Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 386

What is it like to be a refugee in Germany?

“Gitmo in Germany?” and “German Abu Ghraib” were two of the headlines across news wires in late September after photos and a video documenting the abuse of Algerian asylum seekers by security officers in an asylum center had circulated. The photo shows a guard standing next to an asylum seeker who is lying on the floor with his hands tied behind his back; the guard put his foot on the asylum seeker’s head, as if to keep the man down. A video showed a man lying in his own vomit, while he was verbally attacked by the guards.

With the escalation of war in Syria, the number of asylum seekers in Germany reached a 20-year high, and Germany expects to receive a total of over 200,000 new asylum seekers this year. But German cities are not prepared to receive that many people, and, as has become clear once more, they resort to cost-saving measures that backfire. The asylum center in which the abuse occurred (Burbach in the state of North-Rhine Westphalia) is managed by a private company, and the security officers charged with the abuse were from a sub-contractor, a private security firm that apparently did not put much effort into careful selection and training of the officers. According to the German magazine Der Spiegel, some of the officers had links to the neo-Nazi scene.

Officials promised rapid documentation and clarification of the events, as well as prosecution of the perpetrators. They fired the sub-contractor and vowed to tighten background checks of security personnel. But German civil society actors and media outlets kept asking what is being done to address and solve the underlying issues: overcrowded asylum centers, the lack of resources to build new facilities, the privatization of security in these centers, and the dubious background of security officers and their links to right-wing parties. “The plight of refugees is used for business,” the NGO ProAsyl (pro asylum) criticized. Opposition leaders called for a “national refugee summit.”

Indeed, the latest abuses are not isolated incidents. In 2002, state security identified four Neonazis working for security firms in facilities in Brandenburg. In 2013, journalists, based on official reports, estimated that ten percent of the 1150 active Neonazis in Brandenburg worked in the security sector. As some point out, part of the problem of the lack of response to these incidence is that only when the security service identifies such right-wing tendencies, politicians listen; there is much less reaction when civil society initiatives point to instances of discrimination and abuse by right-leaning officers.

The general trend has been to make immigration more difficult, rather than improving the conditions for asylum seekers and refugees. Conservative politicians even make it their explicit goal to keep conditions precarious in order to send a message to “Africa” that coming to Germany as a refugee is difficult and burdensome. None of the 16 states requires shelter operators to hire social workers. When numbers of asylum seekers were relatively low, at around 20,000 between 2006-2009, municipalities—that are responsible for providing shelter—blocked attempts at renovating asylum centers, and the tendency was to close as many “superfluous” facilities as possible. As a consequence, the city of Duisburg announced in August that the city would shelter asylum seekers in tents.

More fundamentally, even at a time when Germany is commemorating the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall and exodus of East German refugees who had gathered at the West German embassy in Prague, few people think back and compare their own situation with that of the asylum seekers and refugees in Germany today. Media reports looking back at the situation 25 years ago celebrated the high level of solidarity with which West Germans welcomed those who had fled from the GDR. Today, asylum shelters are surrounded by anti-refugee rallies organized by far-right groups. And when a member of parliament from the Christian Democratic Party recently suggested to settle asylum seekers in families instead of anonymous shelters, he received outraged responses.

The photos and video of the abuses will surely change how Germans think about refugees among them, but not for long—a couple of weeks after the publication of the photos, few still talk about them. What’s needed is a much more thorough change in attitude towards migrants and solidarity for their situation.

How do we talk about the memory of Apartheid

In 1966 the South African government declared District Six—a high-density, mostly coloured residential area intrinsic to the fabric of downtown Cape Town for at least a century and situated on prime land beneath Table Mountain —to be a white “Group Area.” The state promptly set about forcefully removing District Six’s “non-white” residents (eventually about 60,000 of them) to land up to 30 miles further to a flood plane known as the “Cape Flats,” which consisted of mostly swamp land and sand dunes populated by invasive vegetation.

Despite the fact that nowadays developers and the city council (governed by the mostly white Democratic Alliance which relies partly on the votes of poor coloureds who now inhabit the Cape Flats) would sooner forget that District Six ever existed (they want to remake that part of the city into a Maboneng-style district for hipsters and whites with money), and despite the fact that nothing but an ugly gash on the hillside near the city is the only evidence of razed buildings, its historical significance has been extensively memoralized. There’s a downtown museum—a few blocks from the original neighborhood—dedicated to its memory and District Six, and its former inhabitants have been the subjects of scores of books, novels, films and photographic exhibitions.

What we get from the Museum and these media are celebrations of a multiracial milieu: it was, after all, the neighborhood that started as a home for free slaves and black migrants to the city, a place which also attracted poor European—mostly Jewish—immigrants. We also see, in the objects and photographs of remembrance, evidence of the residents’ resilience—of how the mostly poor and working class renters made it in a city that made life difficult for them already. Finally, we see how, through forced removals, these people who built a vibrant place of possibility were condemned to various parts of the desolate Cape Flats.

Though District Six also had other black residents, it is coloureds that primarily lay claim to District Six (most coloureds don’t identify as black, but many trace their ancestors to Mozambican and Angolan slaves or Khoi and Xhosa unions). District Six is for them a lament for a lost city and a lodestar in reconstructing a more integrated metropole. And because the land where District Six stood has not been occupied much since, the area still stands as a monument for racial inequality and exclusion. Even as you drive above it on the elevated highway that takes you from the suburbs into central Cape Town, you can’t miss the presence of its empty expanse

The result of its lasting absence/presence is that popular memories of District Six—though it is punctuated by occasional stories of deprivation and communal violence (the infamous Cape Town Mongrels gang originated there)—generally celebrate those who lived there. (My father, who was born in Peninsula Maternity Hospital in District Six—but grew up in Newlands and Kirstenbosch—has the same nostalgia for “die Distriek.”).

The now-razed neighborhood also had profound influences on the city’s cultural life. The writer Alex la Guma (he died later, an exile, in Cuba) brought the quarter to life in his books (“A Walk in the Night”) as well as in his journalism for the Communist papers, The New Age and The Guardian. Musicians like Abdullah Ibrahim honed their skills in its clubs.

Yet, occasionally, residents recall more complicated memories, like how they remember or care to forget the history and legacy of institutions like the Eoan Group.

