Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 360

#SAHipHop2014: Looking Back At The Year That Was

In 2014, South African Hip Hop was allowed longer strides on the mainstream’s catwalk. The line between artist and celebrity got blurred as rappers continued to package themselves into products ripe for mass consumption. Meanwhile, marketers clawed further into the consciousness of an artform they dared not be associated with ten years prior. For the most part the music was good, but that’s as far as it went. The beats were nice, but mostly generic. Imported flows and concepts were given merit as long as the content was ‘local’.

Hip hop didn’t scare anyone, nor was it likely to incite mass action towards any socio-economic cause. To remain relevant, South African Hip Hop engaged in ego-boosting PR exercises masquerading as beef. Moments of brilliance lay scattered in the field of pop aspirations. By-standers stood silent through it all, perhaps overwhelmed by the weight of the shadow that hip hop globally has allowed itself to become.

In 2004, South African Hip Hop embarked on what felt like a maiden voyage to its now-widespread acceptance. The seven-person rap crew Skwatta Kamp won a South African Music Award (SAMA), “Best Rap” category, with an independently-released and distributed album called Khut en joyn. One year later, they managed to sell 25,000 copies of their major label debut Mkhukhu Funkshen. A second SAMA followed.

In 2005, a rapper signed to music producer DJ Cleo’s Will Of Steel label sold 50, 000 copies. Going by the name Pitch Black Afro, and bolstered by a call-and-response single which no one could stop singing along to, the Soweto-born emcee became – and, at time of writing, remains – the first solo rapper to go platinum. And he did so at a time when it really mattered, both critically and commercially (gold and platinum certification has since been re-adjusted to 20,000 and 40,000 copies sold respectively).

The 2004-2005 period felt like the apex of events which had been brewing some years prior. Rage Records had cemented itself as a respectable, if boutique, label through compilations such as Expressions and Maximum Sentense, and through signing acts such as Proverb, Zubz and producer Battlekat onto its roster. Another rap group, Cashless Society, had managed to secure a deal with DJ Bobbito’s now-defunct Fondle Em label to distribute their single “Blaze the breaks.” DJ Bionic’s Eargasm Entertainment had released Mizchif’s Life From All Angles EP; the Hymphatic Thabs had single-handedly written the manual for how to thrive as an independent hip hop artist in South Africa with his debut release, Error Era. In Cape Town, African Dope Records had experienced some amount of success with Goddessa and Moodphase 5ive. The former, an all-female trio, broke through with “Social Ills,” a single which did well to solidify Cape Town’s image as the more ‘conscious’ of the two cities. The latter, a multi-genre outfit led by emcee D-Form and vocalist Ernie, implanted itself in Jozi’s hearts with their appearance at Club 206.

“We were on our first African Dope tour in April 2001… We arrived at 206 and Moodphase rocked it so hard the power went down. They rocked it even harder with an impromptu acoustic jam while the power was down…” recalled African Dope co-founder Roach in an interview.

Billing itself as “South Africa’s No.1 Hip Hop Magazine” and with distribution spanning not only South Africa but neighbouring states as well, Hype Magazine hit the shelves in 2004. The print publication’s first two issues were guest edited by DJ Ready D: champion turntablist; community builder; car enthusiast and, most importantly, co-founder of Prophets Of da City and Brasse Vannie Kaap — two globally-revered cultural institutions with roots in the Cape Flats. It was fitting, then, that Ready D was chose as the one to ignite the torch for the magazine. The lantern has been burning since, changing hands through a shifting roster of contributors and editors.

Hype may have dished out more than its fair share of mediocre content through the years. However, it’d be unfair to not commend them for the good work they’ve done, most notably their continued relevance, in a shaky South African print environment. As former editor Simone Harris attests in the magazine’s 10th Anniversary issue, Hype is “a history book that has served our [South African] hip hop heritage well” as well as a “brand which has kept up with each new generation of hip hop enthusiasts.”

Rapper AKA @ Maftown Heights 2014

The year 2014 was filled with great rap releases. K.O. of the group Teargas came brandishing a brand new set of flows on Skhanda Republic, his debut solo outing. “Caracara”, the second single from that album has amassed an upward of 1 million views (inspiring spoofs like this one in the process).

AKA ended off a gruelling 2014 by winning in four categories at the third annual South African Hip Hop Awards. His sophomore album Levels had been producing strong singles such as “Kontrol” and “Congratulate” well before its mid-year release. The album best showcases how, over the years, hip hop in South Africa has learned how to produce songs which can work collectively or as singles. The latest, “All eyez on me,” has guest raps from JR and Da Les, with hook duties masterfully handled by Burna Boy. The song premiered via a Google+ hangout and was simultaneously broadcast on radio stations in Kenya and Nigeria. AKA answered questions from the anchor Lee Kasumba and from guests in the hangout. The song continues to gain traction and has recently entered A-list rotation on BBC 1Xtra.

Cassper Nyovest’s Tsholofelo played like the scattered thoughts of an artist still figuring out what approach to music works best for their audience. It showcased his breadth as a rapper, sure, but it failed to establish him as a fully-fledged artist. However, it’s only his first effort.

When it wasn’t arguing over who the best is via a list curated by a satellite television broadcaster; engaging in c-grade social media antics; or writing open letters to radio stations, South African Hip Hop did extremely well for itself. Away from the glimmer of the mainstream, Cape Town continued to quietly nurture its own class of talent. “We had to deal with so many gatekeepers, turned down so many times by people already on the scene,” said Laneave Hansen of Rude World Records, the independent label which, besides pop sensation Jimmy Nevis, boast artists like Kita Keetz, BoolZ, and Namibia’s Black Vulcanite, acts who are giving an alternative take on the genre and expanding the rap conversation beyond the confines of eJozi (the city of Johannesburg). There’s also Andy Mkosi with her traditionalist approach and real-life raps; Miss Celaneous favours hard-edged, finger-up-your-nose-type lyrics. In one fell swoop, she lists all that is wrong with the ‘scene’ as she raps: “all I gotta say/ I am bored as fuck with the game in SA/ same old naaiers (fuckers) get the fame/” on “#Checkmeout”, a song which utilises Nipsey Hustle’s song of the same title.

