Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 366
February 9, 2015
Here are our Africa Cup of Nations 2015 Awards
That was AFCON 2015. It was like 1992 all over again. The Ivorians are African champions after a nerve-shredding penalty shoot-out, and a Black Stars side led by an outstanding Number 10 named A. Ayew are still waiting for the cup after 32 years. The tournament was a bit of a weird one, like a cantankerous old uncle whose grouching plays on your nerves, but is full of surprises. Here’s our rundown of the best things about AFCON 2015.
Best quote: Boubacar “Copa” Barry, Cote d’Ivoire’s much-maligned veteran goalie (and alleged Tupac lookalike), who saved two penalties and scored the decisive kick, having twice lost AFCON finals on penalties. A triumph that would melt the hardest heart, and then, in his post-match interview, this:
Boubacar Barry after winning AFCON '15:
"I am not big in size or talent. But I thought of my mother who loves me" #mA pic.twitter.com/OeAt2n5Ib3
— Muslim Footballers (@TheAMF) February 8, 2015
Best player: Serge Aurier. The dogged, skilfull Ivorian right-back was awful in his first match, and divine for the rest of the tournament. Apparently he had to shave his beard off in the dressing room after the final (he wasn’t the only victim of enforced hair removal, as we shall see.)
Best fan: Didier Drogba. We’re not sure if this instagram post of the great man watching Copa Barry slot the final penalty is the greatest thing ever posted to instagram, but it’s in the top one.
Best coach: Florent Ibengé. Took DRC to the semis and added a touch of class throughout, in a tournament stacked with mediocre foreign coaches. Plus Herve Renard can’t get to win everything. Ibengé’s players obviously loved him.
Personality of the tournament: This award had to be shared. First, there was Gervinho. He started by punching Naby Keita, finished by hiding behind the bench during the shootout. Yes, there were some memes.
And then, of course, there was DRC goalkeeper Robert Kidiaba. We already knew about his famous bum shuffle goal celebration, and got to see it over and over again as DRC kept scoring. This was how he celebrated clinching 3rd place:
The highlight came just before that. As he was facing Equatorial Guinea’s star player, Javier Balboa, Kidiaba, 39, casually pulled off a perfect back-flip. Balboa blazed his effort wide.
Best goal: Mandla Masango for Bafana vs Ghana. This was the best AFCON goal in a long, long time. Shades of James Rodriguez’s famous goal in the World Cup — watch how Masango has just gotten back onto his feet as he strikes the ball. Incredible. Unfortunately for Bafana, this was as good as it got.
Best game: DR Congo 4-2 Congo. There won’t be a better 45 minutes of football than the 2nd half of that one for years. Jude Wanga wrote a memorable post for the LRB about it, here’s a snippet:
When DRC went 2-0 down, less than twenty minutes into the second half, the colourful language broke out. Lingala has seven vowels and 29 consonants, and my family put them all to good use criticising the defence. New and inventive ways of swearing were learned by all. My aunt shouted that there were children present. It had no effect. Then came 25 minutes of pure magic. A dramatic and scarcely believable four-goal comeback saw Congo collapse against their stronger neighbours. I gave up tweeting just before the third goal. When Dieumerci Mbokani sealed the win in the 90th minute, the living room erupted. Six different languages were being spoken at once.
Reports began pouring in of people taking to the streets in DRC. Car horns blared in Kinshasa, roads were packed in Goma. DRC were through to the semi-finals for the first time since 1998, and people were in the mood to celebrate. Ibenge’s name rang out in the streets of Kinshasa, children ran around waving flags, even people carrying the dead home to prepare for the customary period of mourning got caught up in the celebrations.
I spoke to my father on the phone after the match. He told me he had known all along we would win. He is 79 years old, and has lived through two coups and two civil wars. ‘The Congolese are a resilient people,’ he said. ‘Look at our history. Look all we have been through. We are never beaten. We will never be beaten. We will always go forward.’
Best tweet: This was a tie as well:
Herve Renard. Post-colonial African hero with a job for life somewhere in Africa. He’s like a World Bank employee. Uh oh. #AFCON2015
— Miriti Murungi (@NutmegRadio) February 8, 2015
My people may not have access to good schools or clean water, but look at the amazing stadium I built for #AFCON2015! pic.twitter.com/pYUjMxIwvS
— President Obiang (@PresidentObiang) February 8, 2015
Baldest studio analyst: Sammy Kuffour. He bet that his Black Stars would win. They didn’t. He was shaved live on SuperSport. First by Robert Marawa, and then by a specially appointed Nigerian barber. We couldn’t find a vine of it, probably because of Eskom.
Best hair: The one and only Yannick Bolasie. He was fantastic throughout, a wonderful addition to AFCON, and another good reason to celebrate CAF’s inspired decision to invite fans to present man-of-the-match awards to the players. This resulted in some truly epic player-fan encounters:
Rogue’s Gallery: The medal ceremony: Issa Hayatou, Teodoro Obiang, Sepp Blatter.That’s a lot of autocrats for just one stage. Life presidents of FIFA, CAF & Equatorial Guinea. In power longer than these players have been alive. As usual, the beautiful game had to triumph in spite of those in charge.
Abderrahmane Sissako’s film Timbuktu complicates the Jihadist narrative
Timbuktu, a new film from acclaimed Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako has won a string of international awards , is nominated for a foreign-language Oscar, and is a firm favorite to take the best film award at FESPACO . We decided to publish a few reviews of this momentous film.
Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu begins with a scene of a truck of armed jihadists chasing a gazelle. One screams to the other, “Don’t kill it. Tire it out.” It’s a fitting metaphor for the occupation of northern Mali. For, it represents the gradual, often confounding, regulations and punishments that jihadists enforced in the name of shari’a. It also represents the physical, economic, and emotional exhaustion that so many Timbuktians experienced under the occupation.
Timbuktu, which opened in the United States on January 28, centers on a Tuareg family living in a tent on the outskirts of Timbuktu. Both honor and fatigue make the family reluctant to flee with their family and friends. This leaves them worried and lonely. It also makes them vulnerable to the jihadist regime, as well as fellow Timbuktians, who are equally frightened and on edge. But the film also highlights other residents—including locals and jihadists—as they negotiate the demands of the occupation.
Many film critics have lauded Timbuktu as a “visual masterpiece,” praising Sissako’s use of vast landscapes and captivating cityscapes. However, the cinematography accomplishes more than stunning images. Instead, it evokes the loneliness, confusion, desperation and sense of abandonment that so many Timbuktians experienced. Who could they rely upon and trust aside from the few who remained? How were residents to gauge the jihadists’ often conflicting motives?
