much he or she fuckin' well pleases!") When Warner Brothers agreed to distribute the picture, Abramoff was suddenly living his Hollywood dream. Abramoff sold Red Scorpion as a work of verisimilitude. He claimed to know the region cold, and he would shoot his film in Swaziland, the small Bantu kingdom wedged between South Africa and Mozambique. His attraction to the region was financial as well as ideological. By hiring the services of the South African film industry, which suffered under the anti-apartheid boycott, he could exploit massive tax deductions available to investors there...
TPM manages to snag a copy of the invite to a Kenyan embassy tea party, hoping to use the political "Tea Party" buzz to create a different kind of buzz 'round Kenyan tea .
And just in case you had doubts that both conservative fringe elements garnering so much mainstream attention--the "Tea Party" and "Birther" movements--are all Kenya related, Huff Post adds:
A recent CBS/New York Times poll found that many self-described tea partiers are also "birthers," who doubt President Obama's birthplace. According to the poll, 30% of tea partiers and 20% of all Americans believe that Obama was not born in the U.S. and therefore cannot be the country's legitimate leader. Despite the release of the president's birth certificate, many believe that he was born in Kenya, where his father lived. At last week's tax day protests, attendees held signs saying "Go Back To Kenya" and "A village in Kenya is missing its idiot." Jon Chessoni, the Kenyan Embassy's first secretary, struck out at birthers in a 2009 Washington Independent article about a forged copy of a Kenyan birth certificate for President Obama. Chessoni told the Independent that "it's maddness" to continue to question Obama's birthplace and that birther claims are baseless."
But from the threshold of the global economic crisis and 2008 elections, are the "tea partiers" and "birthers" simply a rhetorical shift of the "threat and the war on terror" from a foreign to a domestic front? The prof in the video makes a compelling argument:
Hmm.. also the sheer proximity of the Bush years and its rhetoric on terror might explain why the rhetorical shift was so easy to make and why so many are compelled by its new tea party clothes.
Jumping off the assumption that the "heroic" tends to be a conservative ideal and therefore harbors "dangerous" right wing designs on society, British New RightChairman and ultra right wing intellectual Johnathan Bowden takes on what one may call the tactical or the ever realigning nature of the heroic ideal in popular culture, especially comic books:
Somewhere in the talk he cherry picks and fits in The Black Panther and Luke Cage as renderings of such realignments... For the culture studies geeks though, the whole lecture is well worth the listen. A while back at Black Superhero blog (via Shadow and Act), we came across a different take on the ever changing nature of the heroic -- the trailer for the still in progress doc, Shades of Gray - An Examination of Race Relations in Comic Books:
The oysters live by the phlankton rich waters of an antarctica current and south westerly sea breeze but die easily by anything from algae blooms to change in weather.
CNN talks to oyster farmers Henning Du Plessis and Tupohole Shiwanapo.
"New York Herald Tribune" New York Times has been streaming a silly, tongue-in-cheek and, oh, so divine new trailer, cut for Rialto Pictures' 50th Anniversary Restoration and re-release of Jean Luc Godard's Breathless/ À bout de souffle (1960). It's kinda like the former trailer, only better. We hear the new print already screened at the Berlin film fest and according to Variety the restoration, supervised by Beatrice Valbin at StudioCanal, is the film's first with English subtitles revisions by film historian Lenny Borger.
And before u ask what all the fuss is over the zillionth re-release of the ultimate French yawner? Okay, we admit it. We are like gushing 12 yr old girls at a Justin Bieber concert when it comes to this movie. Sigh. We just can't help ourselves. We will even defend its 1983 U.S remake by Jim McBride on the grounds of insanity and references to the Silver Surfer:
Bringing together an array of African artrepresenting how "whiteness" has been viewed through African eyes over a millenia, Ghanaian curator Nii Quarcoopome's thematic question was - "whether, in racial or ethnic terms, in society or in art, is 'outsider' still a viable term?" The question, however, takes on an interesting twist considering paleoanthropologists are contemplating the origin of artistic creativity actually predates Europe and its purpose seems to have been a way to help people belong, overcome otherness; in other words, to help bring the outsider in.