Away from the mainstream, Jozi’s a hive of active movements, like the internationally-acclaimed Scrambles for Money battle rap league; innovative rap cliques like Revivolution; and mind-bendingly dope delivery a la Gigi Lamayne. Boyz ‘n’ Buck$, a crew of creative entrepreneurs with associations in music and fashion, have crafted a visual identity which resonates with their fanbase.

Okmalumkoolkat’s one of the members, alongside the likes of Riky Rick and Bubhesii — the former an artist whose debut album, Family Tree, is about to disrupt the way South African rap is set up, while the latter is a Jozi rap mainstay who’s collaborated on music with the likes of the P.O. Box Project, and recently launched a mobile boutique store with his wife. Okmalumkoolkat’s been the quiet architect for a lot of trends in South African Hip Hop. While the likes of HHP and Morafe may have been doing what’s now termed New Age Kwaito for more than a decade, it’s Dirty Paraffin (Okmalumkoolkat + Dr SpiZee) who acted as the bridge not only through introducing experimental beats favouring bass-heavy frequencies, but through their slang, and through the means through which they chose to distribute music — mostly on-line, for free, and with no strings attached.

It’s a strategy which has worked for Cassper Nyovest. In a recent visit to Zimbabwe, he stopped by the 2 Broke Twimbos’ studio to chat about his career. Talking about his team’s music distribution strategy, Cassper said: “Our music is free and anybody can download it; you’ll never know where it’ll end up. It probably started with one kid in Zimbabwe who played it to his friend, and then it ended up spreading, [and that was] before we started playing on radio.”

Nyovest is worthy of mention for re-writing the rule book on how to make it as an artist in South Africa. He came as an independent off the bat, and retains ownership of all of his music to this day. How he achieved nationwide acclaim with two songs to his name (“Gusheshe” and “Doc Shebeleza”) is a topic all on its own. He’s nominated under five categories for the 2015 SAMA Awards to be held in two months’ time.

Rappers Blaklez and Nveigh @ Maftown Heights 2014

There’s elation in the air. South African Hip Hop is the media’s darling. Headlines such as ‘South African Hip Hop wins big at [insert desired award ceremony name here]’ are easy to come by. It’s a good time to be a part of it all — as a by-stander in the pit, shouting your lungs out word-for-word to your favourite rapper’s songs, at the expense of carrying the baggage that comes with being a rap fan.

Less discussed is the danger of having any single, “authoritative” voice on the scene. South African rap writing needs to be elevated beyond an eighty-odd-page monthly print issue which can be read in one sitting, in under an hour! There is room for more voices; alternative voices; voices of change, of discontent, of outrage!

In a scene which measures success by the amount of radio spins a song receives and values awards ceremonies — which couldn’t give two shits about hip hop were they held at gunpoint — over everything else, this vital voice is rendered mute. It’s the voice of a section of South African Hip Hop dedicated solely to dope beats, dope rhymes, having fun, and being ‘nice with it.’ This legion of heads is scattered across the country, bubbling in their locales yet never getting the ‘spark’ to make it onto the mainstream. They toil to upload songs onto the Internet; to share links on social networks; to e-mail blogs requesting for interviews. They are the foot soldiers of South African Rap. Alas, ‘keeping it real’ doesn’t pay the bills. Now also a good time to innovate; to disrupt the trend; to build pan-African institutions inspired by hip hop!

Kissinger 2.0: Why Washington should seek closer cooperation with Teheran in the fight against Boko Haram

Richard Nixon visited Mao’s Zedong’s China 43 years ago, from 21 to 28 February 1972. His stay was part of Henry Kissinger’s triangular diplomacy in which the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Soviet Union were drawn into a competitive cooperative dynamic with the United States. Because of that newly established link with the PRC, Leonid Brezhnev felt compelled to improve his relationship with the US, resulting in an interim strategic arms limitation agreement (SALT I), normalization of US-Soviet trade and even a joint venture in space known as Apollo-Soyuz. While Détente had its limits, particularly in Vietnam and other areas of the Third World, it still stands as one of Henri Kissinger’s crowning achievements.

The African Union’s (AU) decision to commit 75,00 troops to counter Boko Haram’s in Nigeria as well as Nigeria’s call for American support and the pledge to support of Iranian Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Amir Hossein Abdollahian at the AU summit, offers the Obama administration the chance to design its own triangle, a Kissinger 2.0.

It is true, as John Campbell points out, that Boko Haram is an indigenous northern Nigerian response to poverty and bad governance which should not be placed in the context of the international war on terrorism. But sustained attention to the international dimension of this African conflict is vital in addressing an underlying problem: the proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia that is being played out in Nigeria.

President Obama ought to take a page out of the book of the Vice President of Nigeria, Namadi Sambo, who travelled to Riyadh in August 2012 to request King Abdullah’s assistance. The late King and other Saudi nationals funded Al Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Boko Haram and Al Shabab believing that their radicalism would provide a vehicle for Saudi geostrategic interests. Iran on its turn has, according to the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point, invested in intelligence gathering and supports a group of its own: the Islamic Movement in Nigeria. While the fog of war makes the verification of precise details difficult, it is becoming increasingly clear that the ideological competition between Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism and Iran’s Shia inspired Khomeinism has been exported to Africa, with bloody results.