Others critics have also applauded the film’s supposed comedic and satirical script. Such praise is somewhat misleading in my opinion. Timbuktu does not portray the jihadists—at least not all of them—as either purely ideological or bumbling buffoons. Many are depicted as critical thinkers in their own way. Others—(former) lovers of rap music and soccer—are depicted as youths who are way over their heads. Contrary to certain criticism following the Charlie Hebdo attack, however, this is not to suggest that Sissako is an apologist for extremism. Far from it. Instead, he depicts the jihadists as real, not as a caricature.
Sissako also demonstrates local resistance to shari’a. He includes a scene of a fishmonger critiquing new regulations that force her to wear gloves. And he includes another of lower-level jihadists searching for singers and guitar players. Some viewers and critics find these scenes amusing, and perhaps they were partially intended to be. Nonetheless, rules enforcing public veiling and prohibiting music were far from amusing to the Timbuktians with whom I worked in 2013. And as Sissako accurately illustrates, the jihadists brutally countered these local expressions of resistance.
Timbuktu is not a documentary… which is not to suggest that it should be. The film excellently depicts many of the hardships that Timbuktians encountered under the occupation. It also excellently depicts the numerous creative ways in which locals—particularly women—subtly and not so subtly rejected shari’a. But viewers should remember that Timbuktu is very much in medias res. Aside from a scene of a brief conversation with a Tuareg mercenary from Libya, there is little historical or regional context, which is perhaps a means to avoid a more complicated discussion of the role of the MNLA and Tuareg-led independence movements. Furthermore, the occupiers are regularly referred to as “jihadists”. This is surely what they called themselves. And it also facilitates Sissako’s critique of religious extremism. Nonetheless, I think it’s important to consider that most Timbuktians themselves refused to identify the occupiers with Islam. Almost every time I referred to them as “jihadists” or “Islamists”, my friends would (sometimes angrily) correct me, saying, “No, these people know nothing about Islam. This is not Islam. They are terrorists, pure and simple.” Of course, it’s not that simple. But it is important to reflect upon this local perspective while viewing Timbuktian characters on screen critique the occupation.
Many of my Timbuktian friends were disappointed that Timbuktu’s global transformation from “mythical town” to “real place” occurred as a result of terrorism. Similarly, I find it somewhat unfortunate that this is the context for what is more or less the town’s contemporary cinematic debut. Nonetheless, Sissako tells an incredibly accurate story of Timbuktu. Without romanticizing it, we find an urban center that is also equal parts Sahara Desert and Niger River. We find a place of ethnic and linguistic diversity that has historically championed cosmopolitanism and more moderate expressions of religion. What Sissako’s Timbuktu highlights—and perhaps this is the film’s most important lesson—is that, despite inflammatory rhetoric that suggests otherwise, those in the West are not those most affected by terrorism. Those who are regularly forced to confront such violence are in Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, Somalia, Libya, not to mention Syria and Iraq… places that rarely make it into the Western press.
February 6, 2015
#SAHipHop2014: When South African Hip Hop Met The Internet
It’s all my father’s fault!
Sometime towards the end of the nineties, I remember him bringing along a heavy-set, pale-skinned man into our home during a lunch break from work. The man wore one of those green-gray shirts which only come in size XL and above, a pair of shorts, and veldskoens. This look rendered him more a farmer than a technician who’d come to fiddle with our computer.
He asked for the telephone end-point, the one onto which the telephone receiver gets plugged in, and began fiddling with that too. In no time, I’d figured out that either that evening or the next day (it all depended on ‘activation time’), I’d be able to access ohhla, spitkicker, and a small fortune of websites I’d only heard of or read about. The World Wide Web had landed on my desktop at a record-breaking speed of 56kbps and I was going to usher in every bit of it!
Around 2002, I was set in my ways; I’d become an Internet-dependent delinquent prowling night and day for hyperlinks to rap music websites which I’d spot on magazines, see written at the end of television shows, and hear as they were announced radio. It was during these solitary digging missions that I discovered Africasgateway. Almost instantaneously, I fell in love with its forums – a buzzing community of like-minded heads waxing fanatical about rap music from the African continent and beyond.
“I’m from an area of South Africa that is very secluded in many ways,” says Rushay Booysen – community activist, public speaker, connector, and Internet prowler of note. Rushay was an early adopter of Africasgateway and its forums. Speaking over a Skype connection from his house in Port Elizabeth, he shares invaluable information about the website which was founded by Shane Heusdens, a Dutch national who’d migrated to Cape Town from Namibia in 1989.
Rushay was alerted of Africasgateway’s existence by his then-girlfriend who understood just how much he loved hip hop and desired to connect with like-minded heads from all over the world. It’s the same desire which still informs his world view to this day. Through Internet communities, Rushay has connected with heads from all over the world.
“When you looked at the web at that time and you [didn’t] know the specifics and the dynamics of running or hosting a website, it just [looked] like a corporation. It [didn’t] look like it could be one person doing that thing,” says Rushay.
He drafted an e-mail introducing himself and stating his intention to get involved and sent it over to Milk (short for Milkdaddy, Shane’s alias on the website). Milk, whom Rushay had spoken to over the phone a few years earlier, responded by inviting him over to his house in Cape Town. “He had this coloured accent,” he recalls.
“I just took a bus to Cape Town and knocked on the guy’s door,” he adds.
Arriving in Cape Town, Rushay’s perception of how Milkdaddy might look was completely altered. Milk was still living with his wife at that time; she’s the one who opened the door when he knocked.
“You meet this woman with her husband and it’s a white dude, a white Dutch [who] grew up in Namibia. It was just like ‘this is crazy!’” says Rush, relaying the shock of that initial meeting.
Other website at the time
Africasgateway didn’t exist in isolation. There was also Africanhiphop and Hip Hop Headrush (HHH). The latter is the first ever website to exclusively documenting South African Hip Hop and the culture around it. The site was last updated in September 2007.
Africanhiphop, Milkdaddy notes, is what inspired Africasagateway. He’d connected with its founder, an Amsterdam native called Thomas Gesthuizen, through music exchanges.
“He was interested in stuff coming from where I was [Cape Town], so I would send him stuff that I would come across, and he would send me stuff from the Netherlands or from [wherever], you know?”says Milk, who’d begun teaching himself how to code using html while not working his day job.
Milk registered the domain name and started populating the website with local hip hop news and album reviews. In true web 1.0 fashion, the site was static, meaning he had to manually update all sections everytime new content became available. Eventually, he decided to use a Content Management System (CMS), enabling Africasgateway to scale well with increasing traffic. Forum functionality could be enabled within the CMS. “The forums [were] primarily just about local African music, African hip hop. And then it just went massive. I mean, it got so large at one point it was…I had to move servers several times,” says Milk.