Eoan, a derivative of the Greek word for dawn (Eos), was founded by a white British immigrant, Helen Southern-Holt, in 1933 as a kind of ethnic uplift organization—a “culture and welfare organization” aimed at coloureds in District Six. Its politics was hardly radical. The emphasis was on teaching “the Coloured race” how to speak “proper,” have good posture, manners and hygiene. More importantly, they would also learn the arts, especially ballet and opera. The group used a building, the Liberman Institute, donated by a Jewish philanthropist.

Led by conductor Joseph Salvatore Manca, an Italian immigrant to Cape Town who worked as a bookkeeper for the city council, the all-coloured company (in terms of the performers; most trainers were white) performed from the early 1940s onwards, and gained some local and national fame. Condescending white critics were fond of declaring the group up to their high standards and some group members took this as genuine praise. But Eoan was a genuinely talented company of performers, conducting national and, later, international tours (especially to the UK).

Eoan was a performance company that consisted of talented members; it was not a charity for half-baked dancers. Were they born somewhere else (free from race prejudice or dictatorship), they would have been celebrated for their work. What is remarkable is that a number of Eoan members would go on to prove themselves on global (meaning European and American) stages. They include the ballet dancer David Poole, who passed for white (one Eoan member remembers: “he went to London coloured and came back white!”) and joined the Sadler Wells Theater Ballet as well as the Royal Ballet in London; Gordon Jephtas, a pianist and arranger, on occasion accompanied famed Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi at the Royal Albert Hall in London. One of the male lead singers, Joseph Gabriels, a former municipal worker, became the first South African to sing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

By the time the government had bulldozed District Six to the ground in 1968, the Eoan Group had moved to Athlone coloured township on the Cape Flats, where they made their home at the Joseph Stone Theater, built as a theater space for coloureds. (Any visitor to Athlone will recognize the theater situated on Klipfontein Road, a main thoroughfare close to Athlone Football Stadium). By the late 1970s, however, Eoan was in decline. Though it retained the quality of its performances, a mix of factors contributed to its eventual decline.

Manca (who could be ornery, but was admired by Eoan performers for his high quality of coaching) dueled with Eoan’s coloured administrator, Ismail Sydow, over who should manage the group’s affairs and direction. Sydow was a local coloured grocer whose wife sewed the group’s costumes. Sydow eventually won out over Manca but soured inter-group relations in the process. But as race politics in Apartheid South Africa went, that was an inconsequential victory since both men shared Southern-Holt’s vision. In fact, such rivalries and minor coups happen in performance companies everywhere.

More important to Eoan’s fortunes were the group’s choice of political patrons and its compromises over racism and Apartheid.

Perhaps, it is only in hindsight that we can see how much racial politics and the changing laws affected the group’s dynamics. But at some level, the Eoan Group appeared doomed to controversy and political compromise right from the onset. It originated in Southern-Holt’s white, Conservative, Christian-based rhetoric and her disavowal of any “politics.” However, as the National Party came into power in 1948 and made law out of already discriminatory social practices, Eoan members couldn’t escape being politicized. (Remember this was the period of the “Defiance Campaign” when resistance to Apartheid increasingly took a mass form.) Group members had always vowed to not perform to segregated audiences. However, by the late 1950s, they had given in and were performing to audiences that were divided by a rope: two rows of coloured patrons and eight rows of mostly rich whites. Members rationalized—or so Manca made them think—that they needed the money.

Before long, Eoan applied for money from the Department of Coloured Affairs, a very unpopular arm of the state set up after 1948 to “govern” coloured education, social welfare and housing similar to “Native Affairs” and the Bantustans. Manca also encouraged Eoan to play concerts for white Cabinet ministers. Soon Eoan was going on overseas publicity tours for the Apartheid state. Ada Jansen, one of the senior coloured administrators of Eoan, went to the United Nations on a visit arranged by the regime and its defenders to try and break the cultural boycott and weaken international solidarity in opposition to apartheid. The company also went on tours of Western Europe. (Eoan was certainly not the only group used by the South African regime in this way, of course.)

For Eoan’s critics, the group had gone too far with compromises. The coloured middle classes, whose best qualities Eoan claimed to represent, now despised the group: Most coloureds that cared or noticed (especially the literary elites, political activists, andthe professional classes) now openly resented Eoan.

In 1956, the writer Alex la Guma (charged with treason that same year in a mass trial which included Nelson Mandela) wrote a letter to Eoan about receiving government funding to perform to segregated audiences:

People can … conclude, therefore, that the Eoan Group supports Apartheid. In fact, the whole idea remains one of the slave period when the farmers hired Coloureds to perform for them, their masters. Today in the 20th century we do not recognize the white man as our master. This is the land of our birth and we demand government support for ALL cultural movements. BUT WITHOUT APARTHEID STRINGS (La Guma’s emphasis).

By the late 1970s, most patrons had deserting Eoan’s shows. Opponents like the South African Council on Sports (they concerned themselves with more than games), was openly calling on people to boycott Eoan. In 1979, SACOS, who championed the slogan “no normal sport in an abnormal society,” in a piece of Gramscian theater, declared Eoan a “banned organization.”

Alex La Guma and SACOS—which between them represented competing strands of antiapartheid organizational politics—had a point. During Apartheid, the National Party worked hard to court moderate coloureds as a buffer against African demands. Some coloureds were willing participants in these schemes. The belief among some coloureds to see white people as their natural allies and patrons, of course date back further and implicates slavery, colonialism, mission Christianity, and various government “reforms.” However, throughout South African history, this hardly paid off: social conditions for the majority of coloureds approximated those of their African neighbors. Nevertheless, this paternalism stuck and may also explain why most coloured voters relate to white parties in the city and the Western Cape province. By the late 1950s, Eoan were thus charter members of divide-and-conquer policies.

It can be very difficult for someone with little or no time or even any understanding of the nuances of race, politics and identity in Cape Town to fully grasp the conundrum of groups like Eoan Group and its achievements and controversies. It also doesn’t help that Eoan is a part of a past that few want to revisit in South Africa.

This is why the appearance of a book (Eoan: Our Story) and a film (An Inconsolable Memory) about Eoan is a significant event. “An Inconsolable Memory” and “Eoan: Our Story” both trace their origins to about 100 odd containers and 75 folders filled with documents and information donated by the Eoan Group to Stellenbosch University. From these documents, the university created an Eoan Archive in its Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS). A group of mostly white researchers sifted through the documents and looked into the prospect of publishing a book out of all this. DOMUS staff were joined on a steering committee by Ronald Samaai, the brother of a former Eoan Group member, and Ruth Viljoen, the widow of Eoan baritone, Lionel Fourie. The filmmaker Aryan Kaganof was invited to film the proceedings and go along on interviews.