Like the US and the USSR in the 1970s, Iran and Saudi Arabia are keen to acquire allies which has deepened local conflicts. In January 2012, funds from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, for instance, increased the popularity of Wahabi Islam in Mali and strengthened local fundamentalists such as Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. This militant group in turn drew on the discontent of Northern Malian Tuareg who already in 1963 and 1990 had led an insurgency against the central government in Bamako. Similarly, the murder of  Boko Haram’s leader, Mohammed Yusef, by Nigerian troops in 2009 cemented Boko Haram’s commitment to violence. Abubakar Shekau’s group could only grow because of local and international benefactors, and links to Al-Qaeda and other well-funded groups in the Middle East.

President Nixon meets with China’s Communist Party Leader, Mao Tse- Tung, 29 February 1972 National Archives and Records Administration,  White House Photo Office. (1969 – 1974).

It is as if a strange version of the Cold War has returned to Africa: ideological affinity compel states outside of Africa to fund groups who on their turn spin out of control, killing thousands of civilians and requiring prolonged military intervention.

In response the White House is hesitantly developing a Kissinger 2.0. Obama’s letter to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in mid-October 2014, in which he raises the issue of ISIS, the continued negotiations over Teheran’s nuclear program, the war authorization under consideration in the US Congress, and the President’s reaction to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Nethanyahu’s speech all suggest the US government is open to engaging Iran. At the same time Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, head of Iran’s Expediency Council, has said that cooperation between Tehran and Riyadh would be advantageous to the region.

Bringing Iran back into the international community would give Riyadh and Tehran less incentive to seek allies in the Middle East and Africa and could compel the new Saudi King to prevent his subjects from funding extremists abroad. Improved relations between Iran and the US would force Saudi Arabia into a more constructive attitude because the Saudi Government depends on US military support for its survival and the fight against ISIS.

It is in this light that Africa in general – and Nigeria in particular – becomes a key battle ground in the war on terror and significant in the international order. Not only can cooperation against Boko Haram further restore trust between two nations who have been estranged from one another since 1979, but the defeat of Boko Haram would also offer a blow to the ideological project of a fundamentalist caliphate built on atrocities.

To realise an Iranian-Saudi-US triangle, Obama will have to tread lightly. As Ronald Reagan learned in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal a deal with Iran, like any other diplomatic move, could have unexpected outcomes. Moreover, local problems such as the Kurdish national question or the protracted civil war in Libya might derail a new linkage venture. Nevertheless, Iranian-American support for the AU in Nigeria might provide an important stepping stone to a broader long term arrangement between the US and Iran. For a president eager to establish his legacy this is a golden opportunity. Unlike Kissinger – who was booed when he testified in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a few weeks ago – Obama still has time to write his story.

#WhiteHistoryMonth: When the NYPD beat up Miles Davis

Miles Davis spent March and April of 1959 recording the astounding Kind of Blue. A few months later he was left with blood streaming from his head after being attacked by NYPD officers right outside his own show. Here’s Davis recounting what happened that night in Miles: The Autobiography (1989), which he wrote with Quincy Troupe.

I had just finished doing an Armed Forces Day broadcast, you know, Voice of America and all that bullshit. I had just walked this pretty white girl named Judy out to get a cab. She got in the cab, and I’m standing there in front of Birdland wringing wet because it’s a hot, steaming, muggy night in August. This white policeman comes up to me and tells me to move on. At the time I was doing a lot of boxing and so I thought to myself, I ought to hit this motherfucker because I knew what he was doing. But instead I said, “Move on, for what? I’m working downstairs. That’s my name up there, Miles Davis,” and I pointed to my name on the marquee all up in lights.

He said, “I don’t care where you work, I said move on! If you don’t move on I’m going to arrest you.”

I just looked at his face real straight and hard, and I didn’t move. Then he said, “You’re under arrest!” He reached for his handcuffs, but he was stepping back. Now, boxers had told me that if a guy’s going to hit you, if you walk toward him you can see what’s happening. I saw by the way he was handling himself that the policeman was an ex-fighter. So I kin of leaned in closer because I wasn’t going to give him no distance so he could hit me on the head. He stumbled, and all his stuff fell on the sidewalk, and I thought to myself, Oh, shit, they’re going to think that I fucked with him or something. I’m waiting for him to put the handcuffs on, because all his stuff is on the ground and shit. Then I move closer so he won’t be able to fuck me up. A crowd had gathered all of a sudden from out of nowhere, and this white detective runs in and BAM! hits me on the head. I never saw him coming. Blood was running down the khaki suit I had on.  Then I remember [journalist] Dorothy Kilgallen coming outside with this horrible look on her face — I had known Dorothy for years and I used to date her good friend, Jean Bock — and saying, “Miles, what happened?” I couldn’t say nothing. Illinois Jacquet [the saxophonist] was there, too.

It was almost a race riot, so the police got scared and hurried up and got my ass out of there and took me to the 54th Precinct where they took pictures of me bleeding and shit. So, I’m sitting there, madder than a motherfucker, right? And they’re saying to me in the station, “So you’re the wiseguy, huh?” Then they’d bump up against me, you know, try to get me mad so they could probably knock me upside my head again. I’m just sitting there, taking it all in, watching every move they make.

[…]

It makes the front pages of the New York newspapers, and they repeat the charges in their headlines. There was a picture, which became famous, of me leaving the jail with this bandage all over my head (they had taken me to the hospital to have my head stitched up), and [Davis’ wife] Frances — who had come down to see me when they were transferring me downtown — walking in front of me like a proud stallion.