Above paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson describes (transcript - here) how human creativity predates the cave walls of Lascaux and how recent discoveries like ochre "pencils" at the Southern tip of Africa, dating back to "before Europe," provide proof that the earliest art was the art of developing and establishing social contact, social connectiveness and cohesiveness - body art:
Ochre could certainly have been used, those little ochre pieces dipped in water and used as a stamp for example and maybe that identified those individuals as belonging to the same clan or the same group. There is extensive discovery of ochre pencils and as we know one of the frequent minerals that is used to decorate… I was recently with the some Masai people in Southern Tanzania, and it was so interesting because I went to a wedding and they used this red earth to paint their faces, and here I appear, you know, looking very different and really feeling like the other, like the outsider, and one of the elderly women came up to me and started painting my face, and a number of things happened. The first thing that happened was I felt I was included, that I was part of them, that they had accepted me and I felt an intimacy with that person. You know how it is. We keep a distance from one another. We have this personal space around us. Decorating each other has a very interesting byproduct, which is developing social bonds, and the other thing was that I felt like I could participate and not just simply be an outside observer.
It sure gives a whole new meaning to the scene when the dirty cop tells the good cop, "we need some dirt on you so we can trust you." Nevertheless, Johanson's body painting and bonding experience recalls this post from Elia over at the fab blog, Twiga, about how women in the Abengourou region of Cote de Ivoire use kaolin (a white clay) to etch out designs on their bodies:
She recounts her own Kaolin body painting and bonding experience - here:
... a formidable lady I met once... offered me and my friend H to get some kaolin painting done so that we could have a better immersion into the festival's traditions. When we enthusiastically accepted, as it looked very nice on the other women, she took us to a neighbor's house and proceeded to an improvised application of kaolin. During the few minutes that the painting work took, several neighbors came out to watch the procedure with great curiosity and amusement. When the kaolin artist lady finished, she took a good look at us that should have been of satisfaction but in fact wasn't very pleased: the paint was almost invisible on our all-too-pale bodies. So she tried again to apply some more kaolin clay, but with the same results. Then one of the neighbors suggested to re-paint us with some charcoal, now that would be visible. The ever-growing audience in the yard burst out in laughter. She laughed too, but in the end she took the suggestion and did indeed use some charcoal mixed with the kaolin, and in the end the result wasn't too bad.
After 4 days of cancelled flights and wilting flowers, Business Week reports "late yesterday... 300 metric tons of vegetables and fruits [were airlifted] in three flights to the south of Spain."
Malian-Burkinabe actor and playwright Sotigui Kouyatedied in Paris on April 17, 2010. TV5 Monde tribute to Kouyate - here. Below, a scene with Kouyate and Brenda Blethyn in dir. Rachid Bouchareb's London River (2009):
Bazuka (Quem me rusgou?) by Águias Reais and vocal rantings by Ikonoklasta, the Fazuma Family poet, and Sacerdote. Album: A Radio Fazuma humildemente apresenta ... Batida - Dance Mwangolé. Label : Difference music, 2009.
Coming out Lisbon, Portugal, DJ Impula (and Radio Fazuma), since 2007, have been spinning their favourite Afro-urban everything and anything from Kwaito to Kuduro, Brazilian Funk, Dancehall, Pretoria, Afro House on a radio show called Batida on Portuguese radio, Antena 3. "Batida," in Angola, also stands for "all the illegal compilations that are sold in the streets of Luanda, mostly focusing on kuduro, rap and kizomba." "Bazuka," the first track on “Dance Mwangolé” their second album of mixes, has been burning up the airwaves since last year. Check out their myspace page for how the video was made. Check out mondomix 4 more samples.
..of Soul Boy (2010). Ben Makori, Esther Karanja and Nina Schwendemann, for Reuters Africa Journal, take an in depth look at how the film was made and received.
One of the documentaries screening at the AFF NY is Freddy Ilanga: Che’s Swahili Translator (2009), dir. Katrin Hansing and edited by Nicolas Calzada.
In 1965 Freddy Ilanga, according to this '05 write up by BBC's Mark Doyle,"worked as Che Guevara's Swahili teacher and translator. Che secretly came to the Congo hoping to foment a left-wing revolt against Mobutu's western regime in Kinshasa shortly after the assassination of Congolese independence hero Patrice Lumumba.
Che's efforts in the Congo failed and after he left the region for Prague, Ilanga was sent to Cuba and for some reason has been unable to return to the Congo ever since. The clip from the documentary below about Che's time in the Congo cites Che referring to his Swahili translator:
Part of the AFF NY screening are animated and live shorts from the father of sub-Saharan animation, Nigerien director Moustapha Alassane:
Bon voyage SIM (1966). The charming story of the politician frog Sim, who travels to neighboring countries in the midst of all the pomp and ceremony surrounding a presidential trip.
More on South Africa's first animation academy (in collaboration with Aardman) located at the False Bay Good Hope College, in the sprawling Khayelitsha township on the outskirts of Cape Town:
Michela Wrong (It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle Blower) and Pettina Gappah (An Elegy for Easterly) made the shortlist for the Orwell Prize in the book category.
Orwell Prize 2010 Director, Jean Seaton, announces the shortlist:
Below, BBC's Bidisha talks to Brian Chikwava, whose book Harare North made the long list, and Michela Wrong about political writing:
Detroit's Institute of Art's exhibition, "Through African Eyes," showcasing how African peoples have experienced and interpreted their relationships with Europeans over the past 500 years, opened yesterday. Below the Ghanaian curator, Nii Quarcoopome, walks us through:
NYT slide show - here and Holland Cotter's preview points out just what Quarcoopome achieves:
The question he asks is whether, in racial or ethnic terms, in society or in art, outsider is still a viable term. Once upon a time black Africans saw white Europeans as supernatural beings. They were wrong. Whites saw blacks as savages. They were wrong. Flip those identities around. Still wrong. Shake things up, though, and eliminate the identities altogether, and you start to get [it] right. Mr. Quarcoopome shakes things up.
NYT columnist, Ross Douthat, dropped his take last week on Jefferey Goldberg's New Yorker piece on Mark and Delia Owens - the two conservationists in Zambia in the 80s, who, in order to save the wild animals, decided to form and arm a militia to take on the poachers, with deadly repercussions. Excerpt:
To the Owenses, it no doubt felt like they had become players in a Western — Shane confronting the cattle barons, Gary Cooper taking on the Miller gang, Ransom Stoddard facing off against Liberty Valance. And we all know how those stories are supposed to end: With fundamentally-virtuous people doing what had to be done to tame a lawless country, and leaving the delicate ethical arguments about ends and means to the next generation. This wasn’t a movie, and Zambia wasn’t their country. But if it’s important to stand outside the Owenses’ strange story and pass judgment, it’s also important to step inside it and recognize how understandable every step they took probably felt, how easy it was to justify going to extremes, and how the fine the line can be between heroism and something much darker.
In Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust in Arab Lands, Historian Robert Satloff sets out to prove that not only did Jews in North Africa suffer many of same elements of persecution as Jews in Europe -- arrests, deportations, confiscations and forced labor -- but that there were also hopeful stories of "righteous" Arabs reaching out to protect them. The doc aired on PBS 2 days ago. Full documentary - here.
Michelle Obama approved New York-Kenya fashion label, Suno, talk about their Fall/Winter 2010 collection below:
The design and development is done in New York and the garments themselves in Kenya where they are artisinally produced in small workshops. More on Sono's "2007 post election violence in Kenya" origins - here.
Nigeria's acting president, Goodluck Johnathan, in Washington D.C for the nuclear non-proliferation talks, mentioned at the Council on Foreign Relations, CFR, another kind of proliferation that concerns Africa - the fact that the continent is awash with small and light weapons:
During the interactive session, the Acting President called on the United States government and other developed countries to assist Africa in the control of the proliferation of small and light weapons, noting: "It looks like Africa is a dumping ground for small and light weapons by the international community. "Definitely, this is an area that worries us. The free movement of small arms into Africa is a major problem. It is a huge challenge to us and we believe that the US should help."
But what exactly will the U.S. do? As Paul Salopek wrote about back in '02, the whole idea of ships laden with Africa bound firearms is, ironically, the bitter fruit of peace. The peace which came "with the end of the Cold War in 1989" meant a torrent of surplus weaponry poured southwards... "Today," Salopek wrote, "Russia and China are the leading arms suppliers to Africa. They are followed by cash-strapped Eastern European nations whose aging arsenals are being hawked to the highest bidder — governments, rebels or criminal warlords. A handful of middlemen have reaped millions in profits from gunrunning..."
To add to the irony, as East European nations join NATO, NATO's expansion spurs even more military conversion of hardware in these nations, accelerating "the migration of old East Bloc stockpiles to Africa"; for "it's way more expensive to melt down an old Soviet-style tank than to just dump it quietly for a few thousand dollars in places like Chad." For the Russian side to the dumping guns in Africa story, see - here.
Rape-aXe is a flexible polyurethane condom-like tube that fits into the woman's body. Rows of jagged plastic hooks line the inside of the tube — bent backward like teeth in a shark’s mouth — and lodge in a perpetrator's penis upon entry. The perpetrator can withdraw from the woman, but the Rape-aXe remains clamped on. Trying to pull it off will cause discomfort.
So much has been said about Cairo's relationship with garbage; in film, in relation to conservation and bio-gas, to pigs and even cats. Below, ABC looks at the slum kids and photography:
Over at the Focus website, we found this pic and clip of Baby Ponijao from Opuwo, who stars in the documentary "Babies," which opens Apr 16, 2010. Trailer - here.
One of PBS'classic docs is Shantha Bloemen T-Shirt Travels: The Story of Second Hand Clothes and Third World Debt, (full doc - here, blogged here). Bonnie Allen, in the National Post, digs deeper into the sale of one particular type of used clothing -- ice hockey jerseys. The writer is on a quest to find and photograph all 30 NHL jerseys in Africa (slide show - here), but first...
Historical accounts trace the used-clothing industry back to the aftermath of the First World War when surplus military uniforms were dumped in colonial Africa. Today, almost half a billion dollars worth of second-hand clothing is imported into sub-Saharan Africa each year. The popularity is a bit surprising, given the widespread belief by many Africans that these used clothes have been stripped from the body of a dead person. The phrase "Dead White Man Clothes" is a common term in Uganda's marketplace. In Ghana, (where I spotted a Winnipeg Jets jersey in 2005) the phrase in local Twi is "obruni we wo." Translation: "a white man has died." After all, why else would anyone give up these perfectly good clothes?
Anyway the kid above rocks our NHL jersey - go Caps.
Reuters reports that Meles Zenawi told the Ethiopian parliament that the country has seen, "over the last 8 months, a 21 percent growth in our exports," and even though...
He did not say what was underpinning the growth in exports but officials say the general economy is strengthening as it shakes off the global downturn and a power shortage... Official data shows growth of 9.9 percent in 2008/09, weighed on by the global economic slump and power shortages which dented industrial output.
A 10 pt growth in the economy partly due to improved power supply? Quick, someone page Nigeria.
If ABC is right, then below is the first document ever released by the U.S. government labeling an active foreign military official, Ibraima Pap Camara, Guinea Bissau's Air Force chief of staff (and former head of Guinea-Bissau's Navy, Jose Americo Bubo Na Tchuto), as international drug "kingpins." -- more. 2 Narcotics Traffickers Guinea-bissau
WNYC's Richard Hake talks with founder and executive director of the New York African Film Festival, Mahen Bonetti, about this year's selection of African films for the 17th edition, which runs from April 7th to May 31st:
We like substituting "map" for "safari"and "territory" or the "real" for Africa whenever we come across this often cited paragraph from Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulations:
The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself
- from Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988), pp.166-184.
A study from Thomson Reuters released today yesterday shows South Africa, followed by Egypt and Nigeria are responsible for most of the African science research being done -- as a share of world publications -- in fields that are relevant to natural resources. One of the points also raised was:
There is a marked interaction between researchers in the countries in North Africa which share both language and culture.
The point dovetails into the recent article --from where we got the title to this post --at sci.dev.net by Charles Dhewa about the need to "domesticate" science by using Africa's vernacular languages to talk about it:
Yet despite centuries of scientific undertakings on the continent, there is still no vernacular word for 'science'. In Southern Africa, science remains a minority, English-language based, pursuit that reinforces the domination of English at the expense of local languages such as Ndebele, Swahili and many others. This marginalisation of African languages and practices means much local knowledge is lost. Many innovations by farmers and rural communities are excluded from modern science and technology (S&T) because there are no local terms or expressions to capture them. It is vital for ordinary people to be able to participate in science innovation. Moving the large body of indigenous knowledge into mainstream S&T systems will help address pressing development issues on the continent.
African policymakers must make an effort to 'domesticate' science by using vernacular languages to talk about it. This means investing in translation activities. To achieve this we must strengthen the role of intermediaries with specialist communication skills — people who can translate and summarise complex S&T ideas in local languages and explain both the concepts and implications with simplicity. Such people are sometimes called 'integrators', 'filters' and 'synthesisers'.
And with the whole idea of wikis, open source and fast broadband networks enabling video, dubbing or captioning, suddenly the idea of knowledge building by talking about science using local languages actually seems doable and, even more importantly, sustainable. Not to mention that it also gives a whole new meaning to sustainable science development. The video below looks at scientific knowledge building using wikis and other web 2.0 tools to pass along agriculture methods at the local level, but it also hints at how one could pass along science at the local level if there was the language to talk about it:
ANC insider trading and all aside, a good caption to this video could still be: The White House singles out SA's dismantling of its nuclear weapons program for special praise even though the U.S. refused to vote on the World Bank loan for SA's much needed Medupi coal plant.
One of the options mentioned here was a development bond. Tim Cohen, in this op-ed in Business Day, cites opinions that suggest SA's capital markets could have raised the money for the plant:
The fact that the notion of a development bond is again being mooted suggests, says Laubscher, "lack of understanding of how financial intermediation works".The fact that the notion of a development bond is again being mooted suggests, says Laubscher, "lack of understanding of how financial intermediation works." "Development does not start with the mobilisation of funds - the starting point is the identification and prioritisation of development projects and actions in the context of a comprehensive and coherent policy framework, with the relevant institutions then entering the capital market to seek the necessary finance.
And it is only if the capital market is unable or unwilling to finance such projects that the possibility of market failure requiring corrective action is to be contemplated. "Domestic capital market has absorbed the explosion in the public sector borrowing requirement in recent years with consummate ease. The public sector redeemed debt of R6bn in the 2007/08 fiscal year, but this borrowing requirement has exploded to R300bn the current fiscal year."In spite of this massive increase, Government is still able to borrow at a lower real yield than in 2007/08," he points out. "I am not aware of a single development project of merit in recent years that could not go ahead because of a lack of funding, and the onus is on the propagators of market failure in this area to prove their point," he writes.