The film and book set out to tell the story of the surviving Eoan group members.

The material in the book and film often overlap, with the book sometimes serving as a written transcript for the film.

“Eoan: Our Story” (the book) is organized into themed sections (“Beginnings,” “In Rehearsal,” “Playing Roles,” “Final Curtain,” etcetera). Conversations jump back and forth over time. Much of it is verbatim testimony by Eoan members compiled during interviews (45 in total). However, there’s little context, except for brief descriptions by the editors. This may be consistent with the book’s stated objective to let the Eoan members speak (“our story”), but leaves the reader in the dark about the weight of certain decisions or events. Everything is important and we just have to trust the editors.

Most Eoan members insist they only wanted to practice their art and could care less for “politics” (whether for or against Apartheid). They want to remember a time of glamorous costumes, triumphs and the occasional stage mishap. In general they are proud of the group’s legacy. Some read a progressive legacy into the past: In Eoan they could stop being, say factory- or dockworkers. Talent was what mattered.

Not surprisingly, the resistance and condemnation they faced for taking Apartheid’s money or playing to segregated audiences, still hurt. They want recognition for their efforts. They want people to see that they could perform and that they could create art regardless. For them, being black or coloured, had nothing to do with their abilities or talents. They were also acutely aware of the limitations of Apartheid. They don’t remember their involvement as transgression or collaboration.

Occasionally, some of them recognize the charged environment within which they operated, including within the group itself. Many of them point to slights at the hands of the conductor Manca and other white teachers at Eoan. Manca, for example, discouraged coloured chorus members from learning how to read music, and one of the Eoan trainers, the soprano Emma Renzi, to this day disparages Joseph Gabriels as a “little Cape coloured” who only got invited to sing at the Met in New York City because of his likeness to the more famous Enrico Caruso. That Gabriels enjoyed a fairly stable and successful career in Europe escapes her.

But what seems to hurt (and rankle) surviving Eoan Group members more was the criticism they got from other coloureds. Eoan members relied on the “community” to reinforce their sense of themselves; to validate them and when that validation was withdrawn—slowly from the 1950s onwards–they suffered.

The twin effects of the “testimonies” in the book and the film are that it is hard to deny the coloured members of Eoan the pleasure of wanting to produce and practice their art given the oppression of their daily lives. It wasn’t like they had the pick of opera companies; and until the mid-1980s, they could not perform in whites-only opera houses and theaters. By the time political freedom arrived in 1994 many of them were retired or had died (Gordon Jephtas died in New York City in 1992). They were too old to enjoy freedom.

Between the book and the film, it’s Kaganof’s approach that points to more promising possibilities for getting at some of the unease and murk associated with Eoan. The Stellenbosch researchers probably felt the same way as they indicate in the front of the book. (“And then there was (Kaganof’s) presence behind the camera: filming, moving, filming, winking, filming, laughing soundlessly. How much of what transpired was directed by Aryan Kaganof? I suspect more than we think.”) Kaganof’s film makes you wonder whether documentary film is better suited at getting at our fragmented, complicated pasts. In an interview after I read the book and watched the film, Kaganof told me that “… the film permits itself certain territory that is forbidden to the book. The nature of the academic contract locks the book into the terms of the release form. The film operates outside of that contract and hence shows us that, perhaps, ‘official’ history is only part of the story, and perhaps the least interesting part.”

Kaganof’s film opens with this message: “Let us not begin at the beginning, nor even at the archive, but rather at the word memory…” The emphasis in the film will thus be on fragmented memories. The pace is deliberately show and long, uninterrupted, shots dwell on interviewees as they read the release form for example or offer him tea in mostly overstuffed living rooms (the film also gives a sense of the class politics of Eoan). Kaganof is always present in the film. You see or hear him occasionally as he prompts interviews and in the editing choices he makes.

Then there are the lengthy archival sequences of District Six—mostly street scenes, people milling about or hanging over balconies of run-down tenements, and of children playing among ruins. The overriding sense is one of poverty and neglect. These scenes are overlaid with original recordings by Eoan’s opera company. I counted a total of about 30 minutes worth of these scenes. Some elements in these scenes are often repeated. Three shots in particular: the first is of a (white?) man, probably a security policeman, loafing around a street and who looks straight the camera; and the second, footage that Kaganof shot of a white homeless man lingering outside the Cape Town City Hall (where Eoan performed during Apartheid) as well-dressed patrons arrive for some performance. These shots are jarring—they are the only shots of whites in the film despite the heavy footprint of whites on how Apartheid worked—and you can’t help noticing that. Finally, there’s a slowed-down sequence of a bulldozer about to demolish a house. The sense of loss, anger and disorientation produced by these scenes stays with the viewer for a while after. In contrast, the book has a breezy quality to it in the way it presents the testimony of Eoan group members.

There’s a moment in the film, right at the end, where Ada Jansen, a key organizer for the Eoan Group mentioned earlier, asks Kaganof to put off the camera and he doesn’t and she gives her most honest answer about how people felt about Eoan: “They (other coloured people) hated us for being collaborators.” In this moment, Jansen comes across as proud of what she did, unrepentant and resigned about her position. But also hurt and coming to terms with that past. It is quite revealing. One can debate Kaganof’s ethics and whether it was justified to reveal the truth, but it gets at some of the questions any person interested in Eoan may want to broach or are fascinated by.

One thing the film and the book made me think about is that there must be more productive ways to write or think about black people whose lives or work were compromised by colonialism or Apartheid in South Africa. The popular, default position is usually to label the most disgraced amongst them as traitors or quislings. Some within the ANC and the United Democratic Front publicly promoted singling out and shaming collaborators. In extreme forms, collaborators were executed (e.g. municipal policemen, Askaris, informants) or their houses firebombed or burned down. Sometimes they or their families were shunned or worse physically attacked or murdered. Of course, some black people compromised by Apartheid (homeland leaders, tricameral politicians), were “rehabilitated,” with a number of them even turning up later as ANC MPs in a postapartheid parliament. But in general, the compromised have been written out of history through a mix of shame and a tendency to focus only on those who individually resisted the system. Curiously, the tainted ones end up in a worse place than that reserved for whites, the beneficiaries of those systems.

