Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 367

Welcome to Teca: Bogotá’s Music

Welcome to Teca, Latin America is a Country’s own jukebox for up-and-coming Latin American music. Every Friday (or so) we’ll bring you some of the newest, most interesting artists from around this huge country continent politically-linguistically defined space of ours.

We’ll try to explore cities’ scenes, some more mainstream than others, as well as look into international connections. We won’t feature Ricky Martin, or Jennifer López, because you have already heard them, so what’s the point? Nor will we feature Shakira, because boy, did she lose us with Laundry Service.

But have no fear, there are amazing musicians coming up from the mountains and the plains, from the coasts and the rivers, from south, north, center, east and west. We’ll try our best to show you your next favorite band. And don’t worry: we’ll make sure to keep you dancing.

To inaugurate this new section, we head over to Bogotá, Colombia, the hometown of our two editors, where the Festival Estéreo Picnic announced the lineup for its sixth edition. Estéreo Picnic has been trying to be Colombia’s response to American summer festivals such as Coachella and Lollapalooza, and een if much smaller in scale, it has been growing in audience.

Though the festival costs money to attend (unlike the larger, older and public Rock al Parque festival), its appeal lies mostly in inviting better known international bands and mixing them with rising local acts.

Yet, the festival has been criticized this year for lining up too many Colombian “unknowns”. So we wanted to highlight their effort to showcase some of the most interesting local music. So here you have them, five Bogotano bands attending the 2015 Estereo Picnic that you should not be afraid to hear.

 

Planes (Estudios Universales)

Lead by Pablo Escallón, Planes is not so much a revival, but a rethinking of new wave and shoegaze, with a distinctive Bogotano accent and vocals that you either love or hate, no middle ground (we’re fans, of course).

 

Milmarías

Erick Milmarías, Kike Milmarías and Gregorio Merchán know how to make catchy tunes and they also know how to have fun. Yes, they might be laughing with you, or they might be laughing at you. But it doesn’t really matter for now.

 

Salt Cathedral

Ok, not all of the band is from Bogotá, and they have been living in Boston and New York City for a while. But their name is a reference to one of the favorite day-trip destinations for Bogotanos: an actual cathedral made from salt in the nearby town of Zipaquirá. And, anyway, you shouldn’t miss their mesmerizing beats with beautiful vocals.

 

Mitú

Mitú is named after a Colombian city in the Amazon. And it’s the brainchild of Julián Salazar, the guitar player from the Bogotá-based, Caribbean electro-tropical band Bomba Estéreo, and Franklin Tejedor, the son of “Lámpara”, the legendary percussionist from San Basilio de Palenque (the first ever free black town in the American continent!). But their home is definitely Bogotá. And their sound is a sort of tribal, folkloric electronic music that you have never heard before. Or maybe you have. But Mitú is the kind of electronic music you actually want to listen to again.

 

Andrés Correa

Andrés Correa made his career selling his music in burnt CDs inside plastic bags after his concerts around Bogotá. Now he has made a name as an author with special attention to lyrics and has become a staple of another festival, FICIB (Festival Internacional de la Canción Itinerante de Bogotá). His musical style often changes from song to song, but his quality remains constant.

BONUS:

They are not in this year’s festival, but do not miss some of Bogotá’s finest: Meridian Brothers.

PS.: If you want to contribute to Teca, send us an email to with your five picks of current musical acts from a Latin American city and a brief description for each.

Follow Latin America is a Country on Twitter and .

Digital Archive No. 11 – African Hip Hop

This week I thought I’d try something a little different, inspired by some links I came across on Twitter.  Earlier this week, John Edwin Mason tweeted a story from The Guardian featuring five African musical acts to watch in 2015.  Three of the five acts featured in this article were either hip hop acts or heavily influenced by hip hop.  Reading this story made me think about the huge number of artists that are virtually unheard of here in the United States, but enjoy large followings throughout Africa and the diaspora.  Many of these talents are featured on African Hip Hop, the focus of this week’s post.

This site first appeared in 1997 under the name Rumba-Kali Home of African Hip Hop (the remains of the original site are available here).  It’s original focus was, and continues to be, on “unifying everybody who’s inspired by hip hop and by the cultures of Africa and of African origins.”  While at different points in time the site was sponsored by organizations like the Madunia Foundation, the Africa Server or This Is Africa, currently the site is independently run by a team of contributors spread throughout both the continent and the diaspora.  These contributors present a range of stories, from posts on recent hip hop releases to music videos to feature stories with more substantial content.  Readers can explore the history of Nigerian hip hop or a critical appraisal of American artists using African nations as backdrops in their videos or hip hop’s role as a political tool in Gabon.  Though the site isn’t updated on a regular basis with stories of this type, there is a lot already available and it’s definitely worth exploring.

In addition to individual blog posts, the site hosts regular columns, including The Hip-Hoppreneur by Cedric Muhammad on the business side of things and Bottom Juice by MissJackee which focuses on new sounds from the continent.  Africanhiphop.com also hosts several monthly radio shows, including the newly launched Africa Is Hot and African Hip Hop Radio.  The team producing African Hip Hop Radio consists of presenters from sixteen different countries, providing a broad range of musical selections.  You can listen to the first episode of Africa Is Hot below.

There are also several documentary projects linked to the site, including Hali Halisi: Rap as an Alternative Medium in Tanzania and a series of videos from Nomadic Wax on Global Hip Hop Culture, hosted by Zimbabwe Legit’s Dumi Right.  Finally, in addition to enjoying music and content on the site, a number of mixtapes have been made available for download, including songs from Ghanaian artist Blitz the Ambassador and Gambian-American Say-hu.  Such a wide range of perspectives and so many different styles of hip hop are collected on this site, making it a phenomenal resource for not only learning about African hip hop but also exposing more listeners to these infectious sounds.

This project is entirely independent, so the creators invite any one with information on the development of hip hop in Africa to contribute any materials or stories that they might have.  You can contact the team via this form.  You can also follow African Hip Hop on Twitter (@africanhiphop.com) and Facebook.

As always, feel free to send me suggestions in the comments or via Twitter of sites you might like to see covered in future editions of The Digital Archive!  We’ve been getting some good suggestions from readers that will be reviewed soon!

 

Roger Young’s ‘Keys, Money, Phone’ explores the heart of young whiteness in Cape Town

Something is shifting in South Africa. White privilege is a hot topic, specifically in print and social media, and for good reason. In the past few months, a number of racially motivated assaults on black people in Cape Town’s affluent suburbs have surfaced. This month Nelson Mandela’s former personal assistant Zelda La Grange had a racist twitter meltdown, downplaying the effects of colonialism in South Africa and claiming white people are not welcome in Zuma’s South Africa. An excellent tumblr was started to highlight overt racism on the Facebook pages of the (mostly) white suburbs in Cape Town. White privilege is on the table, and in an unprecedented scale.

So, the award-winning short film Keys, Money, Phone by Roger Young can be seen as a kind of cultural by-product of this racially charged environment. Young has written extensively on white privilege in South Africa, including excellent pieces on that Mandela Rayban sculpure and the absence of memory of slavery in South Africa.

The film follows a young jock named Seb (played by a  young jock named Anton Taylor), stranded after a big night out at Tiger Tiger, the notorious student hangout in Cape Town’s southern suburbs. Passed out drunk, he gets dropped off by his cab driver outside his security complex only to find he has left his keys, money and phone in the taxi, which has driven off.

