The Oedeipal underpinnings of the Underwear Bomber

Binyavanga had a theory about him: rich family + posh school = spoilt kid = "I'm gonna show my daddy. One day."



Just look at him here!

It was compelling.

Compelling enough for me to wonder what Mr. Underpants' secret diary from 2007/2008 (when he was a student in London), as revealed in a world exclusive to Binyavanga, would contain...

Arab and African or both...or something...in Sudan

Alex de Waal is an excellent writer, and also someone whose position on things Sudanese is interesting and complex. (I'm curious to know if there's other good stuff out there: I know only of Mahmood Mamdani, whose work on Darfur and Sudan has been more polemical, or at least polemically anti-polemical.)

I am interested in how one belongs in Sudan because virtually all popular commentary on Sudan is about 'Arabs' and 'Africans.'

How do faces and races reconcile? Arab, African, Ararican, Afrab? Or nothing?

I remember coming across this peculiarly endearing outcome of anthropology in a shop that sold old maps. Facial anthropology.


Invariably, this kind of exercise reveals far greater truths than it might have intended to.


How about a pictorial guide to face and race in Sudan? As they change with time?

Canned Traditions

A paper here from AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, 2007 on "how technologies used in food production in West Africa are referenced in the brand names and packaging of processed African foods sold in the United States." - looks at the branding/ pakaging design, perceptions, change in cuture etc.

and at the beginning of 2008 KOO launched its "Samp & Beans in a can" (Samp & Beans Original, Samp & Beans in Curry Sauce and Samp & Beans in Meat Flavoured Sauce to meet all different tastes and occasions. it was awarded the Symrise/Food Review New Product Competition 2008 award.

wonder if there's something in looking at/ tasting canned/ canning traditions?

Revolution For Kids

In 1974, the children’s publishing house Dar El Fata El Arabi was launched in Beirut. Over the next decade, Dar El Fata—staffed by artists, designers, and writers devoted to bringing attention to the Palestinian cause—produced some of the most visually striking and progressive children’s books in the region. Bidoun sat down with Mohieddin Ellabbad, one of the co-founders of the publishing house and its first and most influential art director, as well as Nawal Traboulsi, a leading expert on children’s literature and reading habits, who got her start as an amateur illustrator hand-picked by Ellabbad to work with him making books.

Read the rest here

The Story of the World Today for the Men and Women of Tomorrow

"The Children’s Newspaper was one of the twentieth century’s most successful magazines for children, running for an astonishing 46 years. During its run of well over 2,000 issues, it covered some of history’s most turbulent times, starting in the aftermath of the Great War, watching over the scientific and social advances of the 1920s and 1930s, following the progress of the Second World War, and seeing Britain emerge from the austerity of the post-war years into the pop-tastic world of the 1960s.

For half its lifetime, The Children’s Newspaper had the hand of Arthur Mee at its tiller, and the paper reflected Mee’s religious faith, his patriotism and his drive to educate the children of the masses. It was only in the 1950s that The Children’s Newspaper began to stray from this brief as the editors and staff tried to reflect the rapidly changing social climate – in which children had their own television programmes, their own fashions and culture – by introducing new features, interviews and comic strips. This mixture of education and entertainment helped the paper survive an onslaught from rival publications and kept the title going until it was eventually absorbed, in 1965, into a new, colourful magazine from the same publisher, Look and Learn...."

read more here
and download full old issues...
___
check how kids are spoken to in this paper - the stories and news reported, and way presented - in our age - publishing-for-children would assume flies over young peoples heads, and that they wont be interested.
___

Abdoulaye Wade's Monument to the North Korean Renaissance

As North Korea goes to war or straight to hell, some might forget that in April this year, a fantastic monument was perpetrated upon an unwitting public in Dakar. And lil' ol' Kim had a hand in it.




Salient facts:

Cost: $27 million

Provenance: Concept and design by President Abdoulaye Wade

Execution: North Korea

Ownership: Wade would like 35% of all ticket sales since it's his Intellectual Property after all

I have no idea how one would do anything with this retrospectively, but it seemed too good and too topical not to bring up in these trying times for family businesses.

Here's Wikipedia on the African Renaissance Monument; and this is the BBC (Jesse Jackson was there).