In a new article in The American Historical Review, the U.S. historian Dan Magaziner (he has previously written a book about South Africa’s black consciousness movement) tackles some of the puzzles thrown up by this history. Specifically Magaziner writes about a group of black South African art teachers (products of Ndaleni, a legendary all-black art institution in Kwazulu-Natal) who worked in racially segregated schools after the imposition of Apartheid.

In Magaziner’s telling these teachers attempted to carve out their independence, producing art that went against state directives, while in the process training generations of black artists and art teachers. Yet by the 1980s, many of them were ostracized, and in extreme cases paid with their lives (one of them, working in the Ciskei Bantustan in 1980, was murdered by his own students who identified him as a direct representative of the oppressive state).

Magaziner concludes that for historians it is important to recognize what kinds of lives were possible for these art teachers. “The state, its educationists and their racialist ideologies were (the) reality (of these teachers) and limited the form of their lives. So they chiseled that reality and tried to make something beautiful of it.”

Yet Magaziner argues that to reduce these art teachers, and others in their position, to history’s victims—“to dwell on such cold, objective facts”—also denies them “the dialogue with reality that constituted the art of their lives.” Magaziner’s solution is to pursue the “echo” of Ndaleni: “a distortion in time, voices that do not say exactly what we expect to hear and whose sense we struggle to discern.” As Magaziner writes about one of his subjects: the challenge is to see “the complexity of his experience, the fine-grained, everyday negotiations of satisfaction and struggle that doubtlessly marked his life.”

Chances are appreciation, and a more critical understanding of Eoan will probably grow if this book and film gets a wider distribution (though the latter is unlikely) and when historians (and other researchers) revisit the social life of black people under colonialism and Apartheid.

The best contrast to Eoan’s fate is how African American performers of the Jim Crow and segregation eras are viewed now than when they played for segregated audiences in America’s clubs and theaters, donned blackface or performed humiliating sketches on radio, television and in film. For example, later generations of civil rights campaigners despised the jazz trumpeter and bandleader Louis Armstrong, for his bug-eyed performances in front of white audiences and trips on behalf of the US State Department in the 1960s to counter Soviet criticism of persistent racism in the United States against blacks. (Armstrong, also controversially, performed in blackface as “King of the Zulus” in the 1949 New Orleans Mardi Gras.) Malcolm X said of Butterfly McQueen, a black actress who played a servile maid in “Gone with the Wind”: “When Butterfly McQueen went into her act, I felt like crawling under the rug.”

However, with time, some of these same critics have been kinder to performers like Armstrong, 1920s singer Bert Williams (he performed in blackface in minstrel shows) or Butterfly McQueen. Armstrong, for example, it turns out often veered off script during those State Department trips and quietly supported the legal defenses of civil rights campaigners.

Yet, for all this, we can’t help but feel uncomfortable with groups like Eoan that made major compromises with Apartheid. At the same time we have to recognize that there weren’t any easy good choices for blacks living under Apartheid who wanted to be creative. Yes, there were artists who resisted heroically and who suffered greatly for it. But as someone who doesn’t want to suffer in his own life (and I lived my formative years under that system), I find it hard to expect anyone else to do it. The fact that the choices were either martyrdom or compromise was part of the injustice of Apartheid. Why should blacks always have to be so much better than everybody else?

The Rusty and Golden Radiators are back!

The Norwegian Students’ and Academics’ International Assistance Fund (SAIH), the organization responsible for the brilliant Africa for Norway campaign, is back with their annual awards for the worst and best fundraising videos by international development organizations:

…and, like last year, Africa is a Country is on the jury! Judging for the Rusty and Golden Radiator Awards will commence soon, however we need your help dear Africa is a Country readers.

The committee is still looking for nominations, so if you have any ideas please share it in the comments on this post, or if you prefer, submit directly via email here: saih@saih.no. For inspiration, check out last year’s winners on the Rusty Radiator Awards website.

#SAHipHop2014: Rapper Flex Boogie Live At Fingo Festival

As member of the hip-hop quartet Ba4za, Hakeem Lesolang presided over one of the most fertile yet under-appreciated eras in South African hip-hop. Capcity Rapcity as it was referred to by the bundles of heads scattered across Mzansi, fed our collective appetites the fuzzy memories of yester-year hip-hop through a steady stream of boom-bap rap music.

Flex Boogie is the artist that emerged when Hakeem decided to explore what lay beyond the jazz-leaning loops and banging drums characterized by production from the likes of Nyambz.

His career took a fashion-conscious direction, a decision which had the unintended consequence of giving him the distinction of the largest fedora hat-collecting rapper in the country. It’s the tenth year since Ba4za’s introduction to the South African hip-hop scene. The four Muslims – two brothers named Malik and Muhajir, and Hakeem and Abdul Qadir – still maintain a strong brotherhood but haven’t recorded music collectively in years.

Flex Boogie is growing his network as an independent artist. He had performances lined up for the full duration of the Grahamstown National Arts Festival, and shall soon be on a tour which will have him play dates in London, New York, and the UAE.

This is what he had to say post his performance on the second last day of the Fingo Festival.

*This article is part of Africasacountry’s series on South African Hip-Hop in 2014. You can follow the rest of the series here.

The great Thomas Sankara was murdered on this day 27 years ago

It is the 27th anniversary of the death of Thomas Sankara, and once again we mark the passing of one of the great leaders of the Twentieth Century. Sankara was a Marxist revolutionary in the last years of the Cold War, a Pan-Africanist when the Pan-African project was at its lowest ebb, a committed feminist long before so-called “global civil society” started to preach about “empowerment” of women, a leader who sought to organize the uplift of a whole society long before elites began to boast about “Africa Rising”.

Sankara was murdered on October 15, 1987, by a conspiracy of European and African interests afraid of what transformative potential Burkina Faso under Sankara suggested and the danger of those ideas spreading. Here’s what Fela Anikulapo Kuti (don’t let anyone colonize Fela btw) said after Sankara’s death:

“His departure is a terrible blow to the political life of Africans, because he was the only one talking about African unity, what Africans need, to progress. He was the only one talking. His loss is bad (Long silence) but my mind is cool because Sankara’s death must have a meaning for Africa. Now that Sankara has been killed, if the leader of Burkina Faso, today, is not doing well, you will see it clearly. This means that in future, bad leaders would be very careful in killing good leaders.”