In an interview with Grolsch’s Canvas site, Young explains that he actually didn’t set out to make a film about white privilege:

“Originally I wanted to just make a fun film about a guy who got locked out. I do a lot of writing about white privilege and I wanted to get away from that. But when I started working with my script editor, Genna Gardini, she totally side-eyed me and I knew I had to just go in. I tried to make it really subtle though.”

In a pink golf shirt with an unsightly vomit stain on the chest, Seb wanders the streets, going back to Tiger Tiger only to get bounced for not having money to enter. He tries in vain to get help or find a place to dos (crash) for the night. Through strained interactions with friends, strangers and his ex-girlfriend, writer/director Young pieces together a portrait of a young man who, while seemingly popular, has no real relationships, no community, and yet no sense of humility. His patronizing interactions with black people are brief (even when they’re the only ones helping him) and they are mostly with service providers: taxi drivers and security guards.

Young manages to make the ingratiating Seb watchable by allowing the viewer to revel in his misfortune. He exercises admirable restraint in trying to get us to like him or to force him to undergo some kind of transformation or redemptive character arc. With each scene we actually like him less and less. This treatment of a protagonist is quite rare in South African cinema, and most films that get funding seem to need some kind of nation building agenda. “The phrase ‘social cohesion’ has been in the Department of Arts and Culture mandate for about 6 years now,” explains Young via email. “The problem is interpretation, if a film shows ‘social cohesion’ then the audience is not forced to think about the work we need to do toward being a socially cohesive society.”

Part of the impetus for Keys, Money, Phone came from a conversation with a black consciousness academic who had told Young that as a white South African, he couldn’t tell the stories of black South Africans. Young agrees, but acknowledges that it’s complicated: “I don’t think white people can tell black stories. But not all stories are purely black or white. Authentic entry points, collaboration, double checking with various experts on cultural issues, these are things we must be vigilant about as filmmakers always, in any endeavor, on any subject. I think some ‘black’ filmmakers would struggle to tell some ‘white’ stories as well, although I do think the results would be illuminating.”

As with the broader discussion around race, this is the kind of frankness and authenticity that is needed in South African cinema if we are to progress at all. Young’s next short is called Boat Girls and will be released soon, followed by a feature film called Love Runs Out. You can watch Keys, Money, Phone via Vimeo on Demand here.

(NOTE: the film will only be available in the USA from 9 Feb, after its regional festival premiere.)

Oualid Khelifi wants to challenge your concepts of African belonging

El Foukr R’Assembly is a collaborative music and film project initiated by Algerian filmmaker Oualid Khelifi. It “looks to foster independent cultural production between North Africa and the rest of the continent, away from state-funding and its sub sequential censorship and demagogy.” Their’s is a bold, political statement of purpose, laden with centuries of historical baggage. The project’s aim is not too far in concept from initiatives such as The Nile Project, but it’s core aim at working independently of state funding gives the mission a bit of a sharp (dare I say punk?) edge. If successful in its aims, El Foukr R’Assembly could challenge dominant concepts of African belonging, race, nation, and cultural diffusion on both sides of the Sahara.

The project’s first edition took place in Djanet, Algeria, between four musicians from different parts of that country. It resulted in a six-track album, and short film documenting the process. Oualid Khelifi is currently in Ghana, trying to raise funds to complete a second collaborative album and short film:

Akwaaba Music founder and Africa is a Country contributor, Benjamin Lebrave, sat down with Oualid to talk about the project and delve deeper into some of the project’s motivations:

Oualid, tell us a bit about the background story for your project in Djanet: how did you and the musicians come together? What sparked the project? What is your respective backgrounds?

Having lived, travelled and worked in various West African countries as an independent multimedia journalist, throughout the years I’ve grown increasingly convinced of the need to foster mobility and exchange between different regions of the continent.

As an Algerian, I’ve brewed a frustration of seeing my co-citizens and other North Africans missing out on incredibly vibrant regions south of the Sahara, as we remain in the Maghreb exclusively locked to the Middle East, Europe and former colonial powers.

In my eyes, a very fruitful synergy could develop, be it economic, cultural or artistic, between North Africa and the rest of the continent. To overcome preconceived erroneous stereotypes, music and short documentary film are accessible tools, which are more likely to carry this rapprochement message without risking alienation of heavily charged political and historic discourses.

I met the musicians through my ordinary social circle in three different parts of Algeria, hence the rhythmic and melodic variety in our ‘Look South’ debut album. To begin with, we became friends. For a few months, I knew they were into music, but had not idea what they were capable of, especially that half of them did not record professionally nor performed on major stages.

Having covered and attended several world music festivals in North and West Africa, I felt a burning urge to make something out of these encounters. I then brought forward to the guys the idea of a film-music ensemble, it made sense to all of us, everybody is into Sub-Saharan music, storytelling and human vibe. The rest just followed.

Why Djanet? What was the creative process like in Djanet?

In early 2014, I went to shoot a short documentary in south Algeria. After production, I decided to take a short break a few hundred kilometres east of where I was in the Sahara, so I headed to Djanet, a province which had for long teased my curiosity.

This ancient crossroads oasis has hosted for over ten centuries nomadic and semi-sedentary communities whose ethnic origins are Berber, Hausa, Peul, Songhai and Arab. Today, they are mostly settled, sharing Tamasheq Touareg as a common language, but still deeply rooted in their varied heritage.

Djanet borders Niger, Libya and is home to communities who still have active extended family links as far as Chad in Central Africa. One could only imagine the human and subsequent musical wealth in that isolated spot of the African Sahara.

What made you want to come to Ghana, and why this Algeria/Ghana collaboration?

In early 2013, I made Abidjan/Ivory Coast a base of my freelance professional life. During summer of the same year, I crossed the border to Ghana with a few friends merely to travel for a couple of weeks. Upon my return to Abidjan, I began flirting with the idea of trying to live in Accra. My instinct and very short experience there told me it would be a place full of visually strong stories on one side, and a city where one could make things happen artistically on the other.

I therefore moved there in June last year and was glad to realize right away that my hunch wasn’t off. The local scene throbs of savvy youngsters rigorously launching projects in photography, multimedia, music, street art and theatre.

Choosing Ghana as the first art-residence destination of El Foukr R’Assembly film-music ensemble followed naturally. Bridging Algeria and Ghana independently isn’t solely a matter of two different regions of Africa, but also a dialogue between Francophone and Anglophone parts of the continent, given that African nations and societies usually remain within their colonial languages’ comfort zones. We want to transcend these handicaps, we may not be able to talk to each other in words, but visuals, sound and music will do it beautifully.

I co-founded Afreekyama Collective with my Tunisian friend and multimedia maker colleague Selim Harbi. The platform now acts as the official production behind El Foukr R’Assembly project. Two years ago, when I drafted the philosophy document for Afreekyama Collective, I wrote: ”we believe that common struggles of the past and mounting dares of the future dictate that divisive notions of two distinct ‘Sub-Saharan’ and ‘North’ Africas are to be transcended, for the sake of cross-border social cohesion, empowerment and exchange”

Today, we are coming to Ghana in this spirit.

What were the biggest shocks in Ghana? Both good and bad, within creative and artist circles as well as socially, culturally or economically?

Like everywhere, I’ve had my share of pleasant and slightly less pleasant surprises. Compared to neighbouring Ivory Coast, I was glad to find out that people in the creative scene were more entrepreneurial, punctual and straight to the point.

For instance, I had the chance to attend and cover in photo and video Chale Wote street festival in Jamestown, Accra. Those 3 days filled me with hope and positivity.

On the other hand, the zealous rising of church influence and role in collective spirituality in Ghana is something I find of concern. Mushrooming panels of pseudo prophets and money-making priests are a social threat. Coupled with economic grievances and political ill management, religion could turn into an instrument of hatred, division and violence overnight. We saw it happen in Algeria in the 1990s, we still suffer its dire consequences today. I personally would like to see the African youth everywhere in the continent mount its guards against such dangers.

Music, art, culture and the creative industry are usually the first to suffer from these hits.

Do you have an idea where this collaboration may go? Whether creative or social or other?

El Foukr R’assembly’s vision is to transport through documentary film and visuals bits and pieces of ordinary life. We are more connected by the day across the continent, so we aim to reach out to as many Africans as possible, to get to know each other online through collaborative performances.

After Ghana, we will go elsewhere in the continent and take back visuals and sound to Algeria and North Africa. On an ad-hoc project basis over the medium to long term, the idea is to also invite artists we will have worked with in Ghana and beyond to Algeria to perform and interact with us as well as other artists.

I ask this next question in the days following the Paris massacre. Do you feel your project has a particular social or political role? If so, where and for whom?

Paris incidents are to condemn regardless of ethnicity, religion and political ideology. Similarly, one should stand firmly and in equal measure against Boko Haram massacres in Nigeria, the forgotten conflict in the Central African Republic and the mayhem in Libya – just to name a few — during which lives of journalists, activists and innocent civilians are being taken regularly.

El Foukr R’assembly is an independent Pan-Africanist & multi-disciplinary project, which calls for the empowering of all Africans through creative means. According to me, the only way for us Africans to defend our human dignity and combat the worthy-vs-unworthy victims paradox is to work together within the continent, learn from each other, gradually become a cultural, economic and geopolitical force. The rest would ensue, and it would be a win-win situation for Africans and the rest of the world.

Do you have a message for creatives seeking a purpose in or out of Africa?

Hard to tell, given that there is no one formula. I believe people should follow their natural tendencies and create within their spheres of passion. That said, Africa isn’t a country just to sarcastically cite the anecdotal reductionist tag, so getting out of one’s comfort zone, be it collaborating, trying out new artistic genres, traveling, working or living in another region is monumental for a realistic and true sense of African belonging. The youth today is more pre-disposed than ever to do so, so let’s just do it.

Let’s end on a lighter note… tell us a funny anecdote about your first trip to Ghana.

During my early days in Accra, a taxi driver asked me about my country of origin. When I said Algeria, he replied “ah, North Africa, the land of rich Arabs”. We laughed, then discussed how my part of the continent is of an African Berber ethnic descent, and that celebrating and taking advantage of the continental diversity is what we all ought to do to strive forward beyond divisive post-colonial notions.

Towards the end of the ride, he jokingly teased me: “well, it is just confusing when it comes to colour. I see that your people are different from Lebanese and Middle Eastern Arabs, but you have so much petrol and gas too, so just bathe yourselves into it, you will all become black, and things will be much easier for everybody.”

Some of the music highlights you came across while in Accra?

It was such a pleasure to meet Wanlov and Fokn Bois crew. I love how they venture into film and musicals to get their voices and message further out. Doing it in pidgin, claiming roots and embracing that continental open spirit to funk out projects with like-minded youngsters is a promising trend, which will go far.

I am also very glad to see people like Villy & Xtreme Volumes working to revive the Afrobeats scene. Ghanaians and Nigerians have for long made wicked music together, but to witness it still happening today in modern fusion style is to my eyes constructive and forward-thinking resistance.

I had the chance as well to check out Siaka Diarra and his band swinging between their native Burkina Faso and Ghana, they maintain a traditional sound while incorporating elements of groovy high life. It is promising for Accra to become hopefully one day soon a West African and continental artistic hub.

I shouldn’t forget the electro-house scene. DJs seem to be increasingly connected to what the African diaspora is doing elsewhere in the world. I had listened to some South African mixes in London, and was surprised to see DJ Steolo in Accra spinning them locally.

Many Terence Rangers

This is not an obituary of Terence Ranger; I am not qualified to write it. Nor is this a journal article; there are already a good number and there will be many—and much better. This commentary is just what it professes: a personal reflection on the Terence Ranger who matters to some of us as Zimbabweans and Zimbabwean scholars writing a Zimbabwean story. In that narrative one cannot avoid a posthumous conversation with Ranger the person and Ranger the author, humanist, and teacher.

There is not one but many Terence Rangers. Hence the one I reflect on is only confined to the politics of knowledge production his work participated in, as seen from personal perspectives of a male Zimbabwean scholar. They are neither the only ones, nor the last. The most formative years of my remarks relate to the period of the 1990s-2000s in an important period in the University of Zimbabwe’s History Department, caught between colonial Rhodesian legacies and students’ demands for decolonizing the meaning and practice of History. Of what relevance was a history that was merely a study of the past, with no career benefit outside secondary school teaching or, at most, having to go all the way to PhD and become a university lecturer? Could history be more?

Personal Reflections

I knew T.O. Ranger before I met him. In the 1980s, anyone taking a history class in Zimbabwe’s postwar secondary schools could not avoid him. His book, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, and Martin and Johnson’s The Struggle for Zimbabwe, were required reading. Granted—the Ordinary Level and Advanced Level History syllabi followed prescribed, catch-all textbooks. However, if you wanted to pass and go to university, to do law, instead of languishing in the “arts subjects” and “end up a teacher in Mudzi or Binga,” you had to read extra. In those days that meant reading Revolt.

I first met Ranger in person as a History honors student at the University of Zimbabwe in 1994 thereabouts. At the time I was a supervisee of the late David Norman Beach. Ranger was good buddies with Ngwabi Bhebe. It was during the time when they were organizing and coordinating the conference that would usher in the publication of two edited volumes, Society in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War, and Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War, arguably the most ambitious project to involve actual guerrillas in writing their own history. Regrettably, of course, the ordinary people came to the conversation as the subject matter, not participants in the Harare indaba itself or authors as co-authors. It is part and parcel of the Western methods of producing an elitist national narrative of great men through formal(ized) institutions, disciplines, and academicians that excluded what the educated elites derisively now refer to as “uneducated village pumpkins.”

As honors and masters students of the History Department in the 1990s, we also always wondered about the territorialization of History and who got to research what. Ranger was the colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe professor who was a prolific publisher visiting here and there from Oxford. We found it curious that he focused on the ‘Shona,’ as if the Ndebele, Tshangana, Hlengwe, Venda, Tonga, Nanzva and so on had no history. Ray Roberts was the postcolonial Zimbabwe professor, who does not seem to have published much. Chengetai Zvobgo was the church history go-to, while Ngwabi Bhebe was seized with Ndebele history. It was a very territorialized discourse from which we are yet to recover not only as intellectuals, but also as a country studied on the basis of ethnicity. Ranger participated in this politics of ethnicized territorialization along with his contemporaries. The question for us now: Do we still need that or are we better off reinventing—even decolonializing—the meaning, practices, and ends of history?

Also bothersome was the very modular tradition of teaching history in the History Department. ‘History of Africa to 1800’ this, ‘History of Central Africa’ that, not calibrated to address any important theoretical questions. This empirical approach, I would find as I traveled wider, was a product of the British tradition, exported to us through colonialism, and slavishly upheld after the end of colonialism—at least politically, but never mentally. It was a rigid studying of the past that sterilized it of any relevance to what I was studying, who I am, and who I want to be, not the singular “I” but “I” as the “we” called “the nation.” History was, as given to us, the study of the past. With Beach, the archives were history; the public secret among us students was that he moved around with the National Archives of Zimbabwe catalogue in his famous brown leather duffel bag. From Ranger, the lesson perhaps is: What’s the point of writing a Zimbabwean history that is more relevant to academia than to the ordinary people? To have a larger than life international name, and yet the history one writes doesn’t ask or address tough questions relevant to the people, to Zimbabwe’s needs. Is this a case of mobilizing Zimbabwe as fodder for intellection, to show Zimbabwe’s past and yet not point the way forward?

Ranger’s writing later seemed to veer more to address an Africanist audience enchanted by his concept of invention of tradition rather than what would have been more useful to Zimbabwe. Namely, a usable past that did not end with using pre-colonial histories to galvanize the armed struggle against dictatorship by a white colonial minority, but also that deep past and the struggle for self-liberation as solid platforms for engineering a robustly democratic, economically prosperous, and all-inclusive post-Rhodesian nation. As far as I remember, those discussions took place indeed, but outside the History Department or the “proper” historical narratives Ranger, Beach, and others were writing—in African Languages, Literature, Law, International Relations, Social Anthropology, and Business, and even Economic History, where the most exciting discussions ended up happening.

We could sense the sharp difference between Ranger and Beach profoundly in their interactions during the History Seminar Series—or should I say their lack of interaction and what we as History students sensed as mutual hostility to each other. Upon researching further in the archives, it did not take long to find that the two men were at opposite sides of the struggle for self-liberation. Up until 1994, and despite having read Peasant Consciousness (1985) and later Norma Kriger’s Zimbabwe’s Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices, and not liking both because they fed a narrative of excluding non-Shona voices on the independence struggle, I had assumed that the  dissent between Beach and Ranger was purely intellectual.

To cut a long story—I discovered that Ranger’s sympathies lay with the nationalists, and he did get photographed with his head bedecked with animal-skin regalia and all. He was also subsequently deportated alongside other white liberal scholars like Giovanni Arrighi and John Reed in one of the most politically explosive atmospheres at the University College of Rhodesia (now University of Zimbabwe) in 1963. This was the time of Zhii, the year Ndabaningi Sithole, Robert Mugabe, Enos Nkala, Leopold Takawira, and others split from ZAPU to form ZANU, triggering violence pitting the two parties as much against each other as against the state itself. One year later, in 1964, the entire leadership of these two organizations inside the country were arrested and detained for the next decade. In 1965, the white settlers of Rhodesia announced a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from Britain and refused to hand over power to Africans. Ranger might have sympathized with the nationalist cause but I am not sure he supported the turn to taking up arms as a self-liberation option. He was comfortable with a non-violent option yes, but when it comes to armed struggle I don’t think Ranger was a Basil Davidson. The most we can credit him for is his sympathies for African independence.

The paths of choices that Ranger and Beach took would, seen from our perspectives as students simply deploying the historical analysis they had taught us, determine the palpable hostilities we observed between them. Ranger would make his way to the University of Manchester and then University of Dar es Salaam, two hives of progressive scholarship at the time. The ‘Manchester School’ and the ‘Dar es Salaam School’ are our link between subaltern studies (India), dependency theory (the Caribbean and South America), and Pan-Africanist studies of Africa. The key figures in Manchester supervised or interacted with students central to these networks. Ranger was a not-insignificant part of that “scholarship informed by political commitment” as Isaacman (2003) nicely puts it. Personally, I think there is an urgent need for the surviving members of that ‘Dar es Salaam School’ and younger African scholars to have a conversation because Tanzania was this intellectual hub at the same time as it was also the gateway of Southern African liberation movements to Cuba, the Soviet Union, China, Korea, and Africa at large. I raise this to say frequenting the Dar circle places Ranger in what was the progressive circle of self-liberation and postcolonial self-determination.

Meanwhile David Norman Beach was employed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (formally the Native Affairs Department) to systematically document and understand ‘the natives’ in order for Ian Smith to perfect the machinery of racist oppression even more. Around 1994, when I was still under Ray Roberts’ supervision, there began a whispering campaign on the subject of racism in the way Roberts and Beach were teaching and supervising students. One of the major problems was why the two of them should continue to supervise students and teach history in the sterilized, ‘study of the past,’ hagiographic way they did as if history was not a usable past. In fact, as a student activist during the turbulent period when the IMF prevailed upon government to privatize the cafeteria, university accommodation, and other key tertiary education support under the Economic Structural Adjustment Program (ESAP), Beach took a very dim view of any student participating in demonstrations. “You have a bright future,” he would say. “You will throw it away if you engage in university politics.” Underneath that threat, one could read as a student not only that the university would expel you, but that you might actually be failed by your professor, that historians should not be politically committed to finding solutions to problems bedeviling the society within which they live.

The sterility of History was in sharp contrast to developments in African Languages and Literature. True—there were occasional rumblings of discontent between faculty that felt colonialism was long gone and others who were seen as still living within it. The point of tension was a black intelligentsia returning from abroad to build their country through reclaiming the intellectual direction and space of pedagogy, only to run into what they saw as an intransigent “Rhodesian” cabal in the form of Beach, Roberts, and their allies in the other departments. The late Solomon Mutswairo in particular was never shy of calling out what he saw as racist dogma that refused to permit the admissibility of evidence or sources that best captured and expressed African thought and practices. He did not see why History—better yet “fact”—should only be defined on the basis of documents in the National Archives or Portuguese archives (Beach’s favorite) written after all by biased Europeans. This was also another point of disagreement with Ranger, who placed immense weight on African voices and oral sources. I remember Beach talking down Mutswairo to ‘stick to poetry’ and leave history to historians, when the former was presenting a paper on the ancestral spirit Nehanda’s medium Charwe, whom he stripped to a mere mortal woman “unjustly accused.” Beach had this cruel disregard for African spiritually that was shockingly arrogant sometimes; he would, of course, say it’s the dispassionate (albeit quite Rhodesian) view a historian ought to have to establish and adjudicate the facts. The exact opposite of Ranger, one would say.

Beach’s life was ended too soon by a brain tumor. Ray Roberts, by contrast, had left much earlier, in 1994 if my memory is correct. He had been billed to be my supervisor since my dissertation was focusing on the construction of the Kariba hydro-electric dam. I remember the day he summoned me into his office, to inform me that Beach would take over as my honors thesis supervisor. He was very bitter at what he perceived as a lack of appreciation among the all-black Masters students he had dedicated so much of his time and energy to train, only for them to label him a racist. What could I say as a supervisee? I just stared at him blankly, waiting for a knock on the door to rescue me. Occasionally, after he had left the department, he would pop in to check on his stockpile of the Rhodesian History (later Zimbabwean History) journal that he claimed as his personal property—relics from the Rhodesian era, piled one after another and in boxes in its editor’s office. The reason for his departure was his alleged racism in the treatment of subject matter concerning the struggle for self-liberation. He and Beach never hid their discomfiture and downright hatred of not just ZANU (PF) but the whole project of self-liberation. Why, they were on the other side! No wonder, Ranger might be accused of anything else. Racism? Never!

What still strikes me is how the University of Zimbabwe was left with Roberts and Beach to preside over how the ‘History of Zimbabwe’ syllabus that was supposed to be so crucial to the rebuilding of a memory and self-esteem shattered by colonialism was to be created and taught. Beach in particular, because the field manual of the Rhodesian Army G-Branch, entitled Soldiers Book of Shona Customs issued on January 1, 1975, was modeled on the historical and cultural knowledge gathered by and from the Ministry of Internal Affairs in which Beach was a senior scholarly figure. With Ngwabi Bhebe’s subsequent departure to the newly formed Midlands State University, Beach remained a key figure in the History Department until his death in 1998. Politically, the pendulum had already swung; but in terms of History and how it was taught, nothing changed. The most accomplished scholars were not in History itself but its Archaeology sub-unit, where Gilbert Pwiti was now dean of the faculty of arts and humanities, and Innocent Pikirayi in charge of Archaeology, and History Department Chair. If there is one thing they will reflect on, it is the failure to decolonialize the meaning, practice and ends of History, to re-define it to address our postcolonial needs, rather than getting stuck in with dogma.

We can fault Ranger for the direction post-independent Zimbabwean history took for other things, but I don’t think dispassionate or sterile History is one of those. I witnessed that difference in 2000 when I taught the ‘Aspects of Central African History’ course with him. He was on one of his many visiting professorships from Oxford, and Innocent Pikirayi felt I needed someone to mentor me as a teacher and to inspire me to publish (and those who know Pikirayi and Ranger well will testify to their constant encouragement of students and junior scholars to publish). The sense of commitment to a usable past, to inspire students to not see history as something so dispassionate but in every sense their own story, was obvious from Day 1. I can’t help but contrast it with Beach’s “hands-free,” dispassionate amassing of one oral tradition after another, and stringing them into a dense, unintelligible mass of the sort one finds in A Zimbabwean Past. Where Beach reveled in the mastery of dates and catalogue numbers of specific files where the bones were buried in the national archives, Ranger wanted us to give students a sense that, as he put it, “History Matters.” Teaching with him convinced me—both as a critique and an appreciation of his perspective—that being a historian did not mean digging up graves to disturb the dead resting in peace just for the sake of writing an erudite narrative, but to recover for oneself an identity, history, and personhood lost to me through the erasure or discoloration of the ancestors’ contributions to my current station in life. I wanted to be a historian who critically engaged with the present and future, to marshall history to the service of the present situation, not of elites but ordinary people. In a sense I felt Ranger had lost that touch since Revolt was published.

Even as visiting professor from Oxford, Ranger was always present and loved in the History Department. The joke was always on him that he did not understand the definition of a “valedictory lecture.” He delivered too many of them that we lost count. “Just come any time Terry, and never use the word valedictory,” we would chide him. “You have a particularly bad memory on how many of these valedictories you’ve held.” That was in 2000. Long into the sunset of his life, Ranger was still writing and talking, with his customary touch of personalized narrative that critics say is narcissistic, while others will say represents the inextricability of Ranger the author and Ranger the person. This conflation of writing and persona that is a consequence of being a public intellectual is most profound in his most talked about essay on “Patriotic History,” which he presented in the time we were co-teaching “Aspects.” The lecture theater was packed, the questions kept coming.

Ranger came at a time when the History and Economic History Departments were beginning to enter what Walter Mignolo calls a “decolonial’ state in terms of the faculty. A whole group of us, training or trained abroad and within the department, had now returned to honor our “bonded” contracts. The likes of Sibongile Mhlaba, Josephine Nhongo-Simbanegavi, Nhamo Samasuwo, Godfrey Ncube, James Muzondidya, Munyaradzi Mushonga, Mhoze Chikowero, Tapiwa Zimudzi, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Gerald Mazarire, Government Phiri, Annie Chipembere, Ezra Chitando, Mickias Musiyiwa—the atmosphere was beginning to be exciting. Then the political and economic implosion took over, space for such engagement shrank, and a great dispersal of this immense pool began. It was also a time when we were beginning to be less enthralled by Ranger and become more critical of his discourse. For some of us, the quest for a usable past, and the need to counter patriotic history that monopolized the struggle for self-liberation in the hands of the political elite at the expense of everyone else—including the guerrillas who fought with the ordinary people on the ground—seemed welcome. It was the yardstick with which the contributions of the Zimbabwean Ranger would be measured.

Ambivalent

To restate—by the time that Terence Ranger penned his important works on the uses and abuses of history, some of us were already wondering and even asked him, during this valedictory presentation on “Patriotic History,” why he had remained silent all along while Matabeleland was burning? While erstwhile liberation war comrades like Joshua Nkomo and Edgar Tekere, the demobilized war veterans from ZIPRA and ZANLA, and the povo were being sidelined in the narrative and enjoyment of the fruits of the Zimbabwean struggle for self-liberation? Had he not, by his silence and writing on the ‘Shona,’ contributed to the patriotic history he now spoke against? Why did he continue to write about ‘Shona’ peasant consciousness and what ZANU (PF) alone had done in the liberation struggle, even as Joshua Nkomo, his comrades-in-arms, had to flee a country he gave his life to liberate dressed like an old woman? Even when the Willowgate scandal was torching the country and the Leadership Code was being turned into toilet paper? Where was his conscience—in Zimbabwe or in Britain? Whatever he did in private we were not privy to.

In that sense, there seemed to me no way that Ranger could insulate himself from being tied to complicity in doing what Amílcar Cabral had warned fellow revolutionaries against in 1972: “Tell no lies and claim no easy victories.” Then again, Cabral died before he had tasted power; we will never know if he would have ended up the way of others who became president. That also applies to Chris Hani, Steve Biko, or Josiah Tongogara. Yet a conversation warning popular liberation icons against overstaying and becoming stale in power and holding them to account based on the revolutionary values of anti-colonial struggle would have lent more credibility to his critique of patriotic history.

I think the Ranger most relevant to us as Zimbabweans and Zimbabwean scholars got side-tracked. In 1976 he had signaled a brilliant research agenda on “a usable past.” Unbeknownst to him, his struggle comrades-in-arms would cunningly use history to justify monopolizing a struggle that everyone had fought against the Smith regime. In hindsight, perhaps this is the danger Ranger intended to warn us against in Peasant Consciousness (1985). But he came across as seeking to portray the self-liberation struggle as having been fought by one party with support from one ethnic group that contributed without coercion to that party and guerrilla army’s efforts. Ranger thus opened up criticism that then scandalized the struggle for self-liberation as an orgy of violence and patriarchal oppression, which is how Zimbabwean critics have read Norma Kriger’s Zimbabwe’s Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices. A narrative that could have helped Zimbabwe was one that exposed the synergies between bottom-up innovations of the ordinary people against all odds and the guerrillas both in the rear bases and on the from in the fight against Smith, particular in a time when politicians had disgraced themselves and could no longer be trusted. Here I think of Mafuranhunzi Gumbo’s Guerrilla Snuff—a history of the struggle capturing ordinary people’s immense contributions in a genre of ‘popular history’ accessible to them.

Perhaps such a project of usable past might have moved even further to quickly cement in documentary film and other accessible accounts of the struggle that are historically inclusive to counter the monopoly of the struggle by academics, politicians, and one party at the expense of everyone else. In the specific case of ZAPU and ZIPRA, the question, methodologically, is not only whether that project might have been at all possible during Gukurahundi, the counter-insurgency operation that left an estimated 20,000 people (it could be more or less) dead, but also how? Some may be forgiven for reading Ranger’s much belated pivot to Matabeleland as coming from Jocelyn Alexander and JoAnn McGregor, co-authors of Violence and Memory (2002), whose longue durée sounds seems an attempt to compensate for the many years of scholarly neglect of western Zimbabwe bar the work of Bhebe and Pathisa Nyathi. The risks of making commentary on Matabeleland in a time of counter-insurgency operations was probably personally too much. Perhaps the old Ranger deported for his troubles by the Smith regime in 1963 had gone?

To the present I am not sure whether to read Ranger’s as an Africanist’s history (outsiders writing about Africa and Africans) or a Zimbabwean history. His Invention of Tradition piece, along with his indifference to Matabeleland until it was too late, give me pause. The comparisons withBasil Davidson or George Shepperson intrigue me; I cannot place him in that category. Yet, I don’t think he was one of those that study Africa because they are fascinated by Africa as subject matter, but who are genuinely driven by their conscience to understand Africa from the perspectives of Africans. However, there are those that either draw very close to the ruling elites for one reason or other, or choose to see, hear, or speak no evil. The question in Ranger’s case is when, not if or always, that Ranger chose to be silent or to speak up—and why.

Unlike Roberts and Beach—who stayed in Rhodesia—Ranger can be remembered for being ejected for his activities and sympathies towards nationalism. At the same time he can also be recognized as a victim of post-liberation euphoria, enthralled in the honeymoon to the extent that even when dissenters within the liberation movement began signaling its early signs of derailment, these committed intellectuals exhibited disbelief and downright indifference to those voices. Delirious with triumphal joy at the fall of the racist white regimes in Southern Africa, they declared missão cumprida and looked the other way as their liberation icons turned rogue on their own citizens in pursuit of personal power. We are post-that-generation, so our conscience in criticizing them is quite clear. Perhaps it is because we have the benefit of hindsight, and history has vindicated us, which is probably unfair. The ructions in ZANU (PF) at the moment, as erstwhile comrades turn on each other, vindicates us and shows the dangers of complicity in silence as the attrition from founding principles of the project of self-liberation unfolds. The erosion of values happens very slowly. It is sometimes even beneficial to those that don’t agree with deviation from principle but go along because they are “eating” or because they can come into Zimbabwe and do their research without restriction. It is only when they are affected directly that they raise their voices. At that point they sound like the lousiest hypocrites. One would think the best way to safeguard the gains of a just cause is to raise the level of vigilance against any pervasions to code Orange so that complacency of corruption does not settle in. Ironically, Ranger’s narratives, especially Peasant Consciousness, promoted a version of Zimbabwe whose construction excluded non-Shona. He can’t cry about patriotic history when since Revolt he authored it.

But what would I have expected Ranger to do? Let’s remind ourselves that, like Davidson, Ranger was not some ordinary British expatriate scholar writing Zimbabwean history. He had personal access to these politicians because he was close to many of them. And perhaps that’s a lesson to every one of us as intellectuals: how close can we get to politicians or elites in order to retain a space for critique between our standpoint and theirs? Perhaps he could have been more vocal early on and not left the Department of History to continue as a Ministry of Internal Affairs outpost without the Rhodesian state to report to. It is probably unfair; haven’t we all left? I expected him to say that it is wrong to treat a wartime comrade like a criminal for the purpose of personal political power. Perhaps I expected Ranger to engage the many exiled ZIPRA and ZAPU cadres to join him in documenting their history, seeing as the party and liberation army’s entire archive had been confiscated during Gukurahundi.

Intellectually the biggest problem is that we relied on Ranger so much to write our history that few blacks ever wrote any. Ranger is only a tip of a larger iceberg of Zimbabwe’s dependence on outsiders to tell its stories. How many black Zimbabweans are writing and publishing today? Any biography of Mugabe by a Zimbabwean? How many books do we have on Zimbabwe since independence by Zimbabweans? We have a system in the country where as a citizen I have to move heaven and earth to get archival documents on a self-liberation struggle in which we the people fought on the ground with makomuredhi (the comrades, as guerrillas were called), cooking for them, gathering intelligence for them, and them fighting and suffering with us. By contrast, if non-Zimbabweans from North America or Europe come in and ask, all doors will open. Some have even bragged to us about it; the next thing we see is all these national archives are digitized and subscription fees paid to access them, and the country gets nothing. If I as a Zimbabwean keen to write a narrative of our struggle as one of unbelievable bottom up-top down innovation, as a project wherein everyone participated in engineering a nation, so that our children and their forebears can draw inspiration from that just as every other great nation on earth does, it is in the national interest to avail to me as much material access as I require.

My point is that there is nothing wrong with outsiders coming to write about Zimbabwe or Africa. They should. Their questions are interesting, but there are not necessarily our questions as Zimbabweans. However, African governments have an obligation to let their academics write histories from the African perspective and should do whatever they can to promote it. Otherwise the tragedy is that entire syllabi will have only non-Zimbabwean authors, whose accounts answer to discourses and questions external to the national interest. We cannot subsist our children in universities and secondary schools on histories about us that are not for us by us, that are calibrated on the basis of questions important to the priorities and thematics of external discourses. As African scholars we can still enrich those external scholarly circles from deep with the registers emanating from conversations focused on our own African priorities. It is cry wolf if we accuse scholars coming from outside of ‘distorting our history’ when we as African governments and leaders do very little and even feel uncomfortable with the stories our own citizens tell.

To his credit, Terence Ranger stands with others in turning their institutions abroad into fecund spaces for training Zimbabwean doctoral students in History. Ranger was unique in one regard: it did not matter whether one was his student at Oxford. If the need was there, and one was committed enough, he would train you even if you were at UZ. I am not a student of Ranger, but the fantastic caliber of students he produced speaks for itself. Some are enamored to him and respond negatively to any critique of him as if it is on them. Some have taken long to break free of his “ethnicity” and “invention of tradition” to carve their own paths. But for some of them like Enocent Msindo, author of Ethnicity in Zimbabwe, that process had already begun with his robust questioning of his former supervisor’s twin paradigms. One day when if I am blessed with long a life as Ranger’s and all I see are just loyal disciples, I will be very sad. The litmus test, the homage his students can pay to Ranger, is to take their own scholarship in richly rewarding directions without fetter.

For those of us who are not Ranger’s students, the questioning had already begun long before, sometimes drawing acrimony from those of his ex-students who did not take kindly to a critique of him, who think they own him. Ranger himself is an institution; it’s impossible to own him. Indeed, a good scholar is known by the number of disagreements others will have on his or her work and politics. For that reason, Terence Osborne Ranger the mentor and teacher of many, the committed academic, and a British man with a strong passion for African self-liberation, will remain important to us as Zimbabwean scholars probably for posterity. The Zimbabwean Ranger is not the Africanist Ranger; the former is defined on the basis of writing the narratives that changed Zimbabweans’ life experiences for better or worse, the latter for his “invention of tradition” and other resonances with theory. The Ranger I sought to portray was a personal and Zimbabwean Ranger.

His passing creates a gap in the caucus on Zimbabwe studies. But it’s not a vacuum.

Africa Cup of Nations Memories: Cameroon’s shootout victory over Nigeria, enjoyed on VHS two days after the match

My favourite AFCON memory harks back to the year 2000 when Ghana and Nigeria co-hosted. To say it was a challenge to watch this competition is an understatement! This marked the era before internet streams and mass football broadcasting in North America. As recent immigrants to Canada, my family carried over our footballing passion but were faced with few avenues to keep it nourished. This meant less football viewing on weekends, but this was a final with two of Africa’s footballing giants in Nigeria and Cameroon. A well-established diaspora network allowed us to get our hands on the prized VHS recording of the final, two days after it was played. Alhamdullilah for the complete lack of interest in African football from Canadian sports media at the time. It meant we could rest easy knowing there was little chance the result could be spoiled.

The final with a top-billing did not disappoint. Dazzling technique, goals, intrigue, and controversy. It had it all! The scoresheet was opened by a young teenage prodigy, one Samuel Eto’o Fils, and Cameroon quickly stormed to a surprising 2-0 lead over the favoured Super Eagles. It seemed as though the tide had turned and only a crossbar stopped the Indomitable Lions from asserting their dominance. Yet, this was only the beginning of the show played before a delighted sell-out crowd in Bamako. The Super Eagles, ushered on by the sound of blaring trumpets, quickly drew level with two goals, including a stunning strike from the legendary Jay-Jay Okocha. Wide-open back and forth play could not break the deadlock and 120 minutes of nail-biting drama had to be settled by the random cruelty of penalty-kicks.

What followed is very familiar to all Super Eagles supporters. A well struck Victor Ikepba spot-kick ricocheted off the top of the cross-bar back to the ground, tantalizingly close to the goal-line. At first glance through the grainy Arab Radio and Television Network recording it appeared as though Ikepba missed a golden chance. But a replay clearly showed that the ball had crossed the line! A decade before Frank Lampard, the first famous justification for the use of goal line technology could be found. To this day, many are convinced that long-time CAF autocrat Issa Hayatou (CAF’s Cameroonian “life president”) was behind the missed call. The late Marc-Vivien Foe missed his chance to lift the Indomitable Lions to glory, but captain Rigobert Song did not hesitate to put it away and claim the first trophy in a golden year for Cameroonian football.

Recent developments have made AFCON viewing much simpler on this side of the Atlantic. This year the competition will be carried by a network available on cable TV, a development that I would never foresee 15 years ago. Despite this, nostalgia ensures the 2000 final continues to rank above all. Let’s hope Equatorial Guinea 2015 comes close!

Mohammed’s is one of the winning entries in our AFCON Memories competition with AMS Clothing, and he wins a national team jersey from the AMS range.

Thanks to AMS Clothing, kit suppliers to the national teams of Sierra Leone and South Sudan, for providing prizes for our AFCON Memories competition. We caught up with AMS founder Luke Westcott, and asked him to explain a bit more about how AMS got started, what makes it distinctive, and where it’s heading.

“Founded in late 2013, AMS recognised the social, as well as commercial opportunities presented in the hugely popular, yet largely informal football industry in Africa. This recognition came about after traveling to Africa and discovering that the only football apparel available for purchase at a reasonable price were low-quality, counterfeit products. Many of these products were the national team apparel of each respective country we travelled to. This led to the idea of becoming the official national team suppliers, and then providing the respective national football federations with the opportunity to offer their official products to the domestic market, at a price that meet the market demands. This means that fans can purchase official products, featuring cool designs, at a fair price, whilst supporting their national football federation in the process. Furthermore, we also supply the international market through the AMS online store and a few other retailers. This allows us to raise revenue and expand to further countries.

“The main focus we highlight to FA’s as to why they should choose us is the opportunity we provide them to effectively commercialise on the popularity of the national team. Many of the smaller federations never receive revenue from apparel sales, even when they are supplied by major sportswear brands. Many of these brands do not make apparel available for purchase, and if they do, it is often at a price that is way too expensive for most people in the domestic market. Furthermore, all our designs are customised and are created to the specifications of the FA. We never use boring template designs, and always try to design something interesting that will be popular with local fans.”

It makes perfect sense to name one of Cape Town’s busiest roads after FW de Klerk

All this controversy around honoring former Apartheid president FW de Klerk by renaming one of Cape Town’s busiest streets after him got me thinking.

The act of public naming is a profound act in our society – which is why it generates so much controversy.

It is symbolic. Naming is not merely of a practical function to help identify an object of interest, it also serves a necessary social purpose.

In this case, it serves to remove history from the tombs of academia and museums, and place it right smack into our everyday lives. It seeks to remind us of our past lest we continue to fall prey to repeating the same mistakes and atrocities over and over again. (Although, in truth, Marikana has also shown us how little we remember about Sharpeville).

It is absolutely true, as the journalist Terry Bell , that De Klerk was a despicable figure in South African history. He deserves no honor and what he stands for should be relegated to the dustbin of our oppressive past.

The City of Cape Town’s act of renaming the section of the N1 Freeway that is right now called Table Bay Boulevard merely serves to show how the current city government has few qualms about de Klerk’s obscenely racist politics, his support for apartheid death squads, and his general hatred of the quest for justice and equality.

Why is that the case? It is not only because the Democratic Alliance is a white dominated party that is unwilling to take the necessary steps to transform our society. Nor is it simply because Cape Town under the Democratic Alliance’s helm has become more segregated and exclusionary and its politics more reactionary and violent than ever.

It is also because the same holds true for South African society as a whole. Neoliberalism, a class project of both the ANC and DA that is buttressed by white capital, has maintained and in some cases even deepened exploitation of most South Africans.

Therefore, the important question to ask right here and right now is whether or not apartheid is truly behind us.

In my estimation, the following still exists:

1) South Africa is still one of the most unequal countries in the world in terms of a range of key social factors such as income, land ownership, crime, and mobility.

2) It also remains segregated by both race and class even if a handful of blacks are able to make it out of the townships.

3) In practice, a different political and legal system is applied to poor blacks when compared to the rest of the population even if officially this is no longer the case.

4) Massacres of black workers and assassinations of community organisers and trade union members continue to take place with impunity for police, hitmen, and the politicians and bosses who give them their orders.

5) Rural South Africa remains under the despotic control of unelected chiefs who gained powerthrough apartheid’s system of indirect rule. The ANC is attempting to deepen this rather than democratise this despotic political system.

Therefore, in many of the ways that count, (i.e. the socioeconomic manifestations in everyday life for the poor majority) we still live in an materially apartheid state. This is in spite of major victories such as legal deracilization, the repeal of the pass laws, the fact that blacks can now vote and the rise of a liberation movement into political power.

While the importance of these changes should not be understated, they do not constitute a structural change in the character of our society.

If then wholesale oppression and exploitation of the majority of people living in South Africa remain, what better way to express that reality than by renaming one of Cape Town’s busiest roads after the person who negotiated a transition away from legal apartheid while ensuring it remains in effect in all the ways that truly matter to poor blacks?

I therefore propose that the remaining of Table Bay Boulevard go ahead but that we use it to remind everyone just how little has changed, in part, because of this man. At the entrances to Table Bay Boulevard, we should demand (or place ourselves) a large plaque which speaks to all the atrocities this man is responsible for, the racist politics he expounds, and the reformulation of his apartheid project post-1994 through wide-scale evictions, police killings and worker exploitation.

Only when our society is truly transformed can renaming our streets after those martyrs and movements who fought and continue to fight against oppression and exploitation be an honest reflection of our country. Until then, FW de Klerk Boulevard is an apt name for a road in a society that continues to oppress and exploit its people.

El México Guerrero: Ayotzinapa’s defiant struggle for justice

On the night of September 26th, 2014, in the western Mexican state of Guerrero, 43 students of the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College of Ayotzinapa were intercepted and shot by the municipal police of Iguala. The survivors were later abducted by a local criminal group known as Guerreros Unidos at the request of the Iguala mayor and police chief. The students’ whereabouts are still unknown four months after the attack. The following photo essay portrays the resilience of the families and classmates of the disappeared as they fight for justice during January 2015.

“I know my boy’s alive. I wonder if he’s being fed, if the people that have him are treating him well, if he’s cold… they took our boys alive, we want them back alive.” Doña Nicanora is one of the mothers of the 43 missing students who has abandoned her life in search of her son, Saúl.

Thousands gather in the Zócalo (Mexico City’s main square) under the banner of “We are all Ayotzinapa.” They listen to parents of the missing 43 plead to boycott upcoming local elections in Guerrero and call for the resignation of embattled President Enrique Peña Nieto.

On January 12th, parents of the missing 43 students marched on the 27th battalion base in Iguala, Guerrero, the city where the boys were abducted. The parents believe that their sons are being held at the base by the military.

A community police officer stands guard at the gates of the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College after activists, students and parents of the 43 alike have received death threats for their continued search for truth.

An elderly relative of one of the disappeared students prepares for an action in Chilpancingo, Guerrero. People have come together regardless of class, gender and age to mobilize against the perceived incompetence in the handling of the Ayotzinapa case by the state.

One of many murals at the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, where the missing first year students were studying to become rural and small village teachers. It reads, “Protesting is a right. Repression is a crime.”

43 desks with the names of the disappeared students hold portraits and flowers at the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero. The gymnasium at the school has transformed into the heart of the Ayotzinapa movement and a vigil for so many who wait for their sons and classmates to just come back home.

This post was originally published (with more photos) at Noria Research.

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El México Guerrero: Ayotzinapa’s Defiant Struggle for Justice

On the night of September 26th, 2014, in the western Mexican state of Guerrero, 43 students of the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College of Ayotzinapa were intercepted and shot by the municipal police of Iguala. The survivors were later abducted by a local criminal group known as Guerreros Unidos at the request of the Iguala mayor and police chief. The students’ whereabouts are still unknown four months after the attack. The following photo essay portrays the resilience of the families and classmates of the disappeared as they fight for justice during January 2015.

“I know my boy’s alive. I wonder if he’s being fed, if the people that have him are treating him well, if he’s cold… they took our boys alive, we want them back alive.” Doña Nicanora is one of the mothers of the 43 missing students who has abandoned her life in search of her son, Saúl.

Thousands gather in the Zócalo (Mexico City’s main square) under the banner of “We are all Ayotzinapa.” They listen to parents of the missing 43 plead to boycott upcoming local elections in Guerrero and call for the resignation of embattled President Enrique Peña Nieto.

On January 12th, parents of the missing 43 students marched on the 27th battalion base in Iguala, Guerrero, the city where the boys were abducted. The parents believe that their sons are being held at the base by the military.

A community police officer stands guard at the gates of the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College after activists, students and parents of the 43 alike have received death threats for their continued search for truth.

An elderly relative of one of the disappeared students prepares for an action in Chilpancingo, Guerrero. People have come together regardless of class, gender and age to mobilize against the perceived incompetence in the handling of the Ayotzinapa case by the state.

One of many murals at the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, where the missing first year students were studying to become rural and small village teachers. It reads, “Protesting is a right. Repression is a crime.”

43 desks with the names of the disappeared students hold portraits and flowers at the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero. The gymnasium at the school has transformed into the heart of the Ayotzinapa movement and a vigil for so many who wait for their sons and classmates to just come back home.

This post was originally published (with more photos) at Noria Research.

5 Questions for a Filmmaker–Newton I. Aduaka

Acclaimed Paris-based Nigerian filmmaker Newton I. Aduaka started his film career in the UK in the 1990s. His first feature, the award-winning and much talked-about, Rage (2000) was the UK’s first hip hop movie and the first film by an independent black filmmaker to be released on the national circuit. Aduaka has screened his films at film festivals around the world and has won numerous awards, among them the Golden Stallion of Yennenga (the award for best film) at Fespaco 2007 for his second feature, Ezra, and the FIPRESCI International Critics Award for his third, One Man’s Show at FESPACO 2013. His fourth feature Oil on Water, (currently in development) was selected to be part of the Cinéfondation’s Atelier at Cannes in 2014.

1) What is your first film memory?

I’ve been asked this question often and each time I think of a scene with two lovers trapped in a burning building, arms wrapped around each other as they desperately try to find an escape through the flames. The scene is accompanied by swelling orchestrated music. I believe this was the climax of the film. I do not remember the title to this day, but each time I’m asked this question, this scene or snippet of a scene appears whole in my minds eye, accompanied by the soundtrack. It was a Bollywood movie; that I know. It was 1975 at a cinema called the Plaza with its huge auditorium in Apapa, Lagos. My mum and I cried a lot. That I remember.

2) Why did you decide to become a filmmaker?

It wasn’t so much a decision as, by successive moments of chance events and experiences. I was a science major at high school. The usual story: I was being groomed to become an Astrophysicist… hence “Newton”! Cinema was something that was not an option, growing up in Nigeria back then, I had no clue that it was even a career. It never crossed my mind. I had dabbled in music; formed a school-band with three classmates and we went as far as recording an album. I was 14. I was part of that generation that, given half a chance, left the country in droves in the mid-eighties. I remember there was this catch phrase: “I’m checking out!” The country was under the iron grip of one of the many military dictatorships. The soldier boys had occupied and clamped down on schools and universities. The socio-political and economic fabric of the country was in tatters.  I arrived to stay at my aunt’s in the run down North Peckham estate in London, which was then called “Home away from home” because of its sizable Nigerian community of exiles. I shot my first feature, Rage, there. The United Kingdom was a country under another form of iron grip, Thatcherite England. The Brixton riots had happened 4 years prior and the term ‘multiculturalism’ was the buzzword. I was lost and confused doing petty clandestine work, but I had the distinct sense that a new chapter of my life was about to begin. A year later, a friend had asked me to accompany him on an open day visit to a college offering a foundation course in film, video and photography. I went along, listened and fell in love. I went on to attend the London Film School, a very international film academy that exposed me to true World Cinema by virtue of my colleagues who had ended up there from all corners of the world. Filmmaking immediately made sense to me; it reconciled my interests in the arts and sciences. Astrophysics is the study of the nature of the universe. Cinema, for me, is the study of the nature of being.

3) Which film do you wish you had made?

The film I am preparing: Oil on Water, an adaptation of the novel by the acclaimed writer, Helon Habila.

4) Name one of the films on your top-5 list and the reason why it is there.

Memories of Underdevelopment by , from 1968. For me, it is a profound and complex study of alienation in times of seismic shifts. An attempt to make sense of, and reconcile, the nature of memory, identity and reality in a life that is in state of flux. And an exploration of the numbing psychic shock that comes in times of great historic transformation, as what is known is swept away and uncertainty/reality sets in.

It is one of the seminal works of cinema that inspired my filmmaking. I guess, personally, my response to the film comes from having lived through a traumatic civil war and the military dictatorships that came after. The protagonist is a character I don’t particularly sympathize with, a complete hypocrite, but the filmmaker finds a way to make you empathize. Not that one accepts or tolerates the character’s behavior, but through him, one is asked to confront that part of one’s nature, which is difficult to accept, which we constantly evade and which becomes part of one’s subconscious fears.

5) Ask yourself any question you think I should have asked and answer it.

Is Cinema important?

Yes… if it has something to say. And I don’t mean in terms of a message, and definitely do not mean peddling some moral or political stance for that matter. For me, it is important if it illuminates or resonates something that makes up the essence of this thing called human nature. Essentially, truth.