Browse Mole Report Download

The Browse Mole Report is an intelligence document of the Directorate of Special Operation. The report was supposed to be a ‘Top Secret’ document of the DSO but was leaked to the public in 2007 and consequently anonymously faxed on 7 May 2007 to the Secretary General of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (COSATU). COSATU shared the document with its alliance organisations and government ministers.

Download the leaked report here.

IVOR POWELL who authored the report is allegedly writing a book on his time with the Scoropions. Read his version on the report in the Mail & Guardian.

Not down in any map; true places never are

As for Melville in the 19th century, so it is now.

Blighted Joburg (town/inner-city) is on something of an upswing - in the popular imaginary at least. There's Hotel Yeoville, a lyrical document of loves and lives in ex-bohemia; there 's Yeoville Studio at Wits, an architecture/urban-planning experiment that, among other things, has produced this guide to eating a whole continent without leaving town.

The Yeoville eating guide is a map of the future: it's a map of potential delight for those who dare. Meanwhile, what of those who are? Right here in Joburg, there are maps of Ethiopia, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Mozambique, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Bangladesh and more; maps of the present; carried and communicated and explained and rearranged every single day.

The Obama Code

An interesting look at "imaging Obama", the article itself is from 2009 but many of the example track back to 2008.

"Historic" was the headline word of November 5th, 2008, the day Barack Obama became the next President of the United States. The international embrace of Obama was, of course, partly a response to his skin color and the historically racialized structure of American society, which for five centuries denied some or all of the rights of Americans not properly male, propertied and of Anglo-European descent. America and throughout the world, the idea of "race" is inescapably knotted with visible markers such as hair and skin color. Color stands in metonymic relation to a vast complex of stories, mythologies, images, emotions, scientific discourses and genomic sequences -- visible and invisible -- of what we know and define as race.

The concept of "color" is much easier to represent in pictures than in words, especially given the complexity of racial discourse in the United States; this may be why some voters who strongly opposed the new leader used the graphics software on their computers to express their concerns. Picturing is a form of speech, and in the context of an affluent, technologically advanced society that allegedly protects its citizens' right to free speech, voters use the Internet as a public arena for broadcasting messages of political dissent. Visual messages are valued for their ability to deliver high extra-linguistic impact with little or no exact meaning.

Many of these messages act as pictorial fictions. Like the depictions of Catholic saints, the images rely on visual cues to reference well-known narratives from history (Obama-Hitler), science fiction (Obama-Alien), horror (Obama-Monster) and religion (Obama-Antichrist). The jumble of images and fragmented chat on the Internet suggests that McLuhan's age of multisensory "electric" media has successfully brought post-literacy and re-tribalization to Western societies. latter is particularly evident in far right wing Internet communities that view Obama in light of the antichrist legend. As my analysis of some of the most virulent imagery will show, McLuhan's view of the media as extensions of the nervous system can be rethought as even more deeply marked in the flesh, not just as extensions of the body, but as the body -- the genomic body -- itself.

To explore the idea of genomic embodiment in Internet images of Barack Obama, I will examine how visual codes, Hebrew lettering and imaginary genetic sequences loop into and through one another in a seemingly post-literate, biotechnological blur. In this richly vague space, where something primordial appears to be happening, I find trace elements of Arthur Kroker's posthuman universe in which "the missing mass of God touches the full-spectrum dominance of cyberculture." In Kroker's view, this touch is of a magnitude to bend space-time relations into a new fabric "simultaneously mythic and historical, past and future, technocratic and religious." The images in this essay are considered in light of this theoretical possibility: a dimensional infolding of visible spaces becoming touched by God.

Full article and images here.

Staged photographs

The Algerian Mohammed Bourouizza grew up in the banlieue of Paris. The images from his Périphéries series seem to be documentary. They correspond point by point to the clichés we might have of Paris suburbs from what we've seen on the press. Yet, you realize that you shouldn't trust the clichés. The locations are scouted, the protagonists are carefully selected models and the lighting is the result of research and artistic strategy. The result is a series of staged depictions of the tensions and issues affecting daily life for young people living in the suburbs of France.