You can look at Blaise Compaore’s record in power since Sankara’s murder, and decide for yourself if he’s a “bad leader”. Back in 2008, AIAC life-president Sean Jacobs remembered Sankara in the Guardian. Here’s a snippet (read the whole thing):

Sankara preached economic self-reliance. He shunned World Bank loans and promoted local food and textile production. Women, the poor and the country’s peasantry benefited mostly from the reforms. Sankara outlawed tribute payments and obligatory labour to village chiefs, abolished rural poll taxes, promoted gender equality in a very male-dominated society (including outlawing female circumcision and polygamy), instituted a massive immunisation programme, built railways and kick-started public housing construction. His administration aggressively pushed literacy programmes, tackled river blindness and embarked on an anti-corruption drive in the civil service.

He discouraged the luxuries that came with government office and encouraged others to do the same. He earned a small salary ($450 a month), refused to have his picture displayed in public buildings, and forbade the uses of chauffeur-driven Mercedes and first class airline tickets by his ministers and senior civil servants.

We remembered Sankara last year and called for a political biopic to be made that could fire the contemporary political imagination:

A revolutionary leader possessed of a towering intellect and extraordinary magnetism, Sankara had rejected the orthodoxies that still today ensure that African nations are structurally dependent on old colonial powers and their global financial institutions.

Like Che Guevara, Malcolm X, and Steve Biko, Sankara’s appeal (to young people in particular) has endured precisely because his transgressive radical politics have proved impossible to subsume within a liberal narrative which is all about the heroism of moderation and non-violence and is in fact predicated on deep racist anxieties. Martin Luther King Jnr and Nelson Mandela were treated as dangerous pariahs by the Western establishment, but in time their histories have been absorbed in popular culture within a bland politics of respectability based on non-racialism and willingness to compromise.

A Thomas Sankara biopic would work partly because there is no white man in this story (except the various shadowy figures of Francafrique). In “Cry Freedom” (1987) Richard Attenborough managed to present Steve Biko’s life as a story in which the hero is white.

There’s the Shakespearian denouement of the trusted lieutenant (Blaise Compaoré) murdering his great friend, usurping his position and tearing up Sankara’s great social project.

But we don’t want to see a film about what might have been, however seductive that aspect of Burkina Faso’s history is. The point is that Sankara’s visionary politics of African sovereignty and unity — like Lumumba’s — remain as impossible today as they were within the context of international affairs towards the end of the Cold War.

We want to see a film showing Sankara’s commitment to feminism and women’s rights, his environmental projects against desertification in the Sahel, his reform of traditional leadership; a film about how his rejection of “support” from the World Bank and IMF enabled a project of galvanizing Burkinabe society that is unimaginable today where these structures of dependency and Western control have come to be the “common sense” basis for all politics in countries like Burkina Faso.

The best film about Sankara is a fantastic 2006 documentary, “The Upright Man” by Robin Shuffield. Watch the whole thing here:

It’s also well worth your time watching Sankara’s famous speech “Against Debt”:

Finally, here’s his unforgettable speech in Harlem, New York:

[Image at the top of this post is piece of artwork by Jona Ras Tarzan]

AIAC Music Revue: Is DJ Lewis’s “Stop Ebola” his “Grippe Aviaire” pt. 2?

DJ Lewis recently released a “Stop Ebola” song and video that reminds me of “Grippe Aviaire”, a song he released during the global Bird Flu pandemic some years ago:

As I mentioned in my Cultural Anthropology contribution, “Grippe Aviaire” was more making fun of the disease, with a popular dance mocking the bird’s behavior more than trying to be educational about it. Perhaps that’s principally why Lewis’s attempt at an Ebola awareness song doesn’t sit quite right with me. Sure, there’s a cute no touching dance, but it all seems a little too playful, not really effective in any attempt to sensitize audiences. Plus, with all the fuss made over the role of traditional healers in the initial spread of Ebola, what’s the meaning of the last part of the video?

To be honest, most coupé-décalé artists would be too decadent (in their regularly scheduled programming) for this kind of message to be taken seriously by audiences anyway. Tiken Jah Fakoly summed this view up pretty nicely in an interview with Afropop in 2011, when he was asked about his role as a voice for the oppressed:

Yes, it is very hard. It is not easy but I chose it. I chose to do reggae music so I have to do this. If I didn’t want to, then I should’ve chosen “coupé-décalé” or something (laughs). For me reggae music is a fight, it is a mission so it’s not easy but it is our mission.

DJ Arafat and Soum Bill are two of the artists I have seen make sincerely socially conscious coupé-décalé, and I do believe coupé decalé is political in an “Of mimicry and membership” kind of way. But DJ Lewis kind of comes off as more of an opportunist in this case than anything else. Siddhartha sent over some great insight about the larger context of the genre after visiting Abidjan this year:

The bigger context here on the music side is that coupé-décalé is pretty stale at this point. It’s been around for 10 years now which is a long time for a style that isn’t exactly built on complex messaging. And coupé-décalé is fun but it’s derivative to begin with (of Congolese music and party style in particular). So DJ Lewis is also coasting on past glory here, not just the glory of his (awesome) Grippe Aviaire song, but the glory of the whole genre.

In Abidjan last January I didn’t hear a ton of coupé-décalé. I mean, it was there in the background, and I wasn’t really in the clubs (I did go to a few smaller, “bar-climatisé” spots, but they had mostly Congolese music on, and also some Naija jams) so I didn’t have a full panoramic view, but still, it feels like the genre is long past its prime.

Meanwhile zouglou which has been left for dead on previous occasions is chugging along, probably because it has more to say. But there’s space for a new Ivorian party music to rise up, for sure.

5 Questions for a Filmmaker … Jahmil X.T. Qubeka

The South African filmmaker and screenwriter Jahmil X.T. Qubeka, who made his feature film directorial debut with the stylish noir, “A Small Town Called Descent“. has over a decade long career spanning an entire spectrum of styles and genres. His documentary and feature film work has enjoyed screenings at various prestigious international film festivals i.a. Rotterdam Film Festival, Pusan International Film Festival, Dubai Film Festival, Los Angeles Pan African Film Festival, Cannes Film Market and Stockholm Film Festival. In 2005 “Talk to Me”, a documentary on HIV/Aids which Qubeka directed for Sesame Street, won several awards, among them the prestigious Peabody Award for best actuality programming. Follow him on Twitter here.

What is your first film memory?

