Africa: Fighting Movie Stereotypes - A Rebranding Lesson

Over at Americas Quarterly, Lina Salazar writes about the Sony Pictures revenge flick, Colombiana, starring Zoe Saldana, and how the perpetuating of a stereotype about a place as a failed state has real costs for people living there. Excerpt:

Colombiana’s title is a brazen attempt by Hollywood producers to capitalize on the decades-old reputation of a country that has made tremendous progress in recent years. It is a purely commercial strategy grounded in fantasy, not reality. And what producers don’t realize is that perpetuating the myth that Colombia is a violence-ridden failed state can have real costs for people living there, and that negative perceptions can have serious negative real world consequences, such as an impact on tourism.

This is good reason to support organizations such as Por Colombia—a group of volunteer students and friends of Colombia in the U.S. and Canada—and initiatives like Colombia, the Other Side of the Coin—a pacifist campaign lead by Carlos Plaza, a Colombian community leader in New York. The latter is leading efforts to distribute materials on premiere night in theaters throughout New York City that shed a more positive (and realistic) light on Colombia.

When they first saw the trailer early this summer, Por Colombia launched #ColombiaisBeautiful—a grassroots social media campaign on Facebook and Twitter designed to counteract overly negative depictions of Colombia in pop culture. The campaign’s banner is a digitally altered poster of the movie: instead of a gun, the “Colombiana” on the film’s poster holds a bunch of flowers, and the tagline "Vengeance is Beautiful" is replaced by "Colombia is Beautiful." This simple campaign has attracted thousands of followers and received coverage from national and international media outlets, including Univision and Huffington Post.

Bogotá-born Carlos Macías, the president of Por Colombia, argues that Sony Pictures is making a profit at Colombia’s expense. Colombians are not against talking about the conflict, says Macías. “If you’re going to talk about the Colombian armed conflict, go ahead, we’re the first to start the conversation," he points out. We don’t deny that violence remains a problem, but we demand balance. We want to provide people with actual facts, while at the same time remembering to include the country’s positive side—which is all too often left out.

Rebranding lesson: piggy back a counter campaign on Hollywood's dime;  re-purposing the same material aimed to make a profit at your expense.

"Snow Falling on Cedis" - Episode 2

After the jump:

South Africa: History of (the Idea of) the Diamond

Kottke digs up an article by Edward Jay Epstein from the Feb 1982 issue of Atlantic Monthly, explaining how diamonds became so popular and so valuable. It's a story about monopoly and the power of advertising. Excerpts:

The diamond invention—the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem—is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value—and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems....

....The diamond invention is far more than a monopoly for fixing diamond prices; it is a mechanism for converting tiny crystals of carbon into universally recognized tokens of wealth, power, and romance. To achieve this goal, De Beers had to control demand as well as supply. Both women and men had to be made to perceive diamonds not as marketable precious stones but as an inseparable part of courtship and married life. To stabilize the market, De Beers had to endow these stones with a sentiment that would inhibit the public from ever reselling them. The illusion had to be created that diamonds were forever -- "forever" in the sense that they should never be resold.

DRC: More Colin Delfosse's Congolese Wrestling Photos

Excerpt from Belgian photographer Colin Delfosse's caption to his portfolios on Congolese wrestlers:

Kinshasa, 2010. Eight million inhabitants, thousands of shegués (street children), hundreds of wrestlers and their brass bands. Edingwe, Dragon, City Train, Mbokotomo : the “legends” of Congolese wrestlers invent themselves on a daily basis in the outskirts of Kinshasa. 
 

Body-building, and even black magic enthusiasts, fight for glory in makeshift rings. They come from the streets and their charisma commands respect and admiration....

Portfolios: "Congolese Wrestlers" and Wizards of the Boxing Ring and more here.

Blog-Comic Strip: "Snow Falling on Cedis" (Debut)

Still working out the kinks, but after the jump is the debut strip for "Snow Falling on Cedis" - a blog comic strip about some African kids stuck on the icy slopes of some glacier out in Alaska. Humor and punditry ensue.

Updates Mon, Wed and Fri until supplies run out :)

Cast and FAQs page on the way.