Hoe's my China nou?

This is a diversion, but hopefully a useful one. Why is "China" so hard to get to? Everyone, left to right, seems to agree, while knowing not very much, that China=danger. Going by popular press accounts of China alone (in the run-up to May 2008) it seemed like the Chinese in South Africa were sitting targets for extreme-nationalistic gun practice. And yet...

Which is why I thought this column by Sipho Hlongwane in the Daily Maverick was rather good. It reminded me - sideways - of a bizarre column by the late John Matshikiza which was immediately panned (but brought into focus that in SA at least, there's an 'our China' and 'their China'). Howard French writes thoughtfully on the expanding role of China in Africa; he may be someone to come at this from a perspective not often seen?

Some more interesting stuff: Chocolate City; the New Yorker on on Nigeriatown; NYT's Howard French archive.

Egypt's Football Dominance

Before 1981 only two North African teams had ever won the African Champion's League title - Egypt's al-Ismaily in 1969, and Algeria's MC Alger in 1976. Since then, North Africa's teams have dominated the championship, winning the title on no fewer than 22 out of the last 28 tournaments. In 2008 Egypt took the Africa Cup of Nations, Cairo's al-Ahly won the Champion's League title for a record sixth time, and Egypt's Mohamed Abou Treika was named the BBC African Footballer of the Year.

What happened in 1981, and how did Egypt come to dominate African football?

Possible writer - football journalist Mohammed Ali

The Korean Friendship Association (KFA) organizes a trip to the DPR of Korea (North Korea) APRIL 2008

A few times per year, The Korean Friendship Association (KFA) organizes a trip to the DPR of Korea (North Korea). The KFA gives the chance to know about the country, its people, society and culture. All passports are invited to apply except for: U.S.A., Republic of Korea (South Korea) and Japan.

The number of visitors is limited to 20.

This isn’t a regular tourist trip, but a cultural one where visitors are expected to interact and behave accordingly. A visitor joining the KFA Delegation is not treated as a tourist but as a friend of the DPRK, having access to places, information, insights and events not allowed for regular visitors.

See pics of travel (several years) here

check out requirements and rules (2011) here

A ‘fictionalised’ travel piece using with N.Korean propaganda to create a fantastical journey?
Data ranging from North Korea Peace Village (scrutiny with modern telescopic lenses reveals that the buildings are mere concrete shells lacking window glass or even interior rooms, with the building lights turned on and off at set times and the empty sidewalks swept by a skeleton crew of caretakers in an effort to preserve the illusion of activity) to Kim Jong-il’s birth (Official biographers claim that his Kim Jong-il's at Baekdu Mountain was foretold by a swallow, and heralded by the appearance of a double rainbow over the mountain and a new star in the heavens.)?

Michelle Mandela

1n 1998, on his 80th birthday, Nelson Mandela married former first lady of Mozambique, Graca Machel.

10 years later, we look at how Mozambicans view Graca today (2008). There are gender issues at play: from a patriarchal standpoint - where the widow of the hero is supposed to keep the memory of the nation - how do they feel? What is the feminist view? What is the history of crossborder matrimonial exchange between South Africa and Mozambique (i.e. rumours of Samora and Miriam Makeba)...What irreverent Mozambican writer or gender activist is bold enough to write such a story?

Winston Mankunku Ngozi

May 2008

Winston Mankunku Ngozi, one of South Africa's living jazz legends, is to produce his first DVD. The tenor sax and jazz composer will record live at Cape Town's Artscape Opera House at 8pm on 2 and 3 May.
It will be an orchestrated concert including the Darryl Andrews Big Band, Andile Yenana, Marcus Wyatt, Mike Perry, 12 backing vocals and many more musicians.

40 years after his famous recording of Yakhal' Inkomo in 1968, someone can write a concert review, imagined backstage interview, etc.

Predicting e-readers in 1981: A look back at the future

Newspapers in the Year 2000: “Videotex services will become mature businesses…”

(This report written was originally published by APME in 1981.)

The appearance of newspapers at the beginning of the next century may be affected more by technology and economics than by the inspirations of editors and designers. That’s not to say editors and designers won’t play significant roles, they almost certainly will; however, the product itself may be radically altered by forces already being felt.