When Frances had come down to that police station and saw me all beat up like that, she was almost hysterical, screaming. I think the policemen started to think they had made a mistake, a beautiful woman like this screaming over this nigger. And then Dorothy Kilgallen came down and then wrote about it in her column the next day. The piece was very negative against the police, and that was of some help to my cause.

Now I would have expected this kind of bullshit about resisting arrest and all back in East St Louis (before the city went all-black), but not here in New York City, which is supposed to be the slickest, hippest city in the world. But then, again, I was surrounded by white folks and I have learned that when that happens, if you’re black, there is no justice. None.

[…]

Around this time, people — white people — started saying that I was always “angry,” that I was “racist,” or some silly shit like that. Now, I’ve been racist towards nobody, but that don’t mean I’m going to take shit from a person just because he’s white. I didn’t grin or shuffle and didn’t walk around with my finger up my ass begging for no handout and thinking I was inferior to whites. I was living in America, too, and I was going to try to get everything that was coming to me.

Tomorrow is the Question: Afrofuturism and engaging prophetically with history

On February 13, nearly 200 scholars and artists gathered at “Tomorrow is the Question: Afrofuturism, Sound and Spirit” — a symposium at Union Theological Seminary in New York exploring what an “Afro-future” might sound like and mean today. Panelists included multidisciplinary artist Korby Benoit, electronic music composer Val Jeanty, and scholars Beth Coleman, Michael Veal, Alexander Weheliye, and event moderator George Lewis. Benoit opened the event with a DJ set and Jeanty closed the event with an improvised sonic performance.

What follows is a discussion between the event’s lead organizer, Columbia graduate student Didier Sylvain, and event attendee, Columbia professor of postcolonial Caribbean literature, Kaiama L. Glover:

Didier Sylvain: What, to you, were some key ideas emerging from “Tomorrow is the Question”?

Kaiama L. Glover: George Lewis provided a capacious set of introductory remarks, reminding us that to imagine black futures is to be always recalling black pasts — engaging prophetically with history. Emphasizing the centrality of sound to the public — the social, the political — sphere, Lewis opened up some real space for thinking about the ways sound has mattered, matters, should and will matter to #blacklives in an all-too-often condescending and downright dangerous world.

DS: Can you elaborate on what you mean by “engaging prophetically with history”? 

KLG: I was struck by the extent to which each of the panelists took up Lewis’ call to think of technology as an urgent social intervention vis-à-vis a precarious Afro-future — and by the fact that each one of them put that future within a dynamic historical context. Though Fanon certainly warns us not to become slaves of slavery, it’s pretty clear to me that questioning tomorrow would be an empty practice in the absence of dialogue with uncomfortable yesterdays. Korby Benoit and Val Jeanty explained and expressed musically, for example, their retoolings of ancestral techniques — technologies? — as ways of mediating suffering and contesting injustice. They were backed up in these practices by Beth Coleman’s more explicitly “futurist,” even activist project, whereby telling stories and making sounds can change the contours of our social worlds. Michael Veal conveyed a theoretical commitment to preserving jazz narratives in the conversation, including the technical complexities of (and relations between) Sun Ra’s sound and cosmology. And if Alex Weheliye dug in to a generative rehashing of the R&B vs. hip-hop debate, it was certainly a gesture toward potentially empowering solidarity. 

I suppose what I’m getting at is the fact, as Glissant suggests, that we can — we must — revisit past narratives prophetically; we must reimagine the “same old” stories differently, with an eye to the present and to the futures we desire.

DS: You mention Fanon, which reminds me that, for him, the task at hand is to not only reimagine narratives of the racist colonial past and present, but to also “set afoot a new human being.” There seem to be traces of Fanon in Weheliye’s remarks on black technology — or “apparatuses and forms of embodied knowledge” — that bring about possibilities of the “human otherwise.” Is that a charge for today’s “Afro-futurist” discourse and performance — rethinking and enacting new types humanity?

KLG: First, let me say, in what I hope doesn’t come across as a cheap shot, Fanon actually talks about setting afoot a “new man.” That you generously update his language evokes something I thought was a particularly impressive element of “Tomorrow is the Question” and, I would argue, of the practice of Afro-futurism more broadly – notably, its inclusiveness and breadth as far as gender is concerned. I’m not just talking about the fact of a equal feminine presence at the event itself, though that was very cool, but about the fundamental way in which wariness regarding the reproduction of limiting social constructions of masculinity and femininity are concerned; because as we well know, “the racist colonial past and present” was and is pretty good at sexism, too. But I digress. Or no, I don’t. To update and differently inscribe past discourse so as to bring out the future-forward possibilities it engenders is to set our sights on that “human otherwise” Weheliye wants to explore. Because, like Fanon and Glissant and others, he rightly understands and foregrounds the relational nature of our being-in-common – our imperative to acknowledge the various iterations of our (social) difference and the ethical practice of being decent to one another in the face of this diversity. To me, that’s what an Afro-futurist humanism looks like.

DS: Yes yes. To close, I would be remiss not to ask about these issues in the context of your work on francophone literature in the Caribbean. What postcolonial writers come to mind when thinking about “futurism” in the Afro-Atlantic?

KLG: I’ll walk right through that door you’ve opened and mention a few folks from the specifically French-writing postcolonial context – a look back, I suppose. Beyond the two Martinican theorists Fanon and Glissant who figure in my work, past and present, there is the Haitian writer-painter-mathematician-singer-teacher Frankétienne. Having founded the aesthetic philosophy of Spiralism in the mid-1960s Frankétienne has been writing fiction meant to be heard for decades now. The fact that he stayed and wrote in Duvalier’s Haiti has meant limited appreciation for his contribution, but that’s beginning to change as he and his work travel outside the country and are exposed to an anglophone audience. As was made plain during this recent event, one of Afro-futurism’s challenges will be to imagine solidarity with humans outside the U.S. — American context — to produce sounds and texts and other unifying artifacts that resonate across the divisive boundaries that are the legacy of the colonial past.

Kaiama L. Glover is an Associate Professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College/Columbia University, specializing in francophone postcolonial literature with a particular focus on the Caribbean. She is the author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon.

Didier Sylvain is a composer and PhD student in ethnomusicology at Columbia University. His research explores the metaphysical and political dimensions of futurism in black music, and, more generally, interdisciplinary work surrounding sound, race, and technology across the Afro-Atlantic world.

South Africa’s Domestic Workers: Invisible labor in plain sight

For South Africa watchers, two sets of statistics from a new comparative study of domestic workers in India and South Africa, A New Form of Bonded Labor makes for sobering reading. The first is that around 1.1 million South Africans are domestic workers. With a total population exceeding 52 million people, that’s a lot. The second is that 54,000 of those workers are under the age of fifteen.* Basically child labor. What’s worse, given the statistical invisibility of this kind of work, the actual number is probably even higher.

According to the International Labor Organization, over 75% of domestic workers are women, who work for private house holds. 91% of them are African and 9% is Coloured. So basically they are black. Many of them make work weeks topping 80 hours up to the age of 75 (though women’s life expectancy is only 48 years). The majority of women work in one home, and live there, or divide their workweeks between a few different homes. It also turns out that South Africa has the highest number of domestic workers in the Southern African region.

Historically, domestic workers were the near exclusive privilege of white South Africans. Few relationships carried the legal, state sanctioned apartheid abuses of the public space into the personal homes of white South Africans as the ‘Madam-Maid’ contract did. The domestic worker, (as well as the gardener) embodied the exploitation that the apartheid state was built on in many white homes. And just like the white supremacist economy could only survive and thrive through exploitation, abuse, repression and the disruption and destruction of black neighborhoods, households and families, the domestic worker –isolated from her own family — operated as the backbone to the white family’s household economy.

Many employers chose to frame their domestic worker’s constant presence and unwavering dedication to their children, belongings and wellbeing as a matter of belonging, intimacy and connection, and expressed this with “she’s part of our family” kind of statements. This type of family title, drenched with affection served different functions. It took the exploitation out of the equation, erased the worker’s own family, made their contract seem organic and – simultaneously — soothed suspicious anxieties. On the latter, often, domestic workers were viewed as inherently unreliable, theft-prone and untrustworthy.

The interviews and observations in A New Form of Bonded Labour, suggest that, for many (live-in) domestic workers, not much has changed twenty-one years into democracy. One employer, a married doctor and mother of four from an elite suburb in Durban, described her bond with her domestic worker — who receives 2000 Rands (around $170 right now) a month for 84 hour workweeks — as follows:

She is part of our family. We take care of her, her mother worked for us. She gets all the old clothes, she eats all the leftovers and she has a bed and her own room. When we bought new TV we put the old one in her room. She will do anything for this family. We can wake her up at midnight and ask her to prepare a meal and she does it with a smile on her face.

So basically, she views her worker’s position as a matter of destiny and belonging. Like her mother, she serves them with a smile (so upward generational mobility isn’t necessary either) and is rewarded with a fabricated form of kinship (rather than actual benefits).

Her employee has a different take on their connection.

When my mum retired they gave her R 10,000 which was in 2006 she worked for doctor’s mother for thirty-two years. Is that how you treat your family? They pay me R 2000 a month. What can you buy for R 2000 a month? I work like a slave. I am telling you, seven days a week. When I want time off they make me feel bad. Sometime they give me an extra R 100. I see doctor; she spends more than R2000 on a pair of shoes. I am not their family I work here if I had some — where else to work for more money I would go. True they feed me. I am not hungry here. I got a nice place to stay, but I am always tired.

If their experiences are typical for ‘Madam-Maid’ relationships in post-apartheid South Africa, then it seems like not much has changed, which we already sort of suspected. To this day, domestic workers are recommended with reliability credit, as if her trustworthiness makes her an exception, and family titles continue to trump actual benefits or opportunities for social mobility. They’re still Black.

In 2000, whites are said to have made up 55% of employers versus 30% of Africans and 15% Coloureds and Indians (though the authors note that the real number of white employers is probably higher.) Do black employers treat their domestic workers differently? We don’t know.  But the (overall) picture that the study paints (of both countries) is a bleak one indeed:

These women are taught to be invisible in the homes of their employers and to refrain from engaging in spontaneous conversation with their employers and guests of their employers. They are seen as workers in the household; employers neglect to realize that they are people with feelings and emotions; the way in which they are treated deeply affects and isolates them.

In 2008, visual activist Zanele Muholi (whose mother worked as a domestic worker for the same family for 42 years) wrote that “There continues to be little recognition and little protection from the state for the hard labour these women perform to feed and clothe and house their families.” That’s one of the reasons why, in 2008, she used her ‘Massa” & Mina(h)’ project to “acknowledge all domestic workers around the globe who continue to labour with dignity, while often facing physical, financial, and emotional abuses in their place of work.” *

Since then, the South African state has made some legislative efforts (to protect domestic workers.) They, for example, ratified the International Domestic Workers Convention in 2013 and came up with the ‘Sectoral Determination for the Domestic Worker Sector’ law. But with a minimum wage of 8,34 Rand (around $0,72) per hour, the findings of ‘A New Form of Bonded Labour’ shouldn’t surprise us.

*Mary Sibande is another South African artist who used her art to celebrate her mother, grand mother and great grandmothers (all domestic workers). Check it out here. 

* The child labor estimates are from a 2007 ILO study, when the total population was just below 48 million.

Like a weary protest song that has been marching since the 1960’s

Kae Sun, who we’ve featured on this site before, has just released a new single. With an organ vamp that registers like an extended Prince intro, the interrogative lament wanders over handclaps, and rolling snare drums to give the feel of a weary protest song that has been marching since the 1960’s. Fittingly, the song is called “l o n g w a l k,” and it’s impatient yet resigned feel seems right on time in light of recent mainstream headlines.

The song will be part of Kae Sun’s forthcoming self-titled EP. Follow him on Soundcloud, Twitter, or check up on his website to stay in the loop on when it drops.

If you find yourself in the US’s Northeast this March 28th, head over to Yale University’s Africa Salon Concert, where he will be performing alongside Just a Band and Jean Grae.

Like a weary protest song who has been marching since the 1960’s

Kae Sun, who we’ve featured on this site before, has just released a new single. With an organ vamp that registers like an extended Prince intro, the interrogative lament wanders over handclaps, and rolling snare drums to give the feel of a weary protest song who has been marching since the 1960’s. Fittingly, the song is called “l o n g w a l k,” and it’s impatient yet resigned feel seems right on time in light of recent mainstream headlines:

The song will be part of Kae Sun’s forthcoming self-titled EP. Follow him on Soundcloud, Twitter, or check up on his website to stay in the loop on when it drops.

If you find yourself in the US’s Northeast this March 28th, head over to Yale University’s Africa Salon Concert, where he will be performing alongside Just a Band and Jean Grae.

The fantastical texture of the everyday in E. C. Osondu’s novel: This House is Not for Sale

The Nigerian fantasist, D.O. Fagunwa, didn’t think much of realist fiction. How difficult can it be to mirror life, he asks in a little known 1960 essay published in a teacher’s magazine. Realist fiction, he concludes, involves little more than shopping around for stories that already exist in life and reformatting them into a novel.

If you’re squirming at Fagunwa’s idea that life presents itself in readymade stories, it’s most likely because you’re thinking of what everyone from Aristotle to Virginia Woolf has told us—that life appears in the form of scattered, incoherent bits of incidents, which the uber-imaginative novelist rearranges into narrative.

You clearly did not grow up in a Nigerian city where everyday life serves as the stage for spectacular dramas and miraculous events, where every neighborhood has its fair share of characters and crazies—the white-garment church pastor, the dodgy police man, the mad man with his thing hanging out, the prostitute, the political thug, the old soldier, the witchdoctor, the quack pharmacist, the old lady who everyone thinks is a witch, the Phd holder without a job, and so on. Life with these archetypes existed in a continuum of the hilarious, the surreal, and the bat-shit crazy.

This fantastical texture of the everyday—including the strange catalogue of characters it produces—is what E. C. Osondu captures brilliantly in his debut novel, This House is Not for Sale (2015), an urban tale about a house and its aging patriarch. The house, which is in some sense the principal character in the novel, is set up as the stage on which a series of isolated scenes carved out of a classic Nigerian working class neighborhood are played out.

The narrator doesn’t quite say, but we know the house is in an Oceanside city—the Atlantic to be precise, which would make it Lagos. Given that the military is still in power, we could place the novel somewhere around late the ‘80s or early ‘90s. People on the outside say the house is evil. But that doesn’t quite capture what is strange about it. It’s not haunted either, like a gothic mansion. And even though it is located in a city, the story of its origins is buried in legend and folklore.

Osondu’s work is not entirely a novel in the conventional sense of a single story idea or narrative problem unfolding through time. We are not following the life and times a set of characters from beginning to end. This House is Not for Sale is, instead, a collage of stories centered on strange characters loosely related by their having stayed at the house at some point and having had some dealings with the enigmatic old man called Grandpa.

Each of the fourteen or so stories captures only a fragment of one character’s life told in a short chapter of sometimes as little as 2000 words. If you’re a character in Osondu’s novel, you get one quick shot at basking in the spotlight, after which you disappear from the story, never to be mentioned again.

Because the novel captures only a small bit of each person’s life, the stories often leave you hanging. They are incomplete and piecemeal. You want more. You want more because you realize that each story is a teaser and could easily be a novel on its own, but Osondu—possibly relishing the daemonic pleasure of living you hanging—has chosen to give you only a glimpse of what could have been.

This fragmentary structure of the novel works. It gives one the perverse pleasure of reading a novel that refuses to be a novel. Like Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, each of the stories in Osondu’s work are somewhat linked together, but they hold on jealously to their uniqueness, their incompleteness, and their refusal to coalesce into one continuous “whole story.”

This House is Not for Sale is artistically aware and experimental without trying too hard. The novel is also unapologetically literary. It’s not trying to make some grand point about politics and society. If you’re hankering for an issues-driven novel, feel free to move on to the “poverty porn” section. This House is not for Sale is all about masterful storytelling and a delightful reading experience.

And because the novel is so petite—182 pages—and made up of short dramatic vignettes, it is quite impossible to get bored reading it.

Which Art History in Africa?

Reading Eddie Chambers’ thoughts on African diaspora art history brought home my own struggle of writing on contemporary art in East Africa. I burst out laughing when he, pretty much, joked about the reality of writing on very recent events: “Those of us who work in the realm of African diaspora art history—in my own case, with a particular emphasis on British-based art practice—are constantly faced with the curious, absurd, but sobering challenge of researching that which happened, in a manner of speaking, very recently.” This means, of course, that his writing on late 20th century Black Artists in Britain challenges an art history, that is, both white and centuries old. Chambers reminded me of a very real challenge. Is historical writing on art in Africa available?

Beyond the fancy, glossy, pages of art history books, are African artists (more so, East African artists), whose modern and contemporary art work is practically unrecorded. By unrecorded, I do not mean this literally. Yes, their work is recorded, but really not publicly, instead it is personally recorded, or through collective and personal memory. In this sense, for any writer, or researcher, available writing on these artists, many of whom are living on the continent, is quite unusual. As a result of this, as an art writer working in Africa, I have no available model to craft an entire practice of writing books on contemporary art in Uganda.

When asked what art critics I read to inform my own practice, I am dumbfounded by the fact that my own reading has consisted of white American and French theorists from the 1970s. This often follows with a doubtful look asking: what exactly do you know about Ugandan art? It is as if reading Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’, Roland Barthes’ ‘Camera Lucida’, Jacques Derrida’s ‘Writing and Difference’, Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ and Michel Foucault’s ‘The Order of Things’ places my knowledge of contemporary art (theory) in the West. Yet, this, I have discovered is not unusual for anyone writing on contemporary art in East Africa.

The conversation on contemporary art in Africa, often, overwhelms the art itself, which gets lost in there, somewhere. Some of the most quoted documentations of contemporary art in Africa in recent years are not only difficult to read, but they say little to nothing about the art itself. Yet, again, this is not unusual from writing on contemporary art in Africa, or in the African diaspora. Chambers complaining about the naming of African diaspora art history says: “It seemed to me that there were things, and there were black things; there was history, and then there was black history; there was art, and there was black art.” Chambers goes on to point out how Kobena Mercer’s series on African diaspora art has been named and gives a recommendation in how this could change:

Instead of Cosmopolitan Modernism, Discrepant Abstraction, Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, and Exiles, Diasporas, and Strangers, perhaps the books’ titles should have been along the lines of Modernism, Abstraction, Pop Art, and so on.

Achille Mbembe’s article ‘Afropolitanism’ published in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Africa Remix (2004) comes to mind. And while that show included the phenomenal work of contemporary artists as wide ranging as Cheri Samba, Wangechi Mutu, Julie Mehretu, El Anatsui, and Goddy Leye, the text referred more closely to a theoretical cultural context—one which has been taken up more in African literary debates by writers like Binyavanga Wainaina.

The Portrait of Mali (2012), the monograph on Malian photographer Malick Sidibe opens with a self-titled text by Sabrina Zannier, which discusses how—and maybe why—anthropological approaches teach us anything at all about contemporary art in Africa. She discusses among other things: Sidibe as a storyteller in the rural setting among his goats and sheep. Yet, to contradict the story, in true manner of art writing on contemporary art in Africa, she does not escape discussing Roland Barthes extensively in relation to Sidibe’s photographs.

Yet, perhaps, some authors have struck a balance that works. Coco Fusco’s essay, The Bodies That Were Not Ours, published in Nka Journal in 1996, was striking in its discussion the black male body in contemporary photography. In comparison to the two texts mentioned above, it reads more like a personal journal on the black body in performance art. The essay was collected in a book of the same title published under Routledge along with other essays by Fusco.

Some authors seem to present an overview from a logistical standpoint, while addressing issues of politics and contemporary art practice. Author Candice Breitz, in a rather balanced viewpoint of the much critiqued 1st Johannesburg Biennale, Africus, wrote about its position in a political and logistical framework: “It is in the spirit of slow reconstruction and transformation that the first Johannesburg Biennale should be received; not as a polished event, but as an unfolding process, a work in progress.”

Worth mentioning are two exciting volumes of art writing on contemporary art in Africa. One is ‘Contemporary African Art’ by Sidney Kasfir (2000), and another is ‘Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to Market Place’ (1999) edited by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwenzor. 

The writer, or researcher, on art in East Africa will read, first and foremost, political texts. No doubt that a text such as Franz Fanon’s ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ is fundamental reading. Mahmood Mamdani’s‘Citizen and Subject’ comes to mind, as well. Then, the writer will read philosophical texts. Regardless of which part of Africa, religion will most certainly come upfront. ‘Artist, The Ruler’ by Okotp’Bitek will appear to be fundamental reading for East African art writers. That 1986 text argues from the position that we must abandon Christianity in order to appreciate African aesthetics.

Then, the writer will read art historical texts. From East Africa, again, the one canonical text they will read is the catalogue of the 1995 exhibition: Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, curated by Clementine Deliss. Yes, I know what you are thinking. The truth is that such a reading plan speaks of art, but in very technical terms. In more elaborate terms, if reading on art in Africa is for those who have gone to graduate school, it is no wonder that this information remains unavailable in local libraries, schools, bookshops, homes, and personal libraries across the continent. If history must become available it should be readable.

The real difficulty, for any art writer on the continent, is to know about exhibitions and artworks that happened, as Eddie Chambers says, quite very recently. If going to library archives, and personal libraries, is insufficient, they must go to find the actual artists who were in these exhibitions. The art writer, here, ceases to be a critic of current exhibitions and art productions, but they become a kind of curious “mad person” digging up the past. They go on an obscure, exciting, ridiculous adventure.

The available encounter with contemporary art in Africa is, today, shaped by moral and aesthetic postmodern philosophy from France and America. One doesn’t, in the most formal sense of an art catalogue, exhibition, or critical review, encounter art in Africa without, first being bombarded by colonial and postcolonial theories named above. At times, and often, art curators and writers turn even further back to Hegel, Kant, Leibniz, Hume, and even earlier to Artistotle! Even today, the encounter with art in Africa is shaped by a trajectory of Western philosophical discourse.

Therefore, how can I, as a writer on art in Africa, encounter the subject in new and exciting ways? How can I write about a 1977 artwork by a Ugandan or Kenyan sculptor or performance artist, aware of not only its postcolonial baggage, but also more precisely the wider body of cultural expression in which it was produced? How can I, as a writer, make culture in the 70s more available, palatable, readable?

From recent publications such as ‘Word! Word? Word! – IssaSamb and the Undeciferable Form’ a monograph on IssaSamb of the Sengalese art group Laboratoire Agit’ Art, curated by Koyo Kouohat Raw Material Company in Dakar, Senegal; the new monograph on ‘J. D. Okhai Ojeikere’ curated by Olabisi Silva at the Center for Contemporary Art, Lagos;  ‘Ibrahim El Salahi: A Visionary Modernist,’ the monograph on the Sudanese modern artist Ibrahim El Salahi, written by Salah Hassan; a 54 countries Cultural Encyclopedia curated by Nana Offoriata Ayim at the Center for Cultural Research in Accra, Ghana. My encounter with visual art, here, exists in broader ways, that engage life, history, culture, fashion, architecture, poetry, popular music, and other forms of existence. Reading ‘Word!’ I am exposed to Issa Samb’s originally handwritten manifesto; I am for the first time reading a play that the artist wrote (which are real insights into the working methods of Laboratoire Agit’ Art); I am for the first time reading the poetry of Samb, an artist still stigmatized in Dakar for his political views under an earlier postcolonial regime. Reading ‘Ojeikere’ I am exposed to not only the famous 1970s ‘Hairstyle series’ but I am taken on a journey to see how ‘Pa Ojeikere’ (as he is fondly known in Lagos), made his work as an accurate and nuanced document of the times in which he lived.

These books, are not simply glossy art books, they are documents that show the exciting possibilities of artistic research, and the importance of innovative research in the writing process. Only when art writers on the continent become more adventurous and daring in their research, making choices that aren’t preaching to the choir of postcoloniality, will we discover a fuller and richer encounter with art in Africa.

Was Gilles Cistac murdered to make Frelimo look bad?

Some say that Gilles Cistac was murdered to make Frelimo look bad. If that was the objective, they succeeded. On Thursday the Frelimo spokesperson, sounding like a wounded buffalo, in trembling voice, accused the social media of blaming the Party for the assassination without justification.

Saturday’s march was the perfect opportunity to demonstrate the Party’s solidarity with the people and its abhorrence of what its press and media call a “barbarous act”. The march started peacefully from the site of the murder with the only outward signs of turbulence taking place around the car handing out free “Je suis Gilles Cistac” T shirts. The crowd was not huge but it was a good turnout of a broad cross-section of society from young students, Muslims, government functionaries to the ageing and increasingly disillusioned cooperantes who remembered quite a different Frelimo from their time, as I did when I first came here in 1982.

The march was very well-organized, setting off in separate blocks, led by a lead chanter with megaphone, urging us to accompany him or her. Ours struggled with French, shouting out – inadvertently underscoring the sacrifice – “Jesus Gilles Cistac.”  The atmosphere was of subdued camaraderie. As we moved slowly along the ironically named Rua de Martires de Machava, we stopped to pay homage to the previous victim of this street – Carlos Cardoso. On Avenida de Zimbabwe we had a minute’s silence for Gilles followed by a very long and impassioned applause. We then snaked around and congregated in front of the Faculty of Law where Gilles lectured. Brief eulogies were given and we were then directed to the Praça de Independência.

The march was dignified and calm and I was thankful that at least in Maputo the police would not be so stupid  as to stop the march as they had so absurdly done in Beira two days earlier to the incredulity of all. I had expected senior Frelimo cadres to join to show solidarity and demonstrate that Nyusi’s government is much closer to the people than his predecessor and that they, too, were horrified with the act. But on consulting with a well-informed journalist, apart from Abdul Carim (who was more likely to have been there due to his involvement with civil society), not one notable personality had pitched – a far cry from Hollande and the mayor of Paris, leading the Je suis Charlie rallies. Their absence was difficult to comprehend as it would have been so easy to extend a hand of sympathy and help bring Frelimo back to the povo after its last 8 years of aloofness and arrogance.

No one expected what followed – riot police blocked the two sides of Avenida Kenneth Kaunda in shining new bullet proof vests, shielded helmets and serious looking rifles, hopefully only for firing tear gas but that was not certain. We were all shocked and some extremely angry, chanting “Vergonha!” (Shame!), “O Policia é de Povo” (The Police are the People), “Assasinos” (Assassins), etc.  A brave protester wagged his finger in one’s face saying that, once demobilized, he would be part of “us” but that “we” would not forget his treachery to the people. A very nasty looking  short Napoleonic commander kept walking up and down the ranks giving furtive finger signals. Tear gas canisters were ominously loaded. The situation was tense, and being only a metre away, I warily moved off to the side with a prickling feeling of fear crawling up my back. In the end we all walked home, with some degree of contentment knowing that what just happened would give much more attention to the march than if it had just peacefully continued without incident. But it seems that Frelimo just continues to shoot itself in the foot.

The coming weeks will mark Nyusi’s first hundred days in power. And, as is traditionally done following elections, all government departments are thrown into a flurry to get as much accomplished during that time (so that the new government can demonstrate its commitment to the people) before settling back to their usual pace. Where I am working part-time, there is a tremendous rush to hand out as many outboard motors as possible to lucky fishermen. No matter how many fishermen get motors, the Nyusi government will be more remembered for its public relations blunders with media images of Darth Vader-like policemen blocking a peaceful march in honour of a slain academic – shocking the world and  an increasingly disenfranchised Mozambican public.