A community of users could log in and partake in any of the topics being discussed – anything from general issues, to audio production-related discussions, to rap battles, to epic discussions about the latest rap releases. Initially, users could comment anonymously on the thread, but a username was later required as a means of discouraging trolls.
South Africa-born, UK-based Massdosage of HHH was a Computer Science student at Rhodes University during the mid-nineties. The website was an off-shoot of a prototype he’d built while hosting the Hip Hop Headrush on RMR, Rhodes’ campus radio. He’d publish the show’s tracklisting on the website and, occasionally, put up “a really bad, short [real-time] audio clip” for people to listen to and/or download. This was late 1995.
He completed his studies and moved back home to Johannesburg where he started work at a multimedia company in 1999.
“The account I had at Rhodes was going to get closed. I had to keep paying for it but I was like ‘what’s the point?’ But then I realised I was going to lose the web space,” says Massdosage of the free server space allotted to him while still a student. He decided against letting the website go, aided in part by the potential he saw in the Johannesburg media space. He had contacts who helped him with interviews. “I thought we can make this bigger than just the radio show,” says Massdosage.
After trying and failing to register hhh.co.za (the initials of his radio show), he began thinking of alternatives. It turned out that hiphop.co.za was available so he snapped it up, got a designer with whom he completely overhauled the website, then went live in 1999.
Massdosage would go to events at clubs like 206 to film the likes of DJ Ready D during their performances. Through the website, he was able to host a live chat with Dead Prez during the South African leg of their Black August tour.
“I’d also get certain artists to give me songs to put on-line, to distribute. But I would always discuss it with them first…it was like promotion for them,” he says. These artists included the P.E.R.M collective (Zee, Strawmoon, Space2wice, Kju52, Tumi, Richard III, McWillie, Neo Shamiyaa, and Diliseng), Skwatta Kamp, and the late Mizchif.
Rushay recalls this period: “[Massdosage] was the one guy running the site, he was updating it. It was very basic, but it allowed us to share. We did an event, we shared photos, we shared the story of the event. It was this sharing platform which was one of the first of its kind in South Africa.”
The status quo
Nowadays, Africasgateway is but a shadow of its former self. It succumbed to the ripple effects of Myspace and Facebook.
“Having sites that had that control—not the control but like, where you could kind of congregate everybody—everything just kind of like went flat. And so that’s when the site just kind of died. And a lot of sites around the world went the same way,” says Milk of the website’s demise.
Africanhiphop.com is still being updated, but is more active on twitter. They have archived their once-vibrant forums which helped in facilitating many a cross-continental collaborative projects.
There are more websites and blogs focused on posting South African Hip Hop-related content, from the African Hip Hop Blog’s editorials, to Heavyword’s snapshots of the latest gems. Chekadigital, more a lifestyle blog which sometimes focuses on hip hop, is also doing its bit, as are blogs like Kasi Music Kona, Sistersnrap, and others.
Slikour Metane, solo artist and [former?] member of Skwatta Kamp (and participant to the Africasgateway community) runs a (Jay Z’s) Life + Times-style blog focused on easy-to-digest content. “I am not a blogger, but I love the music, so if I am going to write it with my bad writing skills, know that I did it for the music. I haven’t even scratched the surface as it is a five-year plan,” he told one publication in an interview.
Phiona Okumu was a contributor to Hip Hop Headrush in its heydays. Nowadays, when she’s not travelling the world, she writes about urban African music for The Guardian and is part-owner of Afripop. As one of the earlier purveyors of South African Hip Hop writing, both on-line and in print, does she see a future for the movement on-line?
“I can’t imagine why not,” she responds via e-mail. “South Africa has had no real definitive Internet place for hip hop to call home since the days of hiphopheadrush or [Africasgateway].”
Phiona points out that it’s not only with hip hop, but “with pretty much all the urban musics.” She recalls the days of the Black Rage Productions-owned rage.co.za, and says it’s strange that “no site has taken up the baton to represent SA urban culture in the way that Rage did.” (Black Rage went under with the 2008 financial crisis).
“Today, for better or for worse, anyone with a WordPress and the time can set up shop. That’s why it blows my mind that there aren’t more kids doing it,” she says after noting that the Internet was a different place during the days of Rage. She also credits artists such as Okmalumkoolkat whose on-line presence has been instrumental in catapulting them to mainstream acclaim.
Journalist Mookho Makhetha expresses another view in her article entitled For the love of music:
As large as the online music blogosphere is, it is still left on the fringes of “normal” life. Most bloggers have day jobs and do not have the resources to invest in exhaustive tales about an artist’s music. Some blogs while engaging and well-written (even better than most journalistic pieces) do not have access to the artists. That music writing is not a worthwhile pursuit, that it is something that one does in their spare time and will often play second fiddle to people’s “real” careers is precisely the problem.
We should be recording this
The comparatively low costs of webhosting coupled with the rise of blogs and social media have democratised the playing field for South African Hip Hop. It’s important to recall a time when this was not so, and to celebrate the prospects and promise of a South African Hip Hop which fully embraces the internet. As it stands, most artists treat these platforms as a stopover, a mere mask to cover up their ultimate desire to congregate at the behest of radio and television so as to feel like their music genuinely matters. Phiona, in closing says:
Many from my generation feel like there was something of a golden era that played out between 2003-2004. I think that now, ten years later, the real dawn of an era is happening where for once, hip hop is being given the same weight as Kwaito was. We should be recording this…
Footnote: both Milkdaddy and Juma 4 of Africanhiphop.com reference Shamiel Adams (alias Shamiel X, formerly of the DJ collective The Beatbangaz) as having influenced them to start their individual websites. Attempts to get input from him proved unsuccessful.
Digital Archive No. 12 – The African Rock Art Digital Archive
Last summer, I got the chance to visit the Origins Museum on the University of the Witswatersrand campus in Johannesburg. A major feature of the Museum’s collection is an installation of San rock art. As the Rock Art Research Institute’s website attests, rock art is a key medium through which to understand our collective pasts (pasts which evade the written word).
The Rock Art Research Institute (RARI), based at the University of the Witswatersrand in Johannesburg, aims to not only research Africa’s rock art, but also to publicize, preserve, and conserve these treasures. And one of the ways that they have worked to achieve these aims is through the South African Rock Art Digital Archive.
Some of the images from RARI are available through the Google Cultural Institute. But while the Google collection only contains five images, this site contains over 270,000 images of rock art from 30 institutions around the world. The digitization of the RARI collections began in 2002, thanks to funding from the Ringing Rocks Foundation. In developing their preservation schema and digitization methods, this organization realized it could use their newfound expertise to preserve other private and institutional collections, including materials owned by the Analysis of Rock Art of Lesotho project, Iziko Museums of Cape Town, Natal Museum, National Museum, University of Cape Town, and the University of South Africa (the specific collections and their digitization dates can be found on this page). This collaborative venture (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) resulted in the website that you can access today.