View more images here.

Arizona project 2010: killing soccer in Africa

FAIR Report: An ‘Arizona project’ in Africa

‘Killing soccer in Africa’ is the first Arizona project ever conducted on the African continent. In the Global Investigative Journalism Network, the label ‘Arizona project’ is extended to a team investigation into a story that has led to the harassment, injury, or death, of the individual reporter who first pursued the story alone. It is derived from an investigation that took place in the US state of Arizona, that got reporter Don Bolles killed in 1976. The assassination, by criminals intent on stopping Bolles from pursuing the investigation, led to a call by FAIR’s US sister organization, Investigative Reporters and Editors, to its members, to all descend on Arizona and finish the story. Thirty-eight reporters, working for over twenty media houses, responded to the call, followed the story, and published. The impact of the original story, that Bolles’ killers had wanted to silence, increased massively. Since then, the title of ‘Arizona project’ is given to efforts by a team of journalists coming to finish a story that a lone journalist has been stopped from pursuing by force.

The point that ‘you can stop a journalist, but you can not kill the story’ has, in 2010, been made in Africa by FAIR. When a journalist in Cameroon was severely beaten after he started probing the financial affairs of (Cameroonian) Confederation of African Soccer President Issa Hayatou, FAIR decided to carry out a Transnational Investigation to not only investigate Cameroonian soccer, but African soccer administration, the reign of Hayatou, as a whole. In total eight African countries, including five of the six countries that participated in the just ended World Cup, were covered.

This report resulted. Its conclusions are based on hard facts and cannot be dismissed: African soccer will not achieve meaningful results until its administrators are reigned in and held accountable for their high-living, wasteful and destructive management style. Maybe most importantly, this investigation shows that African soccer administrators are not the only culprits. The international soccer body FIFA is shown to protect and even promote bad African soccer managers. The report has so far been published by media in all the eight African countries where individual journalists participated in FAIR’s Arizona team. It has been reviewed by radio and online media internationally and FAIR hopes that the release of the entire dossier will incur even more international publicity.

This would after all be in line with the Arizona motto:
You can stop a journalist, but you can’t kill the story.

FAIR investigative team
Olukayode Thomas (Nigeria and Ghana)
Chief Bisong Etahoben and Franklin Sone Bayen
(Cameroon)
Dumisani Ndlela (Zimbabwe and Zambia)
Eric Mwamba (Ivory Coast)
Ken Opala (Kenya)
Phathisani Moyo (South Africa)
Charles Rukuni (Editor)

Full report here

Radical Essays on Nigerian Literatures

Edited by
G.G. Darah
This anthology of essays brings together original critical
comments on Nigerian literatures written in the 1970s and
1980s. It is a celebration of Nigeria's contribution to the
world's heritage of letters. The twenty-three essays explore
the fundamental role of the intelligentsia in defining and
describing the nation state in space and time. The
contributions represent some of the best and most articulate
assessments of Nigeria's literary discourses in their
pre-colonial and colonial phases. The various ideological
reflections in the essays reveal significant details about the
intellectual and imaginative processes that have gone into
the shaping of Nigeria over the centuries. The diversity of
themes examined, the historical epochs covered and the
geo-political spread of the contributors add to the uniqueness
of the volume. Chinua Achebe, J.P. Clarke, Femi Osofisan
and Kole Omotoso are among the 23 contributors included.

Published by Malthouse Press, Nigeria
North American Distribution
392 pp., 6.00" x 9.00", January 2008
Paper, $34.95,
9780232540
9789780232542

Preface here

Image Bank: infographics

E-waste sources and destinations

Image Bank: Mastheads

collection of Cultural-Revolution era imagery and propaganda.

Image Bank: infographics

an infographic on China's production in comparison to world's. (for example China produces 75% of toys in the whole world)

yellow part is production, green one- export

Image Bank: Obama/Odinga

Image Bank: War Machines

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military. These are some of their inventions.

Image Bank: Power Sharing

Kenya's opposition leader Raila Odinga (R) shakes hands with Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki (C) as former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan stands beside them during a press conference outside the presidential office on January 24, 2008 in Nairobi, Kenya. The meeting between the two rivals is the first since the disputed presidential election that led to bloodshed across the country.
(January 24, 2008 - Photo by Uriel Sinai/Getty Images News)


Source

Image Bank: Cape Times Burning Man Cover (May 19, 2008)

The Scramble for Vinyl

By Chief Boima
Spurred on by the rise of sampling in Hip Hop and electronic music and despite a downturn in vinyl production, in the 80′s and 90′s a rich vinyl collecting culture exploded in places like the U.S., Europe, and Japan. For years young hip DJs from the city, travelled to forgotten about record shops in backwater towns, the dusty basements of aging record collectors, or the back rows of an inner-city record shop looking for rarities that seemed to pop out of thin air. Collectors scoured their neighbors backyards for rare jazz, rock, and funk, motivated by unnamed sample sources, hoping to find that illusive breakbeat. The best DJs were the ones with the deepest crates. Around the early 00′s, Hip Hop stopped using samples and turned back towards synthesizers, the Internet started a deeper collective crate, and a vital source of inspiration dried up. For collectors, all the stones seemed to be overturned, the market had too many buyers, and people, starting to realize the value of what they had, turned to E-bay to make money off of their collections. With much of the rare vinyl being plundered locally, a few intrepid explorers decided to try their luck in uncharted territory. Of course, they made their way to Africa.
The above map and scenario may both be a little hyperbolic, but it does seem that the current mad-dash for rare African vinyl could be analogous to Europe’s 19th Century Scramble for Africa, a mad-dash for rare African minerals. There is a trend among rare-groove DJs to “find fortune” in the (re)discovery of musical gems in places where the value of vinyl and recorded music from the past has diminished. Just go to your local record shop (if one still exists) and peruse the display shelves to encounter dozens of new releases celebrating the recently uncovered recordings of Africa’s unknown musical heritage. The image of these guys as plundering opportunists isn’t helped by their reception in “The West”. As one music writer puts it,”Frank Gossner’s DJ sets burst with exclusive tracks that are so rare that they can’t be heard anywhere else on this planet” (from ChoiceCuts.com.) Rare music from planet Africa!?! Who wouldn’t want to get a piece of that?
Full article here.

Fuck Granta… thanks, Granta

"If I was smart, I would have waited a few years and made an iPhone app: a little satirical story about how to write about Africa every day, interactive and adaptable, for ninety-nine cents. Fuck Granta… thanks, Granta." Binyavanga Wainaina

In 1962, as many African countries were gaining independence, Heinemann’s African Writer’s Series introduced some of Africa’s most important writers to the continent, and to the world. At the time, the idea of a series spanning the continent seemed reasonable: many countries were encountering the same phenomenon, at the same time.

Almost 50 years later, the media revolution combined with the ongoing flow of immigration has opened up a chapter in African writing. A new generation of African writers has arrived Over the past six years, partly through the efforts of publishing and literary networking through institutions like Kwani (www.kwani.org), Farafina (www.kachifo.com) and Chimurenga (www.chimurenga.co.za). In 2005 Granta published The View from Africa, featuring "fresh voices from Africa, in all their differences". In the same year Bard College created the Chinua Achebe Center for African Writers and Artists, "a world class institution that serves a new generation of African writers". The Orange Prize for Fiction was awarded in London 2007 to Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, and the Caine Prize for African Writing has introduced new writers to agents and publishers. Writers like Chimamanda Adichie, Alain Mabanckou, Chris Abani, Petina Gapah, Marie Ndiaye and Seffi Ata are known and read in many African countries, in the African diaspora, and in Europe and America.