I was six years old in1985, residing in Mdantsane Township, in the then “Republic” of Ciskei. One day my father brought home a VHS machine and two flicks. One was a spaghetti western called The Unholy Four by and the other was a kung fu picture called Little Superman by . He arrived with them quite early in the day and just left the package without connecting anything.  Having gone back to work he left me reeling with curiosity and anticipation for his return. All I had to work with was the two movies’ covers. I must have spent the better part of the day ogling the artwork. I was so enthralled by the premise and promise of the films’ cover art that I started imagining what would happen in each film. I played out both films in my head purely based on the artwork presented. By the time my father came home, he found me passed out on the floor by the TV with two VHS tapes clutched in my arms. Point of the story is that I fell in love with film iconography way before I had even watched a film.   

Why did you decide to become a filmmaker?



When I was eleven or so I came to the conclusion that cinema and making movies was the definitive form of artistic expression of the 21st Century and I was going to be Africa’s answer to Steven Spielberg.  I remember stumbling across a behind-the-scenes video-diary made by my then all-round boyhood-hero, during the filming of ‘s Hamlet. The video enlightened me to the process of making a picture and the intensity of the transformation actors often have to undergo when taking on major roles.  For me it was the ultimate form of storytelling, the absolute pinnacle of expression because it somehow encompassed the other mediums such as writing and music.

Which film do you wish you had made?



Hands down, it has to be ‘s Alexander. Not because I like the film, but because it’s such a missed opportunity. I readMary Renault‘s The Alexander Trilogy  a few years before the film was made. It is such a sweeping yet accessible epic that I was totally enamored by it. For years I fantasized about directing it. For one thing I wanted to do it in Alexander’ smother tongue and not in English. The film was such a let down and it drove home the sad fact that such an epic could never be realized without it being in English and having a play an ancient Macedonian Conquerer.

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



‘s Midnight Cowboy is definately one of my all-time favourites. I came  to it quite late. For a very long time it was one of those classics that you should have seen but I just never got around to doing it. When I finally took the plunge it was love at first sight. What a perfect picture, in every way. Performances, script, direction, cinematography, editing. Everything is on point in this film. It set a very high standard that I will always measure my work by.

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

‘Are you an African Filmmaker or a filmmaker who is African?’ I consider myself to be the latter.  I’m driven by the art of storytelling, therefore my context is African but my language is global. When I write I aim to connect with humanity  not just a particular group. I’m fascinated by what makes us the same rather than what sets us apart.

* The ‘5 Questions for a Filmmaker …’ series is archived here. Picture Credit: Timmy Henny for the National Arts Festival.

The majority of Burkinabé favor progressive change on gender rights

For those interested in gender equality, women’s rights, and even women’s power, these are heady day on the African continent. In Tanzania, a Constitutional Assembly has sent forth a proposed new Constitution that would codify “equal citizenship rights” for women, including the right to own land, the ability to bestow citizenship on their children, equal employment rights and maternity leave. It would also define children as those under 18, which would go a long way to outlawing so-called child marriages. It also proposes 50/50 representation in decision-making bodies. Meanwhile, in Kenya, the National Gender and Equality Commission is formulating a gender policy that will be used to guide the two-thirds gender rule in public institutions. The 2010 Constitution mandated that not more than two-thirds of the members of elective or appointive bodies, including the National Assembly, could be of the same gender. In 2012 the Supreme Court of Kenya upheld the constitutionality of this provision, and then proceeded to strengthen it.

And in Burkina Faso, people, a lot of people, are demanding and working toward formal and real gender equality.

Afrobarometer recently released a study suggesting that a majority of Burkinabé think that, while progress has been made on gender equality, they want much more to be done. When presented with a choice between “equal rights and … the same treatment” or “traditional laws and customs”, 69% preferred the former. 39% strongly favored equal rights and the same treatment for men and women. Burkinabé were presented with the following scenario: “If funds for schooling are limited, a boy should always receive an education in school before a girl” or “If funds for schooling are limited, a family should send the child with the greatest ability to learn.” 66% supported sending the child with the greatest ability. 41% strongly favored sending the child with the greatest ability, and, to be clear, 43% of male respondents felt that way. 67% of respondents felt that women should have the same chance of being elected to public office as men. 57% thought traditional leaders treat women unequally. A majority felt that the police, courts and employers are treating women more or less equally.

For Afrobarometer, this is an example of the aspirational power of a Constitution. The First Article of the Constitution of Burkina Faso reads: “All the Burkinabé are born free and equal in rights. All have an equal vocation to enjoy all the rights and all the freedoms guaranteed by this Constitution. Discrimination of all sorts, notably those founded on race, ethnicity, region, color, sex, language, religion, caste, political opinions, wealth and birth, are prohibited.” That Constitution was first passed in 1991, and, through the various amendment cycles, that article has remained untouched. The power of that Constitution is in its capacity to enable the citizenry to continually strive to expand their rights and improve their collective situation. For Augustin Loada, the author of the Afrobarometer study, the implications of his findings are pretty straightforward. The majority of Burkinabé favor progressive change on the gender front, the government should catch the wave and invest more in promoting gender equality, in particular among traditional leaders. In Burkina Faso, a majority of people seem to feel the time is ripe, a quiet decades long revolution in gender equality could be coming to fruition.

Photo Credit: Julien Falissard on Flickr.

LagosPhoto is Five Years Old

Four years ago I interviewed Azu Nwagbogu, director of Lagos-based African Artists’ Foundation and the annual photography festival LagosPhoto. At the time the interview appeared in Guernica, LagosPhoto had just finished its second year and Nwagbogu’s ambitions for photography in Africa’s most populous country were still developing. On the occasion of LagosPhoto’s five-year anniversary, I spoke to Azu again to get a sense of how far the festival has come and how much work there is left to do. 

It’s been five years since the first LagosPhoto. You’ve written “one of our stated goals was to establish a community for contemporary photography which will unite local and international artists through images that encapsulate individual experiences and identities from across all of Africa.” How do you feel about that statement now, after four years of shows covering a wide range of topics?

We were never going to achieve that after the first edition nor would we after the 5th.  It is one of those goals institutions have to ensure that you never stop searching, striving, seeking because once the goal is fully attained then there’s nothing more to be done.

About the progress? We’ve set a standard for local and international artists, photographers interested in working in Nigeria and Africa, and we’ve demonstrated that there is a need and interest in well-thought-through photographic projects that do not hold up the usual stereotypes.