Through our imperfect eyes into the future, here are some of the developments that can be seen within the next two decades.

Read the rest here

Devoir de Mémoire (Rwanda)

In 2000, the publication of ten texts marked the completion of a two-year project entitled Le Devoir de mémoire [The Duty of Memory], which had brought together ten writers from across Africa to write in response to the Rwandan genocide. This article looks at how the project was posited from the outset as a specifically African response, setting this in the context of older problems of voice, self-representation and the renegotiation of miswritten histories in the postcolonial context. This aspect of the project is made all the more urgent by the actuality of the genocide, and the period of residence the writers spent in Rwanda in 1998. This article argues that the project succeeded in creating a space in which Africa as a whole is made part of the genocide, and vice versa, by raising complex questions of responsibility and by drawing on familiar themes in modern African writing, namely history, memory and identity; exile and dislocation.

Small, Audrey.
The Duty of Memory: A Solidarity of Voices after the Rwandan Genocide
Volume 30, Number 1, March 2007, pp. 85-100
Edinburgh University Press

* 2008 marks 10 years since the Rwanda residencies
* Connects to the larger movement of reconciliation literature and theatre over the last decade (in South Africa, etc.)

Like Father, Like Son

Presidential succession - a recurring theme in African politics

ten days after the January 2001 murder of Laurent Kabila, his son, Joseph Kabila, took over as president. Ali Bongo won the 2009 Gabonese presidency after the death of his father Omar Bongo. Faure Gnassingbe took over as president after the death of his father Gnassingbe Eyadema (in violation of Togo’s Constitution which stipulates that the Speaker of Parliament should succeed the president in the event of his death)*. Gamel Mubarak is being groomed to take the reigns from his father Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. In Sudan, Karim Wade is widely viewed as a strong candidate to succeed his father Abdoulaye Wade as president. Nepotism is also no stranger in Libya where Moamer Gaddafi has just named his son, Saif Al Islam Moammar Kadafi, head of state. Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni has awarded several members of his family with high ranking positions in his cabinet and is rumoured to be grooming his son, Lt Col Kainerugaba Muhoozi, to be president. Playboy Teodoro Nguema Obiang is likely next in line to take over from his father Obiang Nguema as president of the oil rich nation of Equitorial Guinea.
(Source: Lord Aikins Adusei)

How will these new dynasties affect the next era of African politics?

Laurent Kabila Jr. - DRC
Faure Gnassingbe - Togo
Gamal Mubarak; Hosni Mubarak - Egypt
Karim Wad - Senegal
Saif Al Islam Moammar Kadafi - Libya
Yoweri Museveni - Uganda
Obiang Nguema - equitorial Guinea

Mbembe on Sarkozy's Dakar speech

Read it here

Children's Parliament - DRCongo

Children's Parliament - WITNESS - Al Jazeera English
Children's Parliament is a local organisation run by children for children. Their mission since its conception in 1999 is to fight for the rights of children. As teenage students, the parliamentarians dedicate their free time to this noble task and receive no payment, despite enormous obstacles and risk to themselves. Members of Children's Parliament are elected by their peers and delegates are chosen from different neighbourhoods, schools and districts. What unites them is their will to make a difference for Congo's children.

Nicholas Sarkozy’s Unacceptable Speech (Dakar, Feb08)

It is probably written somewhere that between Paris and its former colonies in Black Africa, nothing should follow the norms accepted by the rest of the world. Nicolas Sarkozy’s brief visit to Senegal could have gone unnoticed; instead, it served as a pretext for him to make for an unacceptable speech, one which he would not have dared give outside France’s “pré-carré” (backyard) and in front of the most insignificant of his peers. In Tunisia and Algeria, he understood that it would be improper for him to behave as if he was in a conquered territory. In North Africa he could not even gain automatic access to the popular, folkloric and degrading reception that was reserved for him in Dakar. Within the context of Dakar that reminds one of the “commandants de cercle” of colonial times, he gave a sort of State of the Union address, that is, the State of the Union française, without anyone being able to reproach him for having mistaken the historical era.