South African Rock Art Digital ArchiveSouth African Rock Art Digital ArchiveSouth African Rock Art Digital ArchiveSouth African Rock Art Digital Archive South African Rock Art Digital Archive South African Rock Art Digital ArchiveSouth African Rock Art Digital Archive
There are multiple ways to navigate the site, which are laid out in these guidelines on how to search the database. The most straightforward way to explore the archive is through the Browse options. You can search by subject (ranging from animals to equipment to human figures), traditions (focusing on African hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists/herders), researchers and institutions, and locations (specifically Southern African public rock art sites–though this project also features rock art from throughout the continent). For those planning trips to Southern Africa, this site also acts as a hub of information for public rock art sites that you can visit (as well as proper etiquette for interacting with the artifacts).
It is useful to go through each browsing function to explore all of the options available, since the organizational scheme of this site seems to obfuscate as much of its content as it presents. For example, there are brief essays with each browsing category that are only accessible if you click through each section. Take, for example, this introductory essay on KhoeKhoe Rock Art. Or this essay on Chewa Rock Art in Malawi and Zambia. On that same note, this is not just, as the title suggests, a South African Rock Art Digital Archive, but an African Rock Art Digital Archive. There are artifacts included from Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Lesotho, Mali, the Sahara, Kenya, and, of course, South Africa. But you do have to dig for them.
Find out how you can get involved with SARADA’s efforts here. You can also follow the Rock Art Research Institute on Facebook.
February 5, 2015
White History Month 2015 is coming and we want your submissions
Last March was the inaugural White History Month here on Africa is a Country, and without tooting too loudly on our own vuvuzela, it was kind of brilliant. So we’re going to do it again.
We featured stuff like Kathleen Bomani’s Leather from Human Skin in 1880s Philadelphia and pulled together a wide range of material, from Britain’s mass torture regime in 1950s Kenya to that time the South African government sent a delegation to the USA to find out how “reservations” worked. Check the whole series here.
White History Month should be a resource for all kinds of people, not just those as confused by history as the likes of Michael Elion. In November, Elion thought it was cool to exploit Nelson Mandela’s struggle against white supremacy, by making a repulsive advertisement for Ray-Bans in Cape Town. That’s him pictured above, after his PR campaign had been converted into something more resembling a piece of art, thanks to some beautiful graffiti by Tokolos Stencil Collective.
Ignorance of White History is real, people, and it leads to all kinds of BS.
This year, we’re inviting Africa is a Country readers (you too, Elion) to contribute to White History Month 2015. Get in touch using editorial [at] africasacountry [dot] com and let us know what you want to write about. Take a look at what was featured last year to get an idea of what we’re looking for.
The inspiration for White History Month comes from a 2007 column in the Nation by Gary Younge.
Here’s what he wrote back then:
… So much of Black History Month takes place in the passive voice. Leaders “get assassinated,” patrons “are refused” service, women “are ejected” from public transport. So the objects of racism are many but the subjects few. In removing the instigators, the historians remove the agency and, in the final reckoning, the historical responsibility … There is no month when we get to talk about [James] Blake [the white busdriver challenged by Rosa Parks]; no opportunity to learn the fates of J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, who murdered Emmett Till; no time set aside to keep track of Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, whose false accusations of rape against the Scottsboro Boys sent five innocent young black men to jail. Wouldn’t everyone–particularly white people–benefit from becoming better acquainted with these histories? What we need, in short, is a White History Month … The very notion of black and white history is both a theoretical nonsense and a practical necessity. There is no scientific or biological basis for race. It is a construct to explain the gruesome reality that racism built. But, logic suggests, you cannot have black history without white history. Of course, the trouble is not that we do not hear enough about white history but that what masquerades as history is more akin to mythology. The contradictions of how a “free world” could be founded on genocide, or how the battle for democracy during the Second World War could coincide with Japanese internment and segregation, for example, are rarely addressed … It would offer white people options and role models and all of us inspiration while relieving the burden on African-Americans to recast the nation’s entire racial history in the shortest month of the year. White people, like black people, need access to a history that is accurate, honest and inclusive. Maybe then it would be easier for them, and the rest of us, to make history that is progressive, antiracist and inclusive.
White History Month 2015 is coming. Someone better tell all those folks who love to whine about how “racist” it is that there isn’t a White History Month.
February 4, 2015
5 Questions for a Filmmaker–Jim Chuchu
Hyper creative visual artist, filmmaker Jim Chuchu lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya, where he was born in 1982 and has lived since. He is the Creative Director at the NEST- a multidisciplinary art space, and a member of the ten people strong collective. In addition, he is also a singer-songwriter and former member of the group Just a band.
Chuchu, who has directed short films – among them two fashion films and one of African Metropolis Project films – is currently working on his first solo exhibition of images and video works, scheduled for May this year. With the NEST, he is working on the Stories of Our Lives book, to be released in March. The film Stories of Our Lives has been selected to the Panorama-section of Berlinale, and is screening four times between February 8 and 14 (see the schedule here).
1) What is your first film memory?
I remember watching a cartoon in a film theater sometime in the 80s. I can’t remember what it was called, but it involved tails and mice, and I was so overwhelmed by the whole thing. I was too little to sit properly on the folding theater seat, I kept falling through the gap in the back and my mother had to pull me out several times.
2) Why did you decide to become a filmmaker?
I was an escapist child, who spent a lot of time in the imaginary. Filmmaking seems to me to be the adult version of the games I used to play when I was a child. Bringing my family at the NEST, stories, pictures and sound together to create something immutable. Lately, I’m starting to discover that film has the capacity to dissect and soften those many, unyielding and convoluted castles of privilege and nonsense that one encounters in the universe of Being Black, and Being African, and Being Different. It’s a capacity that I was only dimly aware of until now, and I am relishing the opportunity to explore it.
3) Which film do you wish you had made and why?
3-Iron; an almost silent film featuring lovers who never speak to each other, mysterious and ambitious, and that deliciously unaffected sleight-of-hand at the end. Breathtaking! When I grow up, I want to make films that are as simple and confident as this.
4) Name one of the films on your top-5 list and the reason why it is there.
I’d always been interested in the story of the Zambia Space Program, and the way those guys were and still are ridiculed. That story was, for me, more evidence of how little room there is for contemporary African dreamers, how pervasive the idea that Science does not (and cannot) belong to Africans and how much fantasy and the unknown are derided as being useless and dangerous for and by the continent.
I heard about ’s Afronauts and waited years (YEARS!) to see it. Because of the way African films work these days, where you’re more likely to see them in Europe than in Africa (sigh), I finally got to see it in Sweden, and it was worth the wait. I haven’t seen anything so spectacular and awe-inspiring, I haven’t seen black bodies move with such grace. My heart was beating fast throughout its 14-minute run-time. This is what film can do; demonstrate the truth of things that are beyond the boundaries we place on black bodies and minds. I met her afterwards and had such a fan-boy moment, rendered absolutely mute!
5) Ask yourself any question you think I should have asked and answer it.
What has the little voice inside your head been saying lately?
Stop resisting chocolate.
February 3, 2015
The protest tradition of Maputo’s masked Mapiko dancers
Signs of Mozambique’s booming economy on the one hand and rising inequality on the other can be noticed all over the country. Now even the welfare of those who have fought for the country’s independence has become subordinate to business interests. The “Zona Militar” in the capital Maputo, where demobilized soldiers from both the independence and civil wars live, is threatened to be demolished to make space for high rises for the rich. But the people found a form of expression for their protest–the Mapiko dance–the focus of a new documentary, “The Sounds of Masks,” which is currently filmed and produced. The dance is part of an initiation ritual of the Makonde from northern Mozambique, during which youths are introduced to the world of adulthood–life and death, social and political struggle. According to University of Western Cape Historian Paolo Israel, the dance features “idioms through which Mozambican youth expresses and negotiates its post-socialist modernity.” How that modernity is negotiated in the context of the threats to the Zona Militar is focus of the film. We spoke to the directors, Sara Gouveia and Kofi Zwana about their project:
What is your new film about?
Our film focuses on a group of Makonde people living in the military zone in Maputo. They were given this land as a reward for fighting in both the independence and civil wars. Ironically, they are currently facing eviction by the very same government they fought for to make way for housing and complexes for the rich.
Using their Mapiko dance, which has become a living archive of their history from colonialism to the present day, we look at this current situation against the backdrop of a longer struggle over time. We will blend poetic observation with experimental dance sequences in order to create a dynamic interpretation of Mozambique’s journey and its peoples’ struggles.
How did you come across the subject for your film?
We came across a particular Mapiko dance group called “Massacre de Mueda” when they performed in Cape Town during the Out Of The Box Festival in 2011. They actually got nominated for “best puppet manipulation”, “for showing how masks are ‘originally’ used in an African ritual context.”
We had been filming some of the shows at the festival with a colleague and we were asked to film the group by Paolo Israel, an anthropologist and Professor at the University of the Western Cape, who had organized for the dancers to come to Cape Town. When we saw the show we knew that there was something really beautiful there that should be taken to a broader audience, but we had no idea how. We are not anthropologists so we knew that we needed something more than the dances to turn this into a film that could travel to a general audience. In 2013, Kofi and I decided to take a chance and travel to Maputo as a holiday/work trip (more work than holiday…) to try to understand if there was a story we could explore using film. At this stage we still believed most of the story would take place in the North of Mozambique, which is where the Makonde people are originally from. But while we were in Maputo interviewing various people in the Zona Militar, we found out about the possible evictions and realized that the story we wanted to tell was right there.
We spent 10 days in Maputo with Atanásio, who has become the main character in our film, and in the community in order to identify the people that could help us tell this story. Atanásio was formally considered one of the best Mapiko dancers in the country and is currently heading up the research department of the National Institute of Dance and Song. It is through his eyes that we are introduced to the Zona, the dance and the history of the country. He is a fiery and passionate character who is not afraid to say what is on his mind, so this fearlessness combined with his anthropology and philosophy background ensures us some challenging discussions and thoughts as we follow the eviction process.
How does music and dance help people who will be expelled from the Zona Militar confront the injustice?
Outside of being a form of expression and celebration, the Mapiko dance has long been used by the Makonde as a form of satire. While they tell many stories of the past to remind the younger generations of their history, they often use the dance to comment on what is happening in the present, and so the dance becomes a form of social commentary and expression. One of the key elements of the Mapiko tradition is its ability to unite people and rally them together which is how we believe the dance will help the community during this struggle.
The Zona Militar is an important historical neighbourhood that is about to be completely remodeled. It sits on one of the richest areas in Maputo, Sommerschield, so it’s very likely that the government will evict them sooner rather than later, as the area has potential for investors and businesses. But some of these people have been living here for more than 30 years. They fought for the country’s independence and fought for the government in the civil war. They have raised their children and grandchildren there. To move them to the outskirts of the city is not only disrespectful to the influence they had in the country’s struggles, but it also means that the people will be split up and the traditional ceremonies they still perform in the Zona will get eventually lost, as they won’t have a “base” anymore. I think we will be able to capture these conflicts through their dances. The Makonde people have been sort of outcasts in the Mozambican context, and keeping certain traditions alive is what allows them to keep hold of their identities in a contemporary, cosmopolitan and modernized Maputo. In the last elections, that took place in October, the newly elected President, Filipe Nyusi, became the first Makonde person to ever hold such a position of power, so we are curious to see whether that will make any difference in the fate of the Zona and how people feel about it.
What has been the reaction of the Maputo administration so far to the people’s protest?
Due to 2014 being an election year, the reaction of the administration has been quiet. The evictions were initially set to happen in 2015, but no specific date was given, so we are trying to follow the news to see if something is confirmed or not. We haven’t had a chance to talk to people in the administration yet but this is the plan for our next trip. It’s really important to us that we get both sides of the conflict because obviously nothing is ever as clear cut as it seems. It’s also important to understand from the administration what the community’s options are. We have watched a couple of interviews with the previous Minister of Defense, who argued that this is the best option for the community at this time, as in the future other people could simply evict them without giving them an alternative, leaving them homeless.
One of our characters, Moisés, suggested that even though they wouldn’t be able to keep their houses and gardens, that the government could at least build blocks of flats in the area and offer them to the current residents, so that they can at least carry on living and working in the center of the city. We are curious to see if that will become a possibility. That would be a small victory, but a victory nonetheless, the other options are far worse.
In your view, what do the problems of the people in the film say about the broader struggles Mozambique lives through currently?
Mozambique is going through a lot of changes. Since they have found oil and natural gas in the country there have been a number of foreign investors interested in exploring these opportunities. Though this will help grow their economy we fear that more of these eviction cases will happen throughout the country and the gap between rich and poor will grow even further. So in a sense, this story looks at the present and in a strange way also predicts the future of people living in similar situations. Unfortunately, this is not only happening in Mozambique. Gentrification has been happening in many cities around the globe, so we think this story works as a microcosm that can open up discussion about a much bigger problem.
The film will be released sometime in 2016. Receive updates on the production process on the film’s facebook page. The film is being produced by Lionfish Productions.
February 2, 2015
Football, Disappearances and Disasters in Haiti
Tonton Macoute is the bogeyman of Haitian myth that steals misbehaving children in the dead of night into immortal slavery. That’s why, during the 1960’s, the members of a 25,000-member paramilitary group that carried out President for Life François “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s every vindictive whim, were known as Macoutes. Their official name was the Milice Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale (MVSN). They stole away citizens displaying signs of political dissent to torture, dismember, or disappear them. Women were routinely raped by the MVSN to subdue rural protests and tanks of acid were specially prepared for political prisoners.
One of its unfortunate victims just so happened to be one of Haiti’s greatest football heroes. Joseph Edouard “Joe” Gaetjens was born in 1924 straight into the cushioned arms of the (minuscule and prominently white) German-Haitian elite. His lineage can be traced back to a business emissary sent to the island by King Frederick William III of Prussia. This German elite, while remaining an incredibly small percentage, was and still is staunchly in control of much of the country’s financial sector.
Regardless of Gaetjen’s removed genetic history, by all accounts he was an impressive footballer and the upstanding pride and joy of many Haitian fans. His debut came in 1938 for Etoile Haïtienne, a Port-au-Prince side. When he first donned their kit at the age of 14, the Fédération Haïtienne de Football had already survived an explosion at the National Palace, two violent Presidential overthrows, and a brutal occupation by U. S. military forces. Nevertheless, the sport had grown immensely in the country.
Yet, unable to make a living from playing football, Gaetjens accepted a scholarship from the Haitian government to study Accounting at Columbia University in New York, where he played for the Brookhattan Football Club. There, he was noticed by U. S. scouts, eventually securing a spot on the 1950 World Cup’s squad of his new country.
In the tournament, held in Brazil, England was the favorite to win by a long shot. The inventors of football had a stacked lineup and a royally stacked bank account. But thirty-eight minutes in at the game against the United States, Walter Bahr’s shot from 25 yards out was deflected by his teammate Gaetjen’s charging forehead, sending the ball to the left and just passed the reach of England’s keeper.
“Whether Joe’s getting a piece of it was by accident or design I don’t know, but I know he went after it with his head. It’s the mystery goal,” Bahr said years later.
The Three Lions were unable to recuperate and, when the final whistle blew, Belo Horizonte’s Estádio Independência erupted. The unlikely hero was carried off the field on the shoulders of beaming fans, wave upon wave of cheering Brazilians following behind.
After the goal there was instant fame and glory for Gaetjens and an international playing stint for French clubs Racing Club de Paris and Olympique Alès. Then, in 1954, he went back to Port-au-Prince where he settled down with his new wife, opened a small dry cleaning business and resumed his spot on Etoile Haïtienne.
Ten years later, on July 8th, 1964, about a month after Papa Doc’s self-proclamation as “President for Life,” Gaetjens was thrust into the back seat of a MVSN car, with a gun pressed to the back of his head, never to be seen again.
A football star with absolutely no political aspirations seems an unlikely target. But for a dictator that once ordered the ice-packed head of a rebel to be sent to his office for spirit communication, or that all the black dogs in Haiti be exterminated, anyone is fair game.
Gaetjens had the added misfortune of his younger brother’s association with a group of exiles in the neighboring Dominican Republic with aspirations to overthrow Papa Doc. But his death didn’t erase his memory. Ask anyone over the age of 30 in Haiti about football and most will mention the legendary 1950 goal, Gaetjen’s murder, and the injustice committed by the Duvalier regime.
Disaster
“According to witnesses and U.N. investigators, they stormed into a soccer match during halftime, ordered everyone to lie on the ground and began shooting and hacking people to death in broad daylight as several thousand spectators fled for their lives.”
This is an excerpt from a Miami Herald article in 2005 reporting on an August 20th attack in Port-au-Prince. Caught on video, the brazen murders were carried out during a football game that was sponsored by the U. S. Agency for International Development to promote peace in the shantytown of Cité Soleil.
Small-time gang lords run these slums, a legacy of the MVSN. After the John F. Kennedy assassination in 1963, the United States reluctantly entered into a soft alliance with Duvalier, providing support of upwards of $15 million per year. The Cuban Revolution and the United States’ Cold War strategy positioned the Caribbean as a bulwark to impede the potential spread of Communism and Duvalier took advantage: “Communism has established centers of infection… No area in the world is as vital to American security as the Caribbean… We need a massive injection of money to reset the country on its feet, and this injection can come only from our great, capable friend and neighbor the United States,” Duvalier said in that same 1963.
Most of these “injections” were placed in the pocket of the dictator himself or his Macoutes. Several accounts point to the high probability that the MVSN were trained by U. S. military forces in the early 1960’s and were outfitted with donations of U. S. weaponry.
And though the regime’s guns may have been American, their repressive strategy was distinctly Haitian. Many of those that made up the MVSN legion were Vodou leaders and wielded cultural clout to terrorize the countryside adorned with flashy clothes and sunglasses, a trademark of the powerful deity Baron Samedi. They killed mercilessly and without provocation, randomly stoning or burning victims alive. Bodies were strung up on the streets as warnings and signs of fidelity to Duvalier.
The reign of the Tonton Macoutes officially ended in 1986 when Papa Doc’s son Jean-Claude Duvalier fled the country. The vestiges of the MVSN came to be known as “attachés” that would work as vigilante government security forces or crooked political organizations. Some attachés ran minor drug cartels in the country; others rooted themselves in Cité Soleil, their younger counterparts responsible for the 2005 football stadium attack.
The brutality and randomness of the stadium massacre is directly handed down from MVSN tactics–an exercise of aleatory violence in a space of Haiti’s most beloved sport. This self-obliteration of core Haitian identity is a keystone of the Cult of Duvalier. Luckner Cambronne, the head of the Macoutes, a man known as the “Vampire of the Caribbean” once said: “a good Duvalierist is prepared to kill his children [for Duvalier] and expects his children to kill their parents for him.”
This totalitarian psychology helps explain why Joe Gaetjens and the targeting of football in its entirety were targeted–they were symbols of a game that represents a certain Haitian individualism and independence from the clutches of the ghosts of the regime.
In 2010, economy and infrastructure severely weakened from decades of abusive leadership, a 7.0 Mw earthquake hit Haiti, laid waste to many of the urban centers, and chalked up a death toll of over 200,000. Included in the devastation was Haiti’s prized Sylvio Cator football stadium, leveled with team members and FHF officials inside.
Out of 50 people present at the stadium when the quake struck, 32 died and 12 were severely injured. National football memorabilia was devastated, “We also lost inventories of national equipment; the federation’s archives were not recovered. Our trophies, the awards we have received throughout the history of the federation, pictures of witnesses of our glorious years were not found in the rubble. It was a complete disaster,” recalls FHF president Yves Jean-Bart. Thousands of displaced Haitians relocated to the dilapidated stadium in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, but were forcibly removed in April of that year as rehabilitation efforts began.
Resistance (or Hope)
But in the middle of those rehabilitation efforts, the whole of international football was witness to Haiti’s determined resilience. Only two months after the disaster and loss of their coach Jean-Yves Labaze, the women’s national under-17 team competed in a qualifying tournament for the World Cup. A team gleaned from the Haitian diaspora together with a few national players was gathered to compete in a men’s World Cup qualifying match in Port-au-Prince in 2011.
Jean-Bart reveals the collective hope embedded deep within Haiti’s football community, “Since 2003 we’ve been going from one catastrophe to the next. Personally, I never imagined that there was so much solidarity in our family, such a passion to get back on track, everyday I see that the courage and the willpower is getting stronger and stronger.”
Edson Tavares, the team’s Brazilian coach, is constantly moved by the thousands of Haitian fans that simply want to be around football, in any way possible. They turn up in droves for warm ups, cool downs, and crowd around the team buses.
After the earthquake, football in Haiti was stripped of what little it had, in a larger metaphor for the country itself, truly revealing the fervor and passion of its essence. Football is married to the Haitian identity, for better or for worse. The violence of the Caribbean nation is played out in the political theater of the pitch along with its joy. The game holds generational memories that not even the cruelest of dictators or disasters can strip away. In the tired tradition of Latin American development, international funds from FIFA and private corporations are being injected into new Haitian stadiums and kits, but the lifeblood of football will always come from the island’s streets. As National Team player James Marcelin said in 2011: “We only have one thing left, and that’s football. You can play and all the world is watching you. The flag can fly everywhere because of football. It’s the one thing that people live for now.”
Campusnotes No. 1–Listening to the Black Messiah
This post, is the first in a new series for Africa Is A Country; Campus Notes. The series adapts research papers by undergraduate students and reformats them for readers of the blog. Many of the AIAC editorial collective are academics; we and are colleagues are fortunate to meet students from around the world whose own research interests are moving the study of Africa in exciting and vital new directions. Please, enjoy this piece – and then submit your own work, or that of your students.
In the liner notes of his newest record – the artist’s first in 14 years – neo soul virtuoso D’Angelo acknowledges the obvious: “Black Messiah is a hell of a name for an album.” Among the many reasons for the title’s resonance is that the figure it imagines – a messianic leader for the black community – is such a tantalizing and hopeful notion. With the flames of protest still smoldering across the US, the need for a black messiah feels as urgent as ever. Many have cast D’Angelo for the part, but he’s been loath to assume his own audacious title, explaining that “the title is about all of us.” Perhaps the artist rejects the idea of a singular black savior, who speaks through music – one whose songs provide a profound sense of political and spiritual salvation for listeners. Or maybe he realizes that the position is already taken.
This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, an album that elevated the saxophonist to quasi-divine status. In Coltrane’s life and work, we see the burden African-American artists have carried beyond their artistry, particularly in times of social upheaval. For many, Coltrane was, and remains, a prophet of global black power, who musically and metaphorically broke down barriers that had constrained the lives and imaginations of black people around the world. Coltrane’s emergence in the Fifties and Sixties coincided with the growth of anti-colonialist Black Nationalism in Africa and Latin America, the Civil Rights movement in the United States, and demands for equality throughout the world. Given this context, his music revolution could not help but become entwined with the broader social struggle. Although Coltrane never asserted publically that his music was intended as a vehicle to promote political change, his sound was so distinct, such a break from the status quo, so of the moment, that others imputed to his work political and cultural motives that continue to define him. His music served as a kind of auditory Rorschach test for its listeners. What did you hear in those riffs – politics or spirituality? Abrasiveness or empowerment? What was his responsibility as a black artist: to please the ears, soothe the soul, or get feet marching in the streets? To return to the music scene at this incendiary moment in the national debate on race, what if anything is D’Angelo saying about a musician’s role in that conversation?
Coltrane developed his sound in the eye of a musical maelstrom that saw young African American artists defying the rules of standard jazz, even as their contemporaries were challenging societal norms. Coltrane played first with Dizzy Gillespie and then with Miles Davis, before stepping out as a truly independent voice in 1960, when Atlantic Records released Giant Steps, the first recording on which he was the lead musician for the label. The break from bebop that Coltrane initiated with Giant Steps was so revolutionary that other jazz musicians at the time embraced it as the essence of “freedom.” Coltrane kept going. That same year, he recorded the album My Favorite Things, which Atlantic released a year later. The title track reworks the song Julie Andrews sings to her charges in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music;” it is difficult to imagine a song having two more different iterations and faces. In the quartet’s rendition, accented by Coltrane’s relentless soloing, a distinctly white song becomes a composition rich with blues, with pain and joy and abandon. Coltrane’s Favorite Things was a revolution on the stage that reflected and refracted the revolution in the streets.
Not everyone was enamored immediately with Coltrane’s new sound. Nat Hentoff, the historian and jazz critic, initially dismissed the saxophonist in terms that continue to resonate today. Like many other white reviewers, Hentoff called Coltrane’s work ‘angry’ and ‘strident;’ as some white critics heard it, Coltrane’s sound was the abrasive musical complement to the anger of the mass protests. As with a changing politics, many white reviewers had a harder time than their black colleagues and audiences appreciating the way in which Coltrane was pushing back against traditional jazz. Philip Larkin, the English poet and occasional jazz reviewer for The Telegraph, would not abide what he saw as the joyless radicalism of the new. Coltrane, he wrote, played with a “willful and hideous distortion of tone that offered squeals, squeaks, Bronx cheers and throttled slate-pencil noises for serious consideration.”
Whereas Larkin and other conservatives saw Coltrane’s innovations as a heedless rejection of the musical past, many black critics and audiences saw a vital and resonant thrust in a new direction. Many African Americans contended that the very fact of being white rendered Hentoff, Larkin, and others incapable of comprehending fully Coltrane’s music and how it was inseparable from its political context.
As the music changed, so too did politics. As controversy raged about his sound, Coltrane mostly refrained from linking his music to contemporary events. After four little girls were killed by a bomb in Birmingham, Alabama’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963, however, Coltrane could no longer hold back. Among a torrent of artistic tributes that followed that event was “Alabama,” a plaintive jazz elegy that Coltrane composed and recorded just two months later. In his cadence and tone, many claimed to hear echoes of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s eulogy for the girls. For his part, Coltrane remained coy, saying, “It represents, musically, something that I saw down there translated into music from inside me.”
Coltrane fans grew used to responses like this. When Frank Kofsky, a Marxist historian at California State University at Sacramento and an expert on jazz, asked Coltrane directly whether there was a relationship between his music and Malcolm X’s ideas. Coltrane replied, obliquely, “Well, I think that music, being an expression of the human heart, or of the human being itself, does express just what is happening. I feel it expresses the whole thing – the whole of human experience at the particular time that it is being expressed.” Coltrane never explained his reticence, but the jazz historian Lewis Porter, who wrote a foundational biography of him, told me in an interview that Coltrane was wary of the press and reluctant to appear to be supporting any particular political approach to promoting civil rights. His apprehension stood in contrast to more directly political figures in the jazz world, like Max Roach, the great drummer who put out an album called “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite,” a collaboration with Oscar Brown, Jr. that included tracks with lyrics explicitly about slavery, the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa, and the black freedom struggle.
Yet even though Coltrane was not direct in his approach, by pushing against the constraints of previous generations of music, he was, deliberately or not, encouraging resistance to other forms of control. African American audiences and critics frequently drew parallels between his bold musical works and acts ranging from the fiery speeches of Black Nationalist leaders to nonviolent protests at lunch counters, marches, and bus terminals. For Amiri Baraka, Coltrane was a ‘Black Messiah,’ a Malcolm X of music: “Trane’s constant assaults on the given, the status quo, the Tin Pan Alley of the soul, was what Malcolm attempted in our social life.”
The poets of the Black Arts Movement brought Coltrane into the belly of political debate in both the content and form of their works. In his poem “Extension,” Askia Muhammad Toure figured Coltrane and other jazz musicians, including Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, and Milford Graves, as the sonic complement to Black Power:
Let the Ritual begin:
Sun Ra, Pharoah, Coltrane, Milford tune up your Afro-horns;
let the Song begin, the Wild Song of the Black Heart….
Michael S. Harper’s poem “Dear John, Dear Coltrane,” describes Coltrane as an everyman of black tragedy and longing. Harper contended that whether or not Coltrane claimed to be involved in politics, he was: it was his obligation, his inevitability. “The blues and jazz are the finest extensions of a bedrock of the testamental process,” Harper wrote, words that conferred on Coltrane the mantel of a Black Messiah.
Coltrane was not blind to his political allure. He agreed in 1960 to headline a concert for the Students for Racial Equality chapter at the University of California, for example, and although that event was never held, Coltrane’s willingness to perform signaled a desire to support political causes. Coltrane did play at other overtly political events, including eight concerts to benefit Martin Luther King, Jr. He also wrote several songs inspired by the civil rights leader, most notably “Up ’Gainst the Wall” and “Reverend King.”
In his own writings, however, it is clear that Coltrane envisioned a politics of a different order than that in which King was engaged, a politics that might transcend the social struggles of the mid-century US In the liner notes to A Love Supreme, Coltrane wrote a very intimate admission of his personal failings, and offered the album as a plea for others to join him in a search for “spiritual awakening.” The album resonated in a deeply emotional way, particularly among African Americans. “A Love Supreme is to cultural politics as ‘I Have a Dream’ and ‘Beloved Community’ are to King’s acolytes,” says the poet Elizabeth Alexander. Coltrane’s journey – his quest for wholeness and awakening – was one that many shared. As Frank Kofsky wrote, “Coltrane’s ardent young black followers discovered in his work…the clearest possible expression of the African-American mentality in the second half of the twentieth century.” D’Angelo says the same of his own musical vision when he insists that his startling title “is about all of us.”
John Coltrane died of liver cancer on July 17, 1967. He was 40 years old. His death was easily overlooked in the litany of loss that marked the mid-1960s: Medgar, Malcolm, Martin, so many others. Yet more than a thousand people attended his funeral at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in New York City. As his casket was borne out of the church, Ornette Coleman’s quartet played “Holiday for a Graveyard.“He ascended, and then he was gone, in 1967, as American cities burned,” says Alexander, whose 1990 poem “John Col,” celebrates and mourns Coltrane. “The seer was gone. He was a piece of all the black leadership and hope that was extinguished in the Sixties.”
That illusory sense of hope has continued to evade black Americans, even as symbols of progress abound. Cornel West seemed to be grasping for a piece of that Messianic leadership this past summer when he invoked Coltrane’s legacy in lambasting Barack Obama for failing to live up to the promise African Americans had invested in him. The people were “looking for John Coltrane,” West stated, but instead they got a “brown skinned Kenny G.” Coltrane’s own words belie West’s easy characterization of his individual value; rather, Coltrane seemed to have wanted others to join him, not look to him for salvation. D’Angelo similarly chides West and others, by claiming that the title ‘Messiah’ is best understood as a collective identity, one that does not reside within any one individual, no matter how messianic he might seem. It is collective mantle and a collective burden. Coltrane pushed forward in search of a widespread awakening. If we are all Michael Brown and Eric Garner, then perhaps we might all strive to be John Coltrane, too.
January 31, 2015
The news from South Africa
Last year we declared March White History Month.
This year it seems South Africa is in a hurry to get there.
pointed out the logics of the Democratic Alliance’s move to rename Cape Town’s busiest highway, the N1, F.W. de Klerk Boulevard (despite the vociferous protests of the ANC and others).
Eugene de Kock, aka “Prime Evil,” the handmaiden to De Klerk’s duplicity in the treacherous 1980s, will receive parole this year, despite a sentence of two life-terms plus 212 years. But as De Kock himself has noted, he was jailed, rightfully, while others walk free with blood all over their hands.
The point about political elites being free while their henchmen serve time, suffer PTSD, and do the hard work of dealing with the violence they wrought, has been made again and again. The image of forgiving black South Africans, ruined Afrikaner scapegoats, and free-wheeling elites is getting old. How much more privileged reconciliation without justice can South Africa take before the rainbow fades?
Achille Mbembe put it this way recently in a Facebook post: “As long as South Africa does not put in place a set of coherent anti-racist laws, with institutional bodies endowed with robust investigative resources, deracialization will not happen. Racist incidents will not decrease. The cost of being racist has to steeply increase if any progress has to be made on this front. Unfortunately, the ANC seems to have lost the plot. Intellectually and morally bankrupt, it has dropped the ball insofar as racial justice isconcerned. The new elites are happy to sleep in the former master’s bed, as Fanon rightly predicted.”
The bottom line is this: the ANC has made a pact with capital. All bets about when racial justice and equality will be delivered are therefore, sadly, off.
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