Also, one of the best things you can do as a facilitator is to give people the opportunity to create. I’m not the one creating these things, but when you get people like yourself or Mario Macilau, Chantal Heijnen, Glenna Gordon, Peter DiCampo, George Osodi, Andrew Esiebo, Nana Kofi Acquah, Akintunde Akinleye together, in the same space at the same time, then you can get things that are powerful and useful, like Everyday Africa on Instagram, for example. Everyday Africa led to Everyday Asia, Everyday ME and Everyday Whatever. It is actually because LagosPhoto, I imagine, provided that platform for people like Peter and Austin Merill, photojournalists and photo-enthusiasts who have an interest in Africa to unite and to support their interest with the capacity and ability.

The Everyday movement really took off because not only are these photojournalists giving commentary of Africa that is unusual, but also they engage people like Nana Kofi Acquah and Andrew Esiebo and other local photographers. All of these guys first met at LagosPhoto. We’re not trying to control it or dictate it because we don’t have the capacity to do all of that. But what we can do is get the right people in the room, then open the door after a while, and things happen.

In the second year we had an open call for entry, so the curatorial team actually selected work based on potential. And we’d like to think that our judgment was right, because a lot of the individuals we invited four years ago, three years ago, were not even on the radar, but today they are taken seriously as photojournalists and artists. We can be proud of that achievement.

It’s important for me to think of LagosPhoto as a platform for people to dialogue. Last year we launched a photo book project. Photo books I believe are crucial in evolving contemporary photography on the continent because it gives photographers a real target beyond “What magazine am I going to get this work published in?” or “Who is going to show this work in a gallery?” or whatever else it is. You have a target that is very personal. But technical expertise in doing this is crucial. You don’t want to say “I’m making a photo book” because you have InDesign for your pictures. We got Teun van der Heijden to come to Lagos and he gave a workshop and met with local photographers. I believe he also met with Bisi Silva of CCA whilst in Lagos and I’m happy that there will be a quality world-class monograph on J.D. Okhai Ojeikere, based on a retrospective of his work.

How has photography in Nigeria changed in the course of five years?

It has exploded. I think photography in Nigeria has become so powerful and important to many more people. Access to it has been made easier with smart phones and more affordable cameras too. The cultural landscape of Nigeria is so vast now. We’ve got music, literature, film, performance, photography and the plastic arts in general booming. And there isn’t a creative expression or medium or genre that photography does not do justice to, grant depth to, explore; that it does not illuminate, does not inform.

Photographers are now playing a more active role in the creative industry, in the creative space, and saying “I’ve got the idea to make your work important or to give it deeper penetration,” and this has improved since LagosPhoto. The role of photography in contemporary culture was somehow relegated. I think that photography is embracing contemporary culture; contemporary culture is embracing photography. And this is empowering and providing opportunities for local photographers. Do not get me wrong: all of this existed before LagosPhoto, but I believe the festival has been a catalyst.

What are some of the obstacles to the expansion of photography?

As a general rule I only think about obstacles when we can create an intervention. We need a physical space where photographers can meet and get information, get books, a learning center for photography like a media center.

There needs to be a space in Lagos like FOAM in Amsterdam or the ICP in New York or the Photographer’s Gallery in London. LagosPhoto happens for only a month. That month has amazing possibilities and ramifications but if we had a physical space that was dedicated to photography and we were able to do all of things that we want to do like bimonthly exhibitions, workshops round the year, then we would be able to empower a lot more photographers. We would have a better discourse between local and international photographers on a year-round basis. And the infrastructure to do that is important. AAF has been able to manage to this alongside our other projects but at this point a clear disambiguation and demarcation of resources is necessary.

Another issue that requires an intervention is the problem of archives. There are extant images that relate to Nigeria and Africa from nearly 200 years up to 30 years ago that are rapidly deteriorating and not properly archived. Restoring, indexing and archiving these images is crucial and urgent. I went to the National Museum and they are in plastic bags. The heat emanating from the bags is deteriorating the film. This is a terrible situation. We want to be able to archive all of these images and keep them because they are part of our national history and heritage.

I remember at the launch of the World Press Photo exhibition at Freedom Park a photographer came up to AAF staff and complained that there were no Nigerians in the exhibition, asking why are you just promoting foreigners? Do you feel like expectations in Nigeria are difficult to live up to?

It’s a number of things. The first and most important thing is education. AAF is open to everybody, but people are intimidated to walk through the doors because they think it’s elitist and that we’re exclusive. But our doors are open: they are never locked. We welcome everyone. The second problem is people parroting. A lot of people just basically rehash something they’ve heard someone say. They’re wearing their opinions like it’s fashion. They haven’t understood that you have to apply for World Press to get selected for World Press, and that we do not decide who gets selected as winners in any of all the categories on exhibit.

Nigeria has over 5,000 photographers working part time or full time. But each year we never get more than 30 Nigerians applying for World Press. This year there were 10 or 11, last year there were maybe 8. Then you have India with 200, 300 people. You have the US, with 1000 people applying in different categories. So they don’t understand the way it works in the first instance. But someone has said to them, don’t mind AAF, AAF is only about foreigners. We need time to make them aware of what we’re trying to do.

Sometimes with LagosPhoto people say we don’t show enough Nigerians. And I say well, that’s up to you guys, that’s not just up to LagosPhoto. Contemporary visual culture isn’t relative: it is vicious, relentless, and reductive. You have to do your part. The world is shrinking around us. Your work should be good enough to stand up to scrutiny in Lagos as it is in London, Paris, New York and wherever there is an interest to view. This is the loudest criticism leveled against LagosPhoto and the crowd rarely ever sings out of tune.

We’re going to give you the tools to develop your craft and your art but we will not show your work just because we have an obligation to show Nigerians. I don’t think in that way, I don’t believe in it. I think we do an injustice to the George Osodis and the Akintunde Akinleyes, the Nigerians we’ve exhibited, if we support the view of people who say: “well, we’ve got to show these Nigerians with inferior work because they are Nigerians.” The other guys are working hard and we show them. So you want to be like them, work hard. It’s right there for you, it is up to you. But we don’t do so in isolation, we do it with the right sort of support.

We have many layers of support for Nigerian photographers. Right at the elementary level, we teach photography in schools, in secondary schools. We have an intervention in Makoko, in Mushin, in schools where they have no art training. We have interventions in universities, we have “The Maker,” where we invite young people to come and we have workshops for them. Most of the workshops we organize are free. The most relevant names in contemporary photography come to give workshops to help support their own industry.