Ethiopia: "A Personal Journey through One of the Largest & Oldest Open Air Markets in Africa

A kickstart project worth every dime:

Sosena Solomon's Mekarto is a beautiful and nuanced portrait of five unique individuals and their particular relationship with the market. The modern development in Ethiopia and its overall impact on the people and culture of this unique community is threatening the survival of Merkato. I knew this moment had to be documented to share the unheard voices of the people affected the most.

Excerpt from the Mekato blog:

Hawa has been selling incense in Merkato for over 40 years. At 105 years old she still gets up at 6am to walk several long blocks to her section of the market. Don't let her age fool you, she can feel money and sense how much it is without seeing it....

H/T: Kate Bomz 

Burkina Faso/ Egypt: Old and New Television Soap Industries

Two looks at television soap industries.

Egypt, leading producer of TV soaps in the Arab world, especially for viewers during the Ramadan season when families gather to break the fast, now finds its industry faced with a shortage of actors with many pro-Mubarak actors getting blacklisted - Fr here/ translated - here

But the blacklist has had an unintended effect on the storylines writes Enora Castagne and Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Lebanon's Daily Star.

SlateAfrica's Damien Glez on the rise of the soap opera and television industry in Burkina Faso - Fr here. Translated - here.

West Africa: A Woman's Slavery Illustrated and Deconstructed

... based on an 1876 court transcript of a West African woman named Abina, who was wrongfully enslaved and took her case to court. Details - here.

H/T: C. Blattman

Uganda: ESPN Looks @ Why the First African Little Leaguers to Qualify for the World Series will not be Playing

The Little League World Series has begun and by now everyone knows the story of how the Ugandan little league baseball team (first African team to qualify for the Little League World Series) were denied visas to travel to the U.S because of paperwork issues. Filling in for them is the Saudi (American) team who have gone to the World Series 11 consecutive years and who the Ugandans beat in the regional qualifier in Portugal earlier this year.

The much awaited ESPN look is narrated by Jay Shapiro, who has been shooting a documentary of Uganda's little league's road to the World Series.

South Africa: Wynton Marsalis on the "Standard Bank Joy Of Jazz"

Trumpeters Wynton Marsalis and Hugh Masekela introduce the 2011 Standard Bank Joy of Jazz festival , which begins August 25.

Call for Papers - Special Issue of African Identities

Call for papers for a special issue of African Identities to be published in the summer of 2012 (African Identities: Journal of Economics, Culture and Society)

Late Modernity, Locality and Agency: Contemporary Youth Cultures in Africa

More than a decade and half ago, Donal Cruise-O'Brien (1996) had declared that the African youth were 'a lost generation.' This fatalistic summation of the fate of the African youth was perhaps for good reason. The enormous socio-economic and cultural forces surrounding the lives of young people in Africa were [and still are] simply daunting. And at the very core of this seemingly insurmountable socio-economic atmosphere are the pervasive unjust protocols of postcolonial regimes under which most African youth live. Indeed, more recent scholarship suggests that there is no respite yet for the African youth as the hopeless situation has escalated (See Abbink, Jon and Ineke Van Kessel 2005 & Alcinda Honwana and Filip De Boeck 2005). On account of the inclement socio-economic and political circumstances surrounding young people in Africa, what we are now witnessing across the entire continent is what Mamodou Douf (2003) describes as the 'dramatic irruption of young people in both the domestic and public spheres,' putting young people at the very heart of the continent's socio-economic and political imagination (Durham 2006). But the challenges facing African youth are not peculiar to
them.

All over the world, the new sociology of youth points to a growing concern about the ramifications of globalization, late modernity and general global social and economic restructuring for the lives and futures of young people. But amidst the lingering fears of the future of the young, scholars
have also called for a deep reflection and rethinking of young people's own resilience and agency in the midst of these turbulent times. This special issue of African Identities, tentatively entitled Late Modernity and Agency: Youth Cultures in Africa, seeks to reflect on the varied contours of youth responses to social change in Sub-Saharan Africa. While young people in Africa continue to face extraordinary social challenges in their everyday lives, what are the unique ways in which they have reinvented their circumstances to keep afloat in the midst of seismic global social changes? Papers are solicited on a wide range of topics on the African youth that may unravel young people not only as victims but also as active social actors in the face of a shifting global modernity. The themes may include amongst others,

- African Youth and Globalization
- Late Modernity and Social Change
- Youth and Media-Film, Television, Video, Internet, etc
- Hip-hop, Club Cultures and other forms of Popular culture
- Mobility and Social Media
- Gender and New Economies of Youth
- Democracy, Power and Youth Activism
- Youth and Conflict in Africa
- New Subjectivities and Agency
- Neo-Pentecostalism as Subculture
- The Informal Economy and Invented Pathways
- Lifestyles and Identity Constructions
- New Spatial Politics in Public and Domestic Spaces

Abstracts of not more than 500 words (including name, position, institutional affiliation, and email contact) may be sent to P.UGor@bham.ac.uk no later than September 30th, 2011. This special issue of African Identities will be published in the summer of 2012.

Africa: The Africa Centre - Past and Future

On Friday the Guardian postd a pic of architect David Adjaye's vision for how the Africa Centre's Grade-II listed building in Covent Garden, London, might be restored.


Authors Ngugi wa Thiong'o & Abdilatif Abdalla back in May 2011 share fond memories about the center - here.

H/T: African Art in London

Africa: Making the Case for Even More "Mega" NGOs

Over at BigThink, author Parag Khanna, a former U.S. foreign policy adviser, discusses his dea of "Mega-diplomacy". Excerpt:

Mega-diplomacy would mean bringing individual groups together -- forging new coalitions among "the .gov world, the .com world, the .org world, and the .edu world... so it’s not just about the United Nations" or the G20, but about building a consensus across a broad range

Southern Africa: History of Punk

Six minute trailer for Punk in Africa, a documentary by Keith Jones and Deon Maas which premiered a DIFF last month. iOl's Therese Owen:

The film, which took two years to produce, focuses on the punk sub-culture within the political and social upheavals in three southern African countries – South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. In these societies, punk represented a radical political impulse, playing out against a backdrop of intense political struggle. The history of punk, particularly in South Africa, began in the late 1970s and was a multi-racial movement. Punk in Africa features interviews with musicians from bands such as Suck, Wild Youth, Powerage, National Wake and the Kalahari Surfers. It also deals with the militant anti-apartheid punk bands of the 1980s and comprehensively follows the movement to today, with bands such as 340ml, Hog Hoggidy Hog, Fruits & Veggies and Sibling Rivalry.

Luke Mason @ Mahala:

The film started out telling the amazing, untold story of resistance and music under the apartheid regime. Ageing punks stare wild eyed into the camera and reminisce about the days of vigour and angst, proud of what they did and the courage that it took to stand up for what they believed in, or rather, against what they didn’t. Well researched, well told, the pre-apartheid section of the movie, although not hell-of-a cinematic, is difficult to find fault with. But then apartheid ends and the wheels fall off...

Africa: Videos for Ongoing African Contemporary Art Exhibits @ the Tate and MoMA

First collaboration between the Tate Modern and an art institution based on the continent, in this case the Center of Contemporary Art, Lagos.

Above, Adolphus Opara (Nigeria) on his portraits of Nigerian diviners posed in the manner of classic Victorian portraiture and Michael MacGarry (South Africa) talks you through works investigating the ongoing ramifications of imperialism in Africa. Kader Attia (France) talks his images projected in "Open Your Eyes" and Sammy Baloji (DRC) walks you through archival photos about mineral extraction powerfully reconstituted around new realities of mineral extraction in the DRC.



BBC slideshow - here. Reviews by Africa Art in London - here & Africa is a Country - here.

Below Justice Albie Sachs, one of the first judges appointed to South Africa’s new Constitutional Court by Nelson Mandela in 1994, walks with curator Judy Hecker through the exhibition Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now, still showing @ MoMA:



More @ the show's blog.

Namibia: Language Shaping how we Think - Himbas and Color Perception

The Guardian's Sam Wollaston in his review of the section below from the BBC documentary, Horizon: Do You See What I See, which aired last week:

The language thing was the most extraordinary for me. A scientist travels to northern Namibia to visit the Himba tribe, who have many fewer words for colour and who classify them in completely different ways. He shows them a circle of squares, all green except one which is clearly blue to me and you (unless you're one of my Himba readers). And they can't pick it out, simply because in their language it's the same colour .... 

The Himba might not have a separate word for blue, but watch them select, without breaking a sweat, the different hue of green among other greens English speakers will have a hard time spotting:



Boing Boing has a whole lot more.

Over here, we are interested in the whole notion of language shaping thought structures, especially since most Africans end up having to master many languages. For example, a South African opera singer talks about moving between xhosa, latin and french -  here . Or a recent study that suggests you can shift the responses of Moroccans by simply switching the language (Arabic and French) by which you describe the subject - here.

Like with a whole range of colors, many African languages don't have words for a lot of scientific terms  - an issue blogged here. So its always thrilling to rewatch this '09 video of Ethiopians coming up with Amharic words for the elements on the periodic table:

H/T: Kyle

Kenya: A Modernity of Super Highways and Goat Derbies

Excerpt from Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran by Ali Mirsepassi:

Is modernity a totalizing (dominating and exclusionary) ideology primarily, and inescapably, grounded in European cultural and moral experience, and therefore incapable of understanding other cultures as anything other than as its inferior “other”? 

.....Or, is modernity a mode of social and cultural experience of the present that is open to all forms of contemporary experiences and possibilities? The dilemma here is how to reconcile the .....

..... tension between modernity’s promise of openness and inclusive qualities (the Enlightenment moral promise and the modernist radical vision) and the blatant Eurocentric narrative of modernization that forecloses the possibility of real “local” experiences and of their contribution in the realization of modernity.

Senegal: Why You Can't Get Any of Ousmane Sembene's Films in Dakar

California Newsreel Barrie McClune's visual essay (Journal of African Media Studies Volume 2 Number 1 pp. 107–119 2010) of his search through Dakar's cinema houses, conference rooms,  museums, market stalls and living rooms for Ousmane Sembene's films. He asks if the body of wor of Senegal's most famous filmmaker is accessible to the Dakar public and what has happened to Sembène’s work in the city he made his home...
In search of Sembène by Barrie McClune

Excerpt:

Many assume that it is the structural constraints created by monopolistic foreign distribution companies that explain why Senegalese publics and Senegalese films remain unacquainted with one another. To such claims, Mamadou Sy (17 June 2008 interview) provides an interesting answer: African films don’t work in Senegal. We have tried them many times. Our last experience was with Moolaadé by Ousmane Sembène, but the film did not make in audience returns half of what a foreign DVD would make. And the DVD rents for much less. The clientele will not adapt to African films. There are a couple of notable exceptions

Africa: Black Comic book Superhero Narratives

Trailer for Jinna Mutune's "Leo" , a film about a Kenyan boy dreaming of becoming a comic book superhero (May 2011). Though the boy ends up realizing he is a different kind hero, the film's premise still touches on the problem of reconciling blackness with comic book narratives about superheroes heroes and villains.

Came across a theory that suggests present comic book narratives are too limited. Some say to move past this, the narratological architecture must start from the premise that "black bodies are already supernatural." In this '06 research paper, Anna Beatrice Scott writes:

Black bodies are already stories, mythological beasts with epic powers and tragic presaged endings in the faulty perspectivalism of the white supremacist world. In the garish cartoonish world that is supposedly the everyday, black people’s feats of heroism, while thriving on the margins, completely obliterate current narrative practices for generating the superpowered and mutated.

And apparently the issue of black under-representation is even worse when it comes to "black comic book supervillians". In this 2011 research paper, Phillip Lamarr Cunningham wrote:

...Flash forward some 20-plus years and mainstream comics still remain without many
black supervillains. While black superheroes have managed some progress (perhaps
punctuated by the brief yet impacting run of DC Comics black imprint Milestone during the early- to mid-1990s), black supervillains have yet to experience such a boon. Thus, this essay aims to discern the reasons for such a long, pronounced absence of black supervillains in mainstream comics. As I shall postulate here, this absence largely emerges from a host of narratological constraints that have influenced other genres of popular media, particularly film. I shall conclude by considering the problematic nature of racialized villains while also championing a call for the inclusion for more.

South Africa: Documenting Currents of Subversive Art

Washington, DC screening of Laura Gamse's documentary, Creators, August 15 - 20: @ the Music and Independent Film Festival, US Navy Memorial Museum Burke Theater.

Doc weaves through the growing current of subversive art clashing and merging South Africa’s many cultures. More here. Love the clips below:

Morocco/ Libya: Berber Graffiti, Recognition and Reawakening

For the Amazigh (or Berbers) of Libya, NY Times' C.J Chivers reports that because the use of their ancient language, Tamazight, had been forbidden by the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, now, with their towns liberated from Qaddafi's soldiers, it makes it all the more sweet to..... :

In the evening, as the searing desert temperatures subside, the residents who have returned to this rebel-held city near the front lines appear on the streets. Some of them carry cans of paint, and begin to decorate murals with the characters of an ancient language that had been forbidden by the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. The language is Tamazight, the tongue of the Amazigh, or Berbers, who, after decades of oppression in Libya are re-emerging as a political force (more)

Above, AFP reports on Morocco's new constitution, which back in June made Tamazight an official language, marking the first time a North African country has given the language official status after decades of undermining Amazigh identity.

The Berbers have been "resisting efforts to Arabise their communities ever since the arrival of Islam in the seventh century." Strangely enough, one of the most effective weapons of acculturation used against them has been - the satellite television.

The Revolution will be Embedded

Tamba - Y'akoto. Album: Baby Blues. Warner Music International (Warner), 2011.

Video was shot in Kibera, Nairobi. Short doc of the behind the scenes below. A German with a Ghanaian accent... you could listen to her talk all day:

The Revolution will be Embedded

Naija Nu-metal? ... the Linkin Park-esque beat kicks in around 1.35 mins in.



Once in my Life by Uti. Back2Black Ent. 2011.

Details - here

Africa: "Next Wave of Music": "Live from the Continent" - Post Mortems

NY Times:

The title of the show [Live from the Continent], presented by Lincoln Center Out of Doors, the Caribbean Cultural Center and Society HAE, was slightly misleading. Blitz the Ambassador and Iyadede are both based in Brooklyn. But all three artists are grappling with how to show an African identity to the wider world...

Speakeasy - WSJ:

In an event dubbed “Live from the Continent,” three musicians heralded by the event’s promoters as the “next wave” of African music performed a small sampling of their latest songs. “These are the new sounds and the new faces of African music,” said Ngozi Odita of Soceity HAE, who helped produce the event. “They look to Western culture and they look to their own culture to make their own sound.”

Village Voice:

Consequently, when he says "I'm gonna show y'all where I come from" and launches into a medley that mixes up the Sugar Hill Gang, Rakim, Chuck D and Pete Rock, he means it as much as when he brilliantly mimics the radio voice of a dictator announcing a coup, or builds "Akwaaba," a rap in his native Akan, from the '70s grooves of his countryman K. Frimpong. And later, when he spits rhymes during a second medley that spins Fela, Miriam Makeba, Manu Dibango and Osibisa into Congolese soukous, it's a clear bid to turn all the Africa-heads into hip-hoppers and vice-versa. Critical bias: Sometimes I think the "Afro" in "Afropop" should be more literal. Random notebook dump: Damrosch Park audiences are an odd mix of the interested and the just-out-for-a-stroll inattentive. If you can win these folks over, you've clearly got a future.

Above: pics stashed @ Jati Lindsay (Live From the Continent: Lincoln Center NYC 8/7/11) 

Senegal: Scorsese on the Music of Youssour N'dour

Cue 3:23 mins in for a brief interview with Martin Scorsese @ the May 2011 Yale Commencement ceremony where the director and Senegalese maestro Youssour N'dour were both conferred with honors. The director talks about the music of Yousour N'dour from the1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ. Below, N'dour's voice kicks in around 2.45 mins on a track from the film's soundtrack titled, "A Different Drum":

Tanzania: Narrating "Titanic" in Swahili (Documentary)

German anthropologists have been documenting Tanzanian performers (wa tafsiri) who narrate/translate pirated foreign films into Swahili for the local audience. Though the art of video narration is more established in neighboring Uganda, it seems the East African roots of the practice goes back to colonial efforts like the Bantu Education Kinema experiment from the 30s or mobile cinemas from the 70s used by Kenyan promoters to hawk their wares in the Tanzania country side.  

The documentary below, VeeJays der Film, from Johannes Guttenberg University, Mainz, premiered back in April and is a closer look at Tanzania's “vibanda vya videos” (video parlours) where average Tanzanians gather not only to watch foreign films from China, the United States, Nigeria and India get narrated by enterprising veejays, but also to have the movies translated--given a "Bongo" flavor if you will-- into their local context.




In "Turning rice into pilau: The art of video narration in Tanzania," Matthias Krings explains the narrator biz:

... narrating live is more demanding, because the brouhaha in the video parlour sometimes makes it difficult to concentrate on the film, but at the same time it is more rewarding because of the immediate response the narrator gets from the audience. Performing live, however, doesn’t generate much of an income because the audience would rather stay away than pay a higher entrance fee which means that a live narrator has to depend on the token amount he gets from the owner of the video parlour who hires him to attract more customers. It is only consequential, therefore, to mediatise video narration and sell the tapes en masse to video parlours and video libraries across the country. According to King Rich, who always makes sure to announce his mobile phone number a couple of times on each of his dubbed tapes, he gets a lot of encouragement from his dispersed audiences. Such positive feedback notwithstanding, he believes that his audience still prefers live-narration, for when he performed in Kobla’s video parlour for about two months in 2007 the room soon became too small to accommodate the daily growing numbers of spectators.

The added value the translators--some of whom do not even speak the language they are translating from--provide is the addition of an enzyme-like layer of information that helps the audience further absorb and better digest the movie better in Swahili - i.e. this information could be anything from the veejay's own take on what is going through a character's head in a scene to all the latest juicy gossip about the actor's life. For example, the scene in Titanic where Jack, after saving Rose, is invited to dinner, when translated by a veejay called Lufufu, sounds like this:

Internal monologue Jack: On this party one is supposed to eat ugali [Maize dumplings] with twenty different spoons. Theses are things I would never get accustomed to, stupid, useless things.
Narration: Jack, still on … like I have told you … still on the welcoming party, he thought that he would get ugali, spinach, beans and cassava, instead he was served only very small portions of food. That’s how it is in a decent place like this. That was not very pleasant. He thought to himself that he would go to bed hungry today (Titanic 1:00:13–45).

Like the katsudō-benshis of early 20th century Japan, Tanzania's skilled narrator-translators have also amassed a loyal following; in addition to what the film is about, people want to know who the narrator at the

DRC/ Angola: Bad Neighbors

The Economist explains some of the bad blood between Angola and its northern neighbor, the Congo:

Every year since 2004 Angola has been kicking out tens of thousands of Congolese, most of them diamond diggers and their families. Angola’s GDP per person is now 24 times bigger than that of Congo at the IMF’s last count, so the Congolese keep coming over to seek a living. But the Angolans are fed up with the influx—and the loss of revenue through illegal mining, sometimes put as high as $700m. More recently they have resorted to the most vicious of measures to get rid of the Congolese (more).

Above, a still from the scene in Djo Tunda Wa Munga's Viva Riva! in which the Angolan gangster, Cesar, (played by Hoji Fortuna) utters his now famous "racist" comment about the Congo. More - here. 

South Africa: The Revolution will be Embedded

Bodies Of Water - Wrestlerish. Album: "Towns" 2011.

Lead singer: Werner Olckers
Genre: Bushveld introspection

Friday

18MMW's History of China in 3½ Minutes

H/T:  Lost Laowai

West Africa: Alaba Pedro and the Roots of the "Faaji" Guitar

Music critic Benson Idonije pens a tribute to mark the passing of Nigerian highlife guitarist Alaba Pedro, a proponent of the Ghanaian palm wine guitar style infused strain of Nigerian highlife music -  Faaji. He was also a member of the "Faaji Agba" troupe, subjects of upcoming documentary, "Faaji Agba" from Kunle Tejuosho's Jazzhole Records. Excerpt:

...Pedro’s direction is essentially highlife and African-oriented fusion with other forms of music. His highlife music is not particularly steeped in the tradition of Roy Chicago, his mentor. Rather it reminds the listener of the vintage years of the music from the fifties to the sixties. His sources of inspiration are many and are mainly Ghanian-oriented, including E.T. Mensah, the pioneer of the music form himself through to the more progressive Stargazers and Uburu Professional Dance Band. He is however grateful to Roy Chicago, his former band leader, whose Rhythm Dandies prepared him for the challenges of band leadership. Working with Roy Chicago imbued in him a great sense of rhythm that draws from the various dimensions of African music. Says he: “I joined Roy Chicago in 1961 to replace Mike Enahoro a fine guitarist who left for England at the time. I was with the band up till the time of the civil war when it disbanded in 1969”. Pedro continues: “It was a highly disciplined band which offered me the opportunity to develop musically. Moreover, I was the youngest member of the band, and so I was willing to learn. The band was versatile and could play almost all types of music, but I benefited more from highlife, its specialty which relied more on Nigerian melodies with rhythms rooted in indigenous elements. I learnt a lot from the band.” Pedro’s guitar playing assumed an authoritative status in the eighties... (more)

"Faaji Agba" trailer below. More on the Ghanaian Palmwine sound - here.

Kenya/ Nigeria: The Rise of Innovative TV and Radio Local Programming

About gone are the days when many African broadcasters simply ran old American TV shows. It was  cheaper to buy foreign than risk local programming. Today, local programming is no longer money-losing content national broadcasters must run so as to satisfy the daily quota of local programming the government insists must be shown. Today, all across the continent, broadcasters are proving quality, innovative local programming can outsell foreign.

Above, CNN's Christian Purefroy checks in on the surging number of listeners and rising ad rates @ Wazobia FM, a "Pidgin English" radio station in Lagos, Nigeria.



Above, Wachira Waruru, CEO, Royal Media recently sat down with Balancing Act to talk about how Citizen TV rose from the number four to the number one TV station in Kenya by adopting a local programming strategy; the impact of these Swahili programs, the changing attitude of advertising agencies, and the success local programmes like Inspekta Mwala, Papa Shirandula and Tahidi High have had.

South Africa: Ad Love

A print ad for Audiobook India captures the idea of the "autobiography" by retouching a portrait of Madiba and other shapers of history to include “bookmarks”. Winner of a Silver Outdoor Lion at Cannes International Festival of Creativity back in July.

Kenya: The Revolution will be Embedded

Welcome To The Disco - Muthoni The Drummer Queen. 2011.

H/T: Kate Bomz

Tunisia: Bouazizi and Shango - Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka @ LIVE from the NYPL, May 1st, 2011 - the PEN American Center Arthur Miller Lecture. He compares Tunisian martyr Mohamed Bouazizi to Shango the Yoruba god of thunder and lightning:

... the presiding deity, which in my case is Shango, a turbulent diety whose province is also the administration of retributive justice... Lets not forget the immediate human trigger of the Tunisian revolution: Shango's self-sacrificing agent who set himself on fire. His medium of protest was no accident and I hope he recovers fully so I visit, commiserate and celebrate with him. I shall console him and ressure him that he had been possessed by Shango. He incinerated the status quo even at the prize of letting fire consume his body. Unless that individual was indeed Shango in his own person.... 

Plot Against Muhammad Yunus and Microcredit?

Over at Guernica, Jake Whitney's article and interview with Nobel Peace Laureate Muhammad Yunus (August 2011) looks back at the 2010 Norwegian documentary instrumental in discrediting the Nobel prize winner and the bank he created. Whitney asks if all of it were part of a larger conspiracy by those who felt threatened by microcredit to discredit and force Yunus out of the bank he founded:

Microcredit uprooted entrenched economic forces by putting many local money lenders—loan sharks who charge exorbitant interest rates and possess significant political power—out of business. Moreover, the country’s extreme left and extreme right “hated” microfinance from the beginning (the right thought it was communism in disguise, the left believed it was U.S.-promoted capitalism). On a global level, consider microcredit in the context of a world economy dominated by a few dozen multinational corporations. If microcredit were to thrive globally, it would mean fewer wage workers for foreign corporations to exploit and fewer people dependent upon Western aid—aid generated by what the Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo has described as an “aid industry” of half a million people whose jobs depend on keeping the money flowing. So Yunus has made enemies. And, as he admits in the following interview, he has become a target... (more)

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At the Clinton Global Initiative last year Yunus was on a panel defending his non profit model of microcredit against SK Microfiance, one of the main proponents of the commercial model of microcredit.

Yunus on "social business"