However, one must not be swayed; for even though he claimed to address the whole African continent, he was not naïve enough to believe that his country’s position would cause ripples as far as Johannesburg, Mombasa or Maputo. If intellectuals from these regions have now paid attention to the remarks of the French president, it is because they have been given a brief summary of the president’s speech beforehand. Over the last few days, they have discovered, with bewilderment, the realities of Françafrique.

Their anger is understandable. Even in francophone countries where it has been thought that things had hit the rock bottom, everyone agrees that this time the limit has been breached. Being a relatively young and inexperienced head of State does not give anyone the right to be so irresponsible. When one leads a country as important as France, he or she cannot protract the lame game of “I-am-not-like-the-others.” This arrogance, displayed by a man who could be judged as still surprised by having so easily achieved his goal, led him to entertain the most distressing clichés of 19^th century ethnology in front of a particularly well-informed audience. Political science may one day take interest in this unique figure: a foreign president, from his height of 1.64 m, dares to condemn the inhabitants of an entire continent, calling upon them to distance themselves from nature in order to enter human history and invent their destiny. These statements, kept up to date by French authors anxious to comfort the prevalent Negrophobia, serve to comfort historical revisionism of colonialism, the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda and the slave trade.

The remarks “It is Africans who sold their compatriots to the slave traders” are grossly inappropriate and particularly disingenuous coming from the president of the Republic. They are an insult to the memory of the victims and a despicable moderation of the fundamental violence of the Transatlantic trade.

Never, in the history of humanity, has a nation oppressed another without the complicity, if not zeal, of the elite of the conquered nation. According to Robert Paxton, whose work on Vichy is a classic reference text, Adolf Hitler was not particularly interested in occupying the whole of France; he was primarily keen on neutralizing the country and turning it into an aerial base. It was the French state authorities of the time who actively pressured him to be more ambitious than the devil. Who else, but French writer Charles Maurras, saluted the entry of German tankers into Paris on June 14, 1940 as a “divine surprise”? The same principle applies to other parts of the world. Without the shameful hesitation of Moctezuma – a man of weak character at the head of the powerful Aztec empire – and the petty rivalries between the numerous Indian tribes, Hernan Cortès and his handful of conquistadors would not have succeeded in submitting almost the entire continent of what is today known as Latin America under their rule.

Read the rest here

(by Boubacar Boris Diop; from The Zeleza Post)

Young Lions

"The Young Patriots represent a new kind of African success story. They’re celebrated by many young people in Abidjan for beating and cheating a system gone rancid. With the corrupt 'old fathers' refusing to get out of the way, and with all the old channels to success—emigration, foreign study, state employment, family connections—blocked, the new hero is a young trickster with a talent for self-promotion. The model is no longer the formal bureaucratic style of the French colonizer; it’s the loud, unrestrained style that everyone in Ivory Coast calls American." Wrote George Packer in the The New Yorker in 2003.

As Packer notes: "the Young Patriot leaders, local stars in their twenties who were dressed like American hip-hop singers: gold chains, tracksuits, floppy hats. Their scowling bodyguards sat behind them, wearing muscle shirts and mirror glasses; a few were armed with Kalashnikov rifles. Sitting quietly and pathetically in the back rows were the neighborhood elders. In the traditional hierarchy of African villages, the old are elaborately deferred to by the young. Here the elders had no role other than to applaud while the Young Patriots took turns swaggering and jigging out on the speaker’s platform and the loudspeakers blasted reggae or zouglou, the homegrown pop music of the movement."

Five years later Young Patriots leader Charles Blé Goudé and once rebel leader Guillaume Soro who led the Patriotic Movement of Côte d'Ivoire and later the New Forces have suited up and transformed themselves into a savvy politicians, who play leading roles in Ivoirian politics.

A few days after Soro's 36th Birthday we look at the rise of a new generation of young lions in African politics.

See the Al Jazeera special report, An Ivorian miracle? here.

The Spear (of the nation)

Published by Drum in Nigeria and later also Kenya and Ghana in the early 60s, African Film was just one of the many photo comics or "look books" that flooded English-speaking West Africa in the early post colonial era. Catering to the new urban youth, the series featured the mythical persona of Lance Spearman, a.k.a. "The Spear," a black James Bond-like crime fighter as the central character.
In contrast to the racist stereotype of the uncivilised, uneducated, spear-carrying cannibal, or the eroticised "noble savage" that characterised the depictions of Africans in most Western comic books from the time, Spearman was sharp, stylish and sophisticated. Combining re-appropriated Western references with a distinctly African cultural identity, he reflected a newly defined black Atlantic modernity. Here was a comic book hero that presented a potential critique of colonialism, as well as a significant variation in how the genre classically figured normality and otherness.

Since then The Spear and the comics that featured him have disappeared, but not from their fan's memory. As the comments on the Chimurenga Library website testify The Spear is one sought after individual:

"Looking up on the Chimurenga Library website, I came across so many nostalgic comments on the Boom and Film mags from those who lived in East Africa in the 60's and early 70's like myself, which brought back so many heart-wrenching memories of yester-years.... I certainly would give anything if I could get hold of that collection today... Where have the old dummy prints in the old publishing places that used to publish these mags gone? If those were found or maybe the kids or grand kids of the editor/s(who would be grown-ups now) could be traced, there may be a chance that these wonderfully entertaining photo comics-BOOM and FILM could be resurected. My God, how blessed myself and all of us would be to be able to re-live our childhoods-those glorious years again!"

More here.

We investigate the legacy and the grip of the infamous Spear on the imagination of a generation. It's also a treasure hunt: where is the Spear today and who has the lost stash of African Film magazines?

The Ghetto Biennale

 

 A bustling boulevard in downtown Port-au-Prince seems an unlikely place for an art installation. But, towering over a vacant lot is a 20-foot-tall statue of Legba, the voodoo spirit guardian of the gateway. It’s made out of a car chassis and chunks of a defunct truck. Its creator is André Eugene, one of the sculptors of the Grand Rue.

The Grand Rue is the main avenue that runs north–south through downtown Port-au-Prince. At the avenue’s southern end is a close-knit collective of artists whose sculptural collages of engine manifolds, computer entrails, TV sets, medical debris, skulls and discarded lumber transforms the detritus of a failing economy into deranged, post-apocalyptic totems.

Refused visas, the Grand Rue sculptors were excluded from a private view of their work in a major museum in Miami. A lack of government support makes them economically excluded from all major biennales. In response they organised the Ghetto Biennale.

Rather than bringing completed artworks, as with a traditional biennial, the artists chosen for the Ghetto Biennale created their works in the Grand Rue.

By virtue of its self-organised autonomy, the specificity of the site, and its participatory and relational structure, the first Ghetto Biennale genuinely seemed to disrupt the zones of exclusion entrenched in both contemporary art systems and the geopolitics of the global poor. In this amorphous, chaotic,de-institutionalised space, the distinctions between artist and audience, and between city and gallery appeared momentarily blurred. In the conference which followed, consensus was that a liberated, revolutionary space had emerged.

The raw and the cooked

Kai, a fantastic writer known to some of us here, has a version of this piece in 14; he's been planning to expand it for years. Needs a high-level nudge to do so, perhaps even the promise of a fistful of mp3s of 1970s funk in return for his labour.

If Ntone can make him do it, there's a fantastic piece to be had on the next great economic power's last big secret.

Faustin and Studio Kabako

A review of the work from Festival of Lies to workshopping More...future with Flamme and Xuly (well documented via vids and such) - the Kabako project in Kin and Kisangani. Interview, Studio visit, something.


Studio Kabako Website

amaNdiya

amaNdiya article

Feels like a century ago - but maybe we revisit as entry point, the role of music vs pc-ness etc? In many ways, set the tone for "ordinary people" songs to re-come from Zuma's ANC - where now it's about who sings loudest - when you google this you get Zapiro's cartoons of Zuma...

Kwanele?

Race (or not) & "I don't want to sleep alone"

Two (possible) sideways perspectives: Joshua, a young poet and journalist from Bangalore, has a poetry/photo collaboration called "I don't want to sleep alone" which is nice and gritty, preview here. He also wrote a (tame) piece on looking black and not really knowing it - "Sometimes you have to use racism to your advantage" - available here, and could expand that into a family story, or at least the kind of story unfit to print in a family magazine like the one it originally ran in.

Bob Marley - anniversary of his death

The man who introduced reggae to a worldwide audience, Marley was a hero figure in the classic, mythological sense. From immensely humble beginnings, with talent and religious belief his only weapons, the Jamaican recording artist applied himself with unstinting perseverance to spreading his prophetic musical message across the globe. In 1980, on tour, Bob Marley and the Wailers played to the largest audiences a musical act had ever experienced in Europe. Less than a year later on May 11, 1981 Marley would die, only thirty-six years old.

The anniversary of Marley's death presents an opportunity to explore his legend or his musical legacy.

Women soljas

A lot of this is propaganda:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/5323140.stm

(SA army now giving self props for women soldiers vs rape in DRC).

But Ryan Lobo's photo-journalism piece in Chimu 14, a more personal take.

Dany Laferrière Interview

Still life bathed in warm light: a porcelain bathtub with claw feet, sumptuous white towels draped over the edge, a table set with a stack of books and a glass of red wine. A Monday night in May, and 400 people fill the darkness of Montreal’s Place des Arts’ Cinquième Salle, waiting for Dany Laferrière. He seems to glide onstage, slim, tall, impeccably dressed in a dark suit and a white shirt open at the neck — a gentleman writer or, as the French are saying, un grand écrivain.

Instant applause. They know him well, maybe too well. How as a penniless refugee from Haiti, he chucked his menial job to write a novel about a penniless Haitian refugee writing a novel about himself. A mythical summer in a sweltering apartment on rue St-Denis, drinking, womanizing, reading, writing about the meaning of it all, sure it would lift him out of poverty and obscurity. He took the manuscript first to Jacques Lanctôt, the former FLQ activist turned publisher, warning him to expect a bomb. And he was right.

To the monoculture of Quebec, caught up in the sovereignty debate, Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer offered an exhilarating mix of provocation and humour. Politics, too, but nothing to do with local obsessions. “In the scope of Western values,” the narrator announced, “white woman is inferior to white man, but superior to black man. That’s why she can’t get off except with a Negro. It’s obvious why: she can go as far as she wants with him. The only true sexual relation is between unequals.”

Published in 1985, it was an instant bestseller in Quebec. The translation by David Homel, How to Make Love to a Negro, came out a year later, drawing delirious reviews across Canada as well as in the UK and the US. And, as in the novel, life obeyed art. The author was invited on Denise Bombardier’s popular Radio-Canada TV show, leading to an avalanche of publicity, which he parlayed into a media career spanning the gamut from TV weatherman (a job he famously once performed naked) to talk show regular, literary columnist, and filmmaker. His second book, éroshima, found the author reading the Japanese poet Basho and enjoying sex with Japanese girls. A new book followed every year or so, always first person, in the same pithy style and often very funny — a chronicle of the life and times of a narrator everybody figured must be Dany Laferrière.

Excerpt from 'The Work of Art' by Marianne Ackerman. First appeared in Sept. 2010 issue of The Walrus.

La Chinafrique: Photography by Paolo Woods

These photos are excerpts from a larger series that appear in the book La Chinafrique available here

source

Emergency (Kenyan Web Comic)

Emergency is a web comic written and illustrated by Chief Nyamweya. Inspired by the need to present history in a form that is more accessible to everyday people, Emergency tells the story of the Mau Mau uprising.

A World War II veteran, Dedan Kimathi, returns home to try and rebuild a peaceful existence, but quickly finds himself forced toward the same violence he thought he'd left behind on the battlefield.

With his childhood friend Chege at his side, they shall soon discover that they aren't alone in this battle with the agents of the state.


Emergency Webcomic Promo Trailer from emergencywebcomic on Vimeo.

Emergency Website

Generations & the construction of identity

Generation, South Africa's longest running and most popular soap (is it viewed by many more than 4.9 million people daily) tracks the vicissitudes of black business people in the advertising and marketing fields. Themes of co-option into white capital, loss of concern for roots, gender discrimination, homophobia in the light of cultural expectations and so on drive a fairly standard family saga. It confronts the problems which arise from the post-1994 changes in social milieu, especially among the younger generation.
We re-watch Generations, from the first episode that aired on SABC 1 in 1994 to the present, exploring the character development, the fashions, the lifestyles and the underpinning ideology, to understand and interrogate its role in sustaining social-political life and relations, and in constituting the social-political self in post apartheid South Africa.

Generations website (get blow by blow summaries of each episodes)

There have been a view academic studies in this regard

Mediating the Neoliberal Nation: Television in Post-Apartheid South Africa by Sarah Ives
An analysis of South African television’s political economy as a “public theaters of late capitalism” that is tied up with notions of national belonging.

"Soap operas like Generations, South Africa’s most popular television show, depict a ‘modern,’ urban, world of Black upper-middle class business elites. The show, with its emphasis on the emerging Black middle- and upper-classes presumably made possible by the new elections, encapsulates the hope of the post-apartheid era. Generations’ website makes frequent references to the links between the show and the post-apartheid era. Generations, the website proclaims, “can proudly claim to have not only survived political and social changes during this exciting period, but also to have evolved in tandem with our nation from the birth of its democracy in 1994 to the present time.... Equality, in this discourse, is measured by being able to succeed in the ‘masculine,’ ‘Western’ business world. In Generations these goals remain unquestioned.”

Making meaning, making a home: students watching Generations by CATHERINE MARY O'SHEA JUNE 2004

And Watching Soap Opera by Miki Flockemannn in Senses of Culture : South African Culture Studies by Sarah Nuttall, Cheryl Ann Michael (Oxford University Press, 2000)

Roger Ballen

The backdrops in the photographs are filled with these eerie, surreal drawings and hanging wires – like something you’d find in Purgatory – is that something you staged? Or was it already there?

Nothing is staged. And nothing is already there. Everything is transformed through the camera. So what you’re looking at is not necessarily what’s there. The thing that’s there is the photograph. You’re seeing a photographic view of reality. Everything is transformed through my mind and through a camera. What you see is the photograph. The photograph, no matter what you do, is staged. You make a decision when and where to pull the trigger. There’s an act of subjectivity in every photograph.

source

Danticat on Aristide

Possible writer for Aristide interview

[Danticat] returns to Haiti every three or four months, most recently in January [2004] -- just before the beginning of this year's violence, which ultimately led to the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

"Things hadn't unraveled yet when I was there," Danticat says. "The demonstrations had started ... but you didn't know what kind of storm was coming. There were pro-Aristide demonstrations and anti-Aristide demonstrations. It was sort of going back and forth, and I couldn't tell how it was going to end."

Because her new novel and its attendant publicity tour coincided with Aristide's unseating, Danticat often finds herself, as a respected Haitian-American novelist whose subject is her native county, asked to explain and interpret what's going on. But, she says, the role of commentator ill suits her.

"I don't have any idea, and I'm not afraid to say that," she says. "I don't have the big picture -- first of all because I live here, and second because I'm a fiction writer. My best reaction is my fiction, and that takes some time and reflection and nuance."

Further, she says, she's incapable of the sound-bite assessment that is useful for journalists. "The situation is so complicated anyway, and I don't have the luxury of declaring somebody totally evil or somebody totally saintly. ... So I say I do not know."

source



"She recalls the 1991 coup against Aristide as shocking, "but people rallied". After college, she lobbied for his return while working as an intern for Demme... Danticat met Aristide in New York ("he was very charismatic") and again at the presidential palace in 1994, when she first went back to Haiti to work with Demme on a documentary about the priest's return. "He seemed to embody the pains of the poorest people of Haiti; people loyal to him were so loyal," she says. She was later associate producer on Benoît's film Courage and Pain (1996), testimony from Aristide supporters who survived torture."

Aristide's exile has left her with "very complicated feelings. I wish there could have been a mediated solution, in which those who voted for him didn't think their vote meant nothing. Now there's a wave of violence because they feel they have nothing to lose." As for the desired outcome, "it's not up to me, and certainly not up to the US and France to decide".

source

Festival to honour Girma Beyene

The 7^th edition of the Ethiopian Music Festival will be held from the 7^th to 17 May 2008 in Addis Ababa. Organized by the Alliance Ethio-Francise as a part of its centenary celebration and as a tribute to the Ethiopian pianist, composer and arranger Girma Beyene, the festival is expected to bring along renowned and young musicians.
Francis Falceto in his book Abyssinia Swing, a pictorial history of modern Ethiopian music describes Girma as one of a pioneering generation of artists that has a huge influence on the current Ethiopian music.
From the very beginning of the 1960’s and for some twenty years, he ranked among the Ethiopian musical scene’s most creative and prolific artists. He left precious few recordings behind him as a vocalist: it was above all as a pianist, organist, composer and arranger that Girma made his mark on what is today agreed to be the golden age of Ethiopian music. Throughout the heyday of Vinyl record production (1969-1978), the figure of Girma Beyene dominated the recording sessions. The then-privileged partner of Alemayehu Eshete, Girma innovated, through his simple and to-the-point playing, melding the lightness of pop into the ethos of a changing Ethiopia. Admired for his musical elegance, Girma none the less met one of the saddest fates in Ethiopian music. Though his countrymen still remember his charming voice and his knack for pop, they have totally forgotten his role and importance as an innovator.
Going into exile in the USA in 1981, Girma departed the Ethiopian music scene, sinking into the anonymous “Little Ethiopia’ of America’s East Coast.
According the Alliance booklet, there has been a renewed interest of late in the work and personality of Girma Beyene.International groups such as the Either/ Orchestra, the Daktaris, Le Tigre (Platante), The Ex, Badoum Band and Antibals have added some of Girma’s major compositions to their repertoires.
View programme in PDf here.

Okwui Enwezor's Archive Fever

Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art
International Center of Photography
New York, New York
January 18 - May 4, 2008

Enwezor: "…I want to make a distinction between curating within the canon and curating within culture."

Archive fever : uses of the document in contemporary art /
Okwui Enwezor [curator].
Gottingen : Steidl ; London : Thames & Hudson
May, 2008.
ISBN: 9783865216229 (pbk.)

Organized and written by renowned scholar and ICP Adjunct Curator Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever presents works by leading contemporary artists who use archival documents to rethink the meaning of identity, history, memory, and loss. Over the past thirty years, successive generations have taken wide-ranging approaches to the photographic and filmic archive. The works presented here take many forms, including physical archives arranged by peculiar
cataloguing methods, imagined biographies of fictitious persons, collections of found and anonymous photographs, film versions of photographic albums, and photomontages composed of historical photographs. These images have a wide-ranging subject matter yet are linked by the artists shared meditation on photography and film as the quintessential media of the archive. Artists in the exhibition include Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Zoe Leonard, Ilán Lieberman, Walid Raad, Thomas Ruff, Anri Sala, Fazal Sheikh, Eyal Sivan, Lorna Simpson, and Vivan Sundaram, among others.

Kwame Dawes in Jamaica - poet as journalist?

In early 2008 Kwame Dawes to Jamaica with assistance from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis
Reporting. The center's grants for AIDS journalism in the Caribbean are supported by the MAC AIDS Fund.

Dawes, who was raised in Kingston, is now the poet in residence at the University of South Carolina. He returned to Jamaica with a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, hoping to draw attention to the country's growing HIV/AIDS crisis: the country's AIDS rate is nearly three times that of the U.S. and experts fear that it may soon become an epidemic.

The result of Dawes' efforts is a new form of journalism--a remarkable website called HOPE: Living & Loving with HIV in Jamaica. The site sets first person audio and video accounts by doctors and patients to the of Joshua Cogan.

In his poem Coffee Break, Dawes recounts a story told to him by one of the doctors at the center:

It was Christmas time,

the balloons needed blowing,

and so in the evening

we sat together to blow

balloons and tell jokes--

the cool air off the hills

made me think of coffee,

so I said, "Coffee would be nice,"

and he said, "Yes, coffee

would be nice," and smiled

as his thin fingers pulled

the balloons from the plastic bags;

so I went for coffee

and it takes a few minutes

to make the coffee

though I did not know

if he wanted cows milk

or condensed milk,

and when I came out

to ask him, he was gone,

just like that, in the time

it took me to think,

cows milk or condensed;

the balloons sat lightly

on his still lap.

See Bearing Witness: The Poet as Journalist here

and an interview with Dawes on the project here.