Today the dominant news narrative in West Africa is the Ebola virus epidemic. How do you see coverage of Ebola affecting images of Nigeria and Africa in general?

With every story, you have the start, you have the middle and you have the closure. And if you’re not in charge of your story, you cannot narrate your experience. The Ebola story in Nigeria is actually a brilliant example of lack of proper communication, lack of proper story-telling. Because if you tell the Ebola story in any accurate fashion, you will understand that there are so many heroes within this story. That Nigeria is more or less free of Ebola is due to a few people, and this story needs to be heard. The doctor who insisted that the Liberian patient not leave the hospital, she saved countless lives by her actions, and unfortunately she lost her life in the process. She followed best practice in public health guidelines for cases of infectious and communicable diseases. This is what I’m talking about, empowering local photographers, local journalists, training them in best practices, following the story.

There are so many heroes in this story. But as I say, we’re not telling our own story. We’re not telling it in a way that people have confidence in our system. So the story is going to be told with a tainted brush where people blend Nigeria with Guinea, with Sierra Leone, with Liberia—and it’s too much, just call it West Africa. “Ebola is ravaging West Africa.” The sad thing is that it is not constructive and the learning points are lost with this lazy narrative.

If we were controlling our own narratives, the world would have a lot more confidence in our health professionals, despite our failing healthcare system—they will understand that we are able to deal with it. That’s the thing about Nigeria; we are able to rise to the occasion when the chips are down. We have a population of people who are always willing to rise to a challenge, always willing to push the envelope. And this is the kind of story we should have been celebrating rather than all the money that has been lost, all the business that has been lost.

Governor Fashola’s intervention has been remarkable. You talk about images, he posed with the Ebola survivors, people who actually had Ebola and recovered. He took group pictures with them. They shook hands. That image has done more for businesses and the image of Nigeria, than anyone can quantify.

Why are other people still controlling the narrative?

In truth, we need to reformat our thinking. We need to start thinking African; we need to start thinking from within. We can learn a lot from China, Japan or from more insular countries about how you retain your own culture whilst getting the best from the rest. That’s what innovation is about: you borrow the best ideas, but you imbibe yours to make it your own. But here we discard ours and we just swallow hook, line and sinker the ones from the West, and it doesn’t help us. We need to be innovative and creative. We keep our own things and we get the best tools, the best brains. And until we do that and build capacity, this is going to be the same story. And it’s not just photography, it’s in movies, it’s in music, it’s in lifestyle, it’s in fashion, it’s in everything. Our identity is evolving but we need it to evolve in a way that we can understand and in a way that is authentic, intelligible and coherent.

The topic for 2015 is “Documenting Fiction.” Why is it important to include narratives of fiction and fantasy?

Because we feel like we have made gains in other areas but imagination has been discouraged (in Nigeria). Imagination is the first step in creativity. If we’re going to create any kind of intervention, if we’re going to have a better future, we need to stimulate our minds. I think stories that are more fantastical can be just as informative as what we call reality. A lot of what we learn in the world about our culture is through fiction—fiction in literature, in music, in drama, in poetry and in photography. It’s important for us to allow our minds to run wild a little.

Hollywood is America’s biggest cultural export. So you can imagine that Nollywood is ours as well because Nollywood is huge all over Africa and even parts of your ‘hood in Brooklyn. But what are we really exporting? Are we exporting our culture? No, we’re exporting borrowed fetish culture that is not based on any reality on the ground here. So a lot of people you meet from the West or from Cameroon or other African countries, they’ll tell you that Nigeria is such a fetish country from looking at Nollywood; it’s all superstition, it’s all wickedness, it’s all adultery.

So we’re promoting something that’s actually not an accurate representation because we’re not conscious of its power. And this is the thing: when we become conscious of its power then we can begin to create a new narrative. More fantasy, more fiction, more stories that are based on things we can imagine to improve our welfare and our well-being.

Image Credits: (1) and ( 2) “Turn It Up” by Jide Odukoya; (3) Anoek Steketee and Eefje Blankevoort; (4) and (5)  “Red Gold” by Bayo Omoboriowo; (6) and (7) Cristina de Middel; (8) “Nigerian Punishments” by

Ebola in Perspective: The role of popular music in crisis situations in West Africa

Cultural Anthropology published a series of articles last week called “Ebola in Perspective.” Curated by Danny Hoffman and Mary Moran, two experts on crisis in the Mano River region, the series is an attempt to give deeper insight into international crises making headlines today. I contributed my own entry looking at the role of popular music in crisis situations in West Africa, and the specific types of songs that have come out of the Ebola crisis:

If there was ever a barometer for the mood of the people towards a specific event, outbreak, or crisis in West Africa it would have to be popular music. The Mano River War in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, and Guinea was exemplary of this. During the war, music took on a central role as a form of expression, escape, information sharing, and political contestation for average people on the ground. The post-war period in Sierra Leone and Liberia especially saw short but intense music industry booms directly related to the nation-building process. A host of factors influences such creative booms in West Africa. Not only do social factors lend themselves to the need for the young and marginalized populations to express themselves but also the proliferation of recordings has been assisted by the advent of digital recording technology and digital distribution forms via the Internet and mobile phone technology. In the age of the mp3, broadband, Youtube, and Soundcloud, any outside observer can see the mood and opinions of local communities reflected in real time. In the case of Ebola, such real time transfer of information in the form of popular media is able to give outsiders a more in-depth perspective on the general population’s sensitization to and feelings about the disease, as well as giving locals an important platform to be heard from.

Although things are moving so face that some of my samples may already be a bit “out-dated,” finish reading “Beats, Rhymes, and Ebola” on the Hot Spots website, and check out some of the songs referenced and more below:

Shadow’s famous “Ebola Coming” out of Liberia:

Senegal’s rap superstars with a sensitizing message:

Sierra Leone’s Black Nature with a prayer home:

Diaspora based Liberians Mr. Monrovia, AG DA Profit, and DDDYCool with a political take:

Sierra Leone’s Kao Denero with both a prayer and a political message:

Cote D’Ivoire keeps with it’s strong tradition of socially conscious reggae:

Just out this week, Takun J gets political on Rasta Beach in Monrovia:

Xuman does a Rihanna parody:

And finally, for fans of @Futbolsacountry, Liberian football superstar George Weah does his part on a pan-African sounding tune: