Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 388

That story about Akon’s “giant Ebola air bubble”

People, that story about Akon, the Senegalese-American R&B singer, performing in an air bubble to thousands of screaming Congolese in Goma, because he doesn’t want to get Ebola is false. The hip hop magazine The Source (or whoever started it), made that one up. In a classic case of how modern “journalism” works, that story has been picked up by tabloids and other news sources that take themselves too serious alike. That air bubble thing has been part of Akon’s repertoire for a while now. A few media outlets reflected that by this morning:

He has used the giant orb at a number of concerts, including 2010 gigs in Australia andDubai — four years and thousands of miles away from the 2014 Ebola outbreak.

But what’s actually more interesting is why Akon was in Goma. For that we have to turn to of all people, Vice.com, who did some actual reporting on it.  Reporter Jessica Hatcher went there to to cover the concert. Akon, and the actor Jude Law, were there (wondering how much they were paid?) on behalf of some organization called Peace One Day,  “a London-based advocacy and networking group that attempts to achieve peace around the world for one day a year, and makes films about its work.”

The movement dates back sixteen years, to when a Briton called Jeremy Gilley decided to create a global day of peace. He petitioned governments, who brought a resolution before the UN General Assembly, and the day was universally established in 2001. He likens himself to Mrs Jarvis, who invented Mother’s Day in 1908. “We made the day famous – not ourselves.”

The usual positive feelings thing. You can’t make these things up.

Hatcher quotes Law: “There’s such cynicism towards people, and so many pieces written, fun poked towards people genuinely trying to do good, it’s a cliche.”

But the locals, while enjoying the music (it’s not everyday someone like Akon or Jude Law travels to Goma–well, Ben Affleck does–or for local artists to be on the same bill as ), can see right through all this:

Don’t tell me it’s about peace,” a 29-year old Congolese peace activist, Micheline Mwendike, said of the Akon gig. Her letterbox-red nails flashed as she gesticulated with frustration. “It’s about dancing and singing. To sing and to take a moment of joy is good — but you have to choose your moment. We are killing values for this short moment.”

In choosing to dance, instead of use Peace Day to talk about good governance, she said, a valuable opportunity was being missed: to talk about justice and impunity, to talk about the diabolical state of North Kivu’s roads, to talk about the leaders who show no interest in providing basic services, to talk about the obstacles to peace. “If there are no solutions, the future generation will be in the same position as today,” Mwendike said.

Hatcher also quotes a 15 year old girl:

“My mother used to tell me, if there’s a problem, don’t look at the impacts, look for the roots. Here in Goma, you won’t find the roots,” she said. Nzuki thinks Akon and Jude Law should be out in the countryside, seeing the armed groups’ fiefdoms for what they are. “This festival is useless. I’m not interested.”

And then, finally, a senior international aid worker, who “literally held his head in his hands with opprobrium.”

“They might as well call it the Peace One Day mining company —they’re mining these people,” he said — mining them for the film they will distribute globally, for photo opportunities, and for their own sense of self worth. “It is exploitation.”

As for Akon’s politics and his businesses (he wants to “light Africa‘), those are entirely different matters or we can just refer you to our archive, here and here.

Kampala gets an Art Biennale

Billed erroneously in a local Ugandan newspaper as Africa’s first contemporary art biennale, the Kampala Art Biennale opened on 1 August showing mostly paintings of 45 artists from 13 African countries. Its main exhibition venues were the historical Uganda Museum, as well as the Makerere Art Gallery, and Nommo Gallery. The biennale capitalized on marketing itself as the first biennale on the African continent, though this is clearly incorrect (Dakar, Douala, Cape Town, Bamako, Johannesburg and Lubumbashi biennales, anyone?).

Stephen Asiimwe, the CEO of the Uganda Tourism Board, made this erroneous assumption during a speech he gave at the exhibition press conference in July. But I later heard this same rhetoric in biennale director Daudi Karungi’s opening speech, claiming the biennale to be the first of its kind. Though people in the art scene would have been skeptical, this grandstanding played well on the ignorance of the local audience and the tourism partners.

The 2014 Kampala Art Biennale had odd echoes of the long term effects of mandating that Ugandan art somehow connect itself to foreign investors–and, in fact, ensure that foreign investors’ aesthetic and subject matter interests are reflected.

This practice is connected to one of Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni’s creative moments: during a tour of Vienna in 1992, Museveni declared it an opportune moment for (Ugandans) to portray, through paintings, a promising picture of the new Uganda. He understood, at the time, the power of art in representing Africa to the world, especially through the work of then-internationally renowned Ugandan sculptor Francis Nnaggenda, whose modern and experimental aesthetic introduced foreign audiences to the histories of Uganda through its contemporary art. Museveni’s declaration came after he signed the Investment Code Act of 1991, which sought to make favorable conditions for foreign investors. In particular, he was on the prowl for Austrian investors, and even more so, Austrian art collectors. This desire to attract foreign buyers had the most unfortunate consequences in the following decade: Ugandan art quickly became simplistic, colorful, and exotic for the tourist market. Following Museveni’s investment policy, tourist art would quickly overshadow the depth and richness of an already established Ugandan contemporary art scene, among which was Makerere University’s Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Art, a hub for contemporary art practice throughout East Africa since the 1950s.

In establishing the 2014 Kampala Art Biennale to represent the “current status of Africa” through visual art, the curators Henry Mzili Mujunga and Daudi Karungi’s choices reflect the long after-effects of president Museveni’s decision to marry art and commercial interests. Although the Kampala Biennale’s theme promised to reference the debates about what it means to live and produce art in a modern and ‘progressive Africa’, it still showed the deep effects of Museveni’s investment manifesto: today, in 2014, the exhibition told the grand narrative not of Austrian investment, but of Chinese and American investment in regional and local markets.

To begin with, one sweeping glance across the hall told me that contemporary art was not the focus at the Uganda Museum. Light beaming down from German architect Ernst May’s atrium created a celestial atmosphere in the room. A sideboard held the archaeological display titled ‘Ancestors’. Here one found Lucy, the 1.5 million year old fossil skull, staring from behind the glass frame. In this environment was a panel discussion that uncomfortably juxtaposed art, culture, and tourism.

At the central showcase in the Uganda Museum, the viewer was rendered incapable of tracing a particular genre or style or movement in the exhibition. The more complex work was subsumed by the more obviously “colorful” and exotic. Ideas of ‘progress’ were captured in works by Kenyan painters Michael Soi and Samuel Githui for whom foreign investment in Africa is a battlefield. Githui’s “Bullfight” depicts two bulls facing off amidst a cheering crowd symbolizing the investor neocolonialism of America and China in Kenya. Soi’s “China Loves Africa” depicts Chinese businessmen drinking oil from long straws penetrating into Africa’s heart.

The poetic documentary photography of Malian artist Harandane Dicko, and the striking woodcuts by Ethiopian artist Yonas Melesu had nearly disappeared into the background. When I asked filmmaker Mira Nair who attended the opening what her favorite work in the show was, she mentioned Melesu’s woodcuts. I strained my eyes to find the work, which appeared at the threshold of the exhibition hall. Its near A3 size and subtle brown receded further into the wall next to Soi’s exotic, and rather simplistic “China Loves Africa”. Similarly, the exhibition’s grand narrative of employing art for economic development swallowed up the significance of the context in which Ugandan artist Babirye Leila produced burnt found sculptures: they were made during the passing of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in February. However, the psychological trauma inherent within Leila’s work’s was relegated to the everyday issues of corruption and a failing education system in postcolonial Uganda.

Rather than highlighting African artists’ own ability to produce work that reflected their own contextualised, nuanced aesthetics, the art practices and personal backgrounds of the artists showcased in the exhibition were swallowed up by the machine of exoticism, tourism, and nationalist sentiment. As I walked about this biennale, all I could think of was the Nigerian critic and curator Olabisi Silva’s words on the challenges of curating contemporary art in an international context in 1995: “the distinctive development of each artist is denied, as is any proper debate within the context of wider international art practices.”

During some of the panel discussions, it became clear that governmental funding without strings attached, and the need to groom a local art audience were foremost on everyone’s minds. Biennale curator Henry Mzili Mujunga relayed his vision of a contemporary art museum in Uganda and the need for governmental art support to the Minister of Tourism, who was sitting in the audience. Of course, all this happened before there was a clash between the proponents of art and the promoters of tourism in a heated, though often hilarious, exchange between the panelists. Oddly, gorilla tracking fees actually came up during a debate about the cost of contemporary African art – (I was dumbfounded, specifically, by a panelist’s comparison of an El Anatsui woven metal piece and the odd 600 USD gorilla tracking fee in a Southern Uganda impenetrable forest) – this, in its own way, made it worthwhile to attend a biennale in Uganda. While the emphasis of the Kampala biennale was all about ensuring that African artists are able create what the view from Africa looks like for the tourist market, evident in the Uganda Museum environment was the need to move the art discussion away from Darwinian interests in gorillas to the concern for new audiences for contemporary art in Africa.

Image, Top: Kampala Art Biennale.

Ba re e ne re: The rebirth of a literary dream in Lesotho

In Sesotho, the language of Lesotho, the words “Ba re e ne re…” mean “They say it was said…” Similar to once upon a time, this is how folktales begin in Sesotho. The words have another deeper meaning however, they represent the life and legacy of a phenomenal spirit called Liepollo Rantekoa.

Liepollo was born in Lesotho, though she did much of her schooling in South Africa, first in Bloemfontein, then in Cape Town at the University of Cape Town. Her parents wanted her to study accounting, but she was a creative type who had no time for a safe and practical career. On the contrary, she wanted to better understand and critique history, politics and culture so she switched to sociology, taking classes from UCT’s Centre for African Studies.

The classroom couldn’t contain her, however, and she found greater stimulation in the arts and literature world, eventually joining the team at Chimurenga Magazine, the rabble rousing pan-African journal. With Chimurenga she found a family that challenged her intellectually, offered her creative freedom and helped her unlearn and dream.

Yet home has a way of calling and Liepollo felt a responsibility to bring back to Lesotho all the energy she felt about literary culture and the importance of reading and writing for a society’s growth. It was with this energy that Liepollo organised the Ba re e ne re Literature Festival in March of 2011 with guests that included Keorapetse Kgositsile, Lesego Rampolokeng, Njabulo Ndebele and many others. She had never done anything this big on her own before and she wanted to prove to herself what she was capable of. The first of it’s kind in Lesotho, the festival turned out to be a great success, attracting people from a variety of backgrounds and ages including writers, editors, publishers, poets, students, professors and ministers.

It was Liepollo’s desire to continue with the evolution of Ba re e ne re. She dreamt of community literacy centres, book publishing and more. Though stories, as she knew well, wind and bend. One morning in September 2012, while working on another project, the vehicle in which she rode rolled off the road and tumbled down a hill. She died in the accident, just two days after her 29th birthday. The driver of the vehicle was a young German volunteer, who had been driving recklessly and not heeding his passengers’ requests to be cautious and slow down. He sustained only minor injuries but was flown back to Germany for “medical treatment” and never held accountable.

In response to this tragic end to an incredible life, we, her friends and family found catharsis in working to establish a legacy for Liepollo and to continue the important work she had started by reviving the Ba re e ne re Literature Festival. Our new festival team, led by Lineo Segoete, experienced many challenges including planning via different time zones, delayed funding and more recently Lesotho’s political impasse. Nevertheless, through creative tenacity all roadblocks were overcome and the Ba re e ne re Literature Festival was finally reborn September 5-7, 2014. Here’s the festival trailer:

Joining our conversations about how to cultivate a new generation of readers and writers in Southern Africa were fantastic international guests Niq Mhlongo, Yewande Omotoso, Keamogetsi Molapong and the team from Chimurenga, as well as great local authors and poets such as Mpho Makara, Patrick Bereng, Motebang Sekhohola and Teboho Rantsoabe. We didn’t know what to expect, but the audience turned up ready to engage and the festival proved to be a truly valuable experience (plus sessions were broadcast live on Chimurenga’s www.panafricanspacestation.org.za). Young people especially, demonstrated that they have beautiful stories to tell and the will to share them.

At the end of the final day of the festival, the organising team and the guests created a new ritual by visiting Liepollo at her place of rest. With the setting sun blazing on the horizon, we cleansed her stone and gave thanks. Liepollo, the road was long and rough, but inspired by you we persevered. Ba re e ne re lives on and will continue to evolve with new chapters, as the tales of the storyteller. Ba re e ne re.

Edition: Dakar

In June of 2014, My Africa Is decided to dive into Dakar, Senegal, a rarely talked about city on the West Coast of Africa. (We focused on Lagos, Nigeria in Season One). Dakar not only boast an amazingly hospitable population being the home of the “Teranga”, but is a secret gem for european tourists, and has a youthful population that is very aware of their rights, and are not afraid to fight for it. So we put these three episodes together, to give you a taste of what Dakar has to offer, and provide a brief history lesson on the city. Through this season of My Africa Is, we hope to open the eyes of many, and help them gain a multidimensional perspective on Dakar, Senegal.

Le Journal Rappe:

Sunu Street Project:

Malika Surf Camp:

Get Well Soon, Ashoka

Today the American network NBC announced publicly that friend (and contributor) of Africa is a Country, Ashoka Mukpo, is the freelance journalist who has been diagnosed with Ebola and is being flown to the United States for treatment (read Ashoka’s thoughts on the root causes of the crisis here on Africa is a Country on September 23rd).

As a sort of get well card, I think it’s fitting for us to post the below video, recently shot by Ashoka, of Ebola songs performed at Pan-African beach in Monrovia. I know Liberian music is a great passion of his, it was through a shared interest in Monrovia’s Hipco scene that we first met in Liberia in 2011. After elections he stayed on in the country doing freelance work particularly around workers rights, but had recently returned to the states. This summer he hopped on a plane and decided to go back and help disseminate truth about the Ebola crisis (rather than the hysteria that tends to accompany the coverage of crisis in West Africa.) He had been doing a wonderful job of it.

We wish him a speedy recovery and return to action!

5 Questions for a Filmmaker … Lodi Matsetela

Lodi Matsetela is a former copywriter cum a seasoned scriptwriter, director and a partner in Puo Pha Productions with Makgano Mamabolo. She has worked as a writer on many award-winning South African TV-series. She is the co-creator of the popular TV-series Society, and the director of the short film BFF (Best Friends Forever). Puo Pha Productions has worked with all South African broadcaster, has made the leap into features. With a couple scripts in development the company is in the process of producing another installment of Society for SABC1. Lodi, who is currently pursuing a Masters in film at Howard University in Washington DC, is a member of the newly formed Parallel Film Collective. She tweets under the handle @Letjatji.

What is your first film memory?

I remember going to the drive in with my parents. All 7 of us (5 kids and the parents) squashed into the Cressida station wagon, my brother and sister and I already in our PJs. Smarties melting in my hands. I remember watching The Gods Must be Crazy and being in stitches (how little I knew), and Dirty Dancing (although I don’t think I’ve ever watched it to the end, I always fell asleep). I remember being forced by our mother to watch the Roots film series and in return we’d get to watch a film of our own choosing, which would normally be some  80s B-grade masquerading as A-grade drivel like Rambo or The Running Man.

Why did you decide to become a filmmaker?

I didn’t decide to be a filmmaker, I wanted to be a storyteller. Film is an outlet for me. It could have been journalism, novels or plays, but it ended up being film. I went to the National School of the Arts in Johannesburg, where I did Drama, which must have influenced my choice. It might change, who knows? Life is so unpredictable, but right now, this is the path I’ve chosen.

Which film do you wish you had made?

I wish I’d made  Biutiful by Alejandro Inarritu. I think he’s a
As a filmmaker I want to be an alternative voice, in a topography that’s filled with stories by others defining black people. Images that then become the truth, rather than a particular version of the truth (since truth is subjective). I want to make sure there are alternatives to films like Django Unchained.

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

My top-5 films are constantly changing, I”m forever learning about directors of young and old. It’s a life long journey and I’m not in a rush. Also I like films for different reasons, for their parts rather than their whole.

Somewhere by is one that I constantly reference when writing or directing, because she managed to create her own cinematic Pinter Pause. She has intermittent irrelevant dialogue that doesn’t drive story between long moments of silent action. I think it’s powerful, and having tried to achieve it, I know it’s not easy, its very tricky, and it could easily seem contrived, or gimmicky . She’s found her own language and that’s great. I think she’s a little underrated, even for her privileged Coppola self. I’m looking for my own voice and in the meantime I’ll tread in the footsteps of the likes of her.

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

“What is South African cinema lacking?”

I think we need to stop making films that compete with Hollywood films at the box-office. Its’ a losing battle. Nobody does Hollywood better than Hollywood. Instead we should go back to plain old storytelling. We should stop importing writing-gurus and their ilk. We’ll never find our own voice if all we do is use story telling templates or techniques that don’t acknowledge the context in which the story is being told. Sure, structure is important, but structure with bad content doesn’t make a good script.

Jitsvinger–Practicing, Not Preaching

This article by Lindokuhle Nkosi originally appears on the PASS website. She kindy agreed to let us publish it. Lindokuhle is one of two South Africans partaking in this year’s Invisble Borders project. She documents her encounters here.–Tseliso Monaheng.

Jitsvinger is concerned with matters of identity. Language. Land. Becoming. Being. He delves deep into the “who are you?” and “why?” Through his lyrical, rhythmic fast-paced rhymes, he aims to do more that entertain. He enlightens.

In stark comparison to the flashy, bling-culture of the hip hop of late, he wears his humility like a cloak. “People always wonder about how I made it. How I’m making a living of my art but they don’t know what happens behind the scenes. How hard the hustle is. How I manage to make my rent.” However, money is not what drives him. He’s curious. A little subversive. Unwilling to accept the status quo-the practices and regiments passed down like ill-fitting clothing. “I am concerned about the unsung heroes. People in every sphere who make unrecognised contributions. You have to know what came before you. What was done and was has been done. The artists who invested in what we have now. The historians and the story-tellers.”

It’s a fine line to tread though. The tenuous balance of making history while attempting to preserve it. “I recognise that while I’m exploring and discovering, digging the facts and tracing roots; what I say and do becomes part of the puzzle as well.” Historians make history. Storytellers become the stories. People who dare to tell their own truth, in a personalised manner, become truth.

“Where I come from there’s a demand for identity.” He rolls his eyes up, as if searching for an answer on the ceiling. “People are interrogating race, culture. So we observe and we unpack. It’s an ongoing process.”

He brings the same passion for preservation into how he makes his music. Discovering hip-hop in the early 90’s, he found through it an escape. A raw honesty previously unheard of, unwitnessed. “The metaphysical properties of hip-hop, the metaphors, helped me imagine a better world,” he muses. “I’d get tapes from my brothers and cousins, lock myself up in my room and see what they were rapping about right outside my window. I thought to myself ‘let me try’”.

While he’s a popular Afrikaans vernac rapper now, he began penning his first rhymes in English. “When I discovered poetry and hip hop, English was the medium. That is how I saw other lyricists expressing themselves.” And then he discovered Adam Small. “He wrote the way we spoke, in our dialect, and then I realised that for my music to be accessible, it has to speak to people in way they know and trust.”

“I used to rap in the streets. I hardly performed. I would call into radio stations like Bush Radio, and kick it freestyle over the phone. That’s how I met the local hip hop community. I went from beat boxer to songwriter to full-on musician.” I ask what kept him away from the stage for so long. Was it apprehension? Perhaps some kind of performance anxiety? “I had to build a relationship with the music first. I had to understand what I was doing? What I was trying to do?”

You see was always there. Jits comes from a huge musical family. Grandparents, uncles and aunts; all musicians in their own right. “They were a music institution and they didn’t even know it,” he exclaims. “My mom taught me how to play the guitar!” Nothing street-hard about that, but nothing easy either.

He was still stuck in the factories. Laced up in boots and blue overalls, brewing a plan. “When I was working in the factories, I would look around and see old men who had been there their whole lives. Who were content, or rather they thought they were content. I’d be labelling boxes, or preparing packages with Busta or The Last Emperor,or Wu Tang in my head. I used to think ‘This is not my life. I didn’t make this decision. This is not my lot to carry.’ Rhyming was the escape hatch at the back of my head.” So he kicked down that door, and found his freedom.

He used his bare minimum wages to purchase beats from hip hop street icon, Wayne [Wayne Robertson, alias Hipe, formerly of the duo Ancient Men with Dmus]. He sold his beats for R50 a pop, sometimes cutting Jitsvinger a little discount deal or two. “Then Wayne slipped one of my songs to Ready D and I started getting some airplay. The song made it to a compilation disc called Faculty of Hip Hop-Bootleg no. 3. I still have the C.D. now.”

Again we loop back to issues of identity. To his involvement in Dylan Valley’s Afrikaaps. The documentary film, released late in 2010, traced the history of Afrikaans in the manner it is spoken in the Cape; challenging the idea that it is a white language; claiming it as an indigenous language. As a taal. “This project was very important to me.” Again his eyes scroll upwards. “The thing is, language is connected the land and its history. Its migration is our migration.” But the award-winning movie was met with criticism. The self-proclaimed keepers of all things Afrikaans contested the assertions made in the film. The historians and their fragile, white porcelain memories were up in arms. “We had people like Breyten Breytenbach, the poster boy Afrikaaner telling us that Afrikaan was dead. I was like, ‘whose Afrikaans are you talking about?’ We had to press on because people didn’t know. They didn’t know about Cape Slave history.” He zips down jacket, revealing a Grahamstown Arts fest hoodie underneath

I’m beginning to wonder if in his interrogations of identity, he has managed to discover himself. If what he proclaims is evident in his own life. If while challenge people to challenge themselves, to find themselves; he’s managed to figure himself out. His answer is revealing. He’s spent a huge part of his professional life trying to unearth the coloured identity, you would think that has somehow informed his; but when I ask him simply “Who are you?” he responds, “I am a word designer.”

“I don’t conform to being coloured or black,” he elaborates.

Me: “So you’re an artist before you’re anything else? Before you’re coloured or black or a man or a South African?”

Jits: “I’ve travelled a lot. I’ve gotten the opportunity to another perspective on who I am and where I’m from. I’ve found people all over the world who don’t look like me or speak like me, but they’re all my brothers and sisters in hip hop.”

Me: “But you say you’ve backed away from hip hop in a traditional sense? Are you redefining the relationship again?”

Jits: “I had to step out of hip hop for a while. I had to. I don’t think I need to rethink my relationship with the music, I think our hip hop needs to redefine itself in general. What is hip hop in Africa? What is African hip hop? We need to figure it out ‘cause it’s a huge broadcasting system. It’s the pulse of society. I want to approach music from a contemporary angle. Come up with something wholesome.”

Hip hop is alive in a tangible manner in this province. It’s not in bottles of champagne and music video lifestyles, it’s still in the street. In graffiti as politics. In rhymes as activism. In some kind puritanical observation of the five elements. Hip hop as religion, as daily bread. “There’s something about Cape Town that makes it perfect for pure hip hop. Something in its mysticism.” A mistiness has crept into his voice. “ cause the creativity here isn’t confined to Ivory Towers; it’s out there in the flats. In the streets. Hip hop here is a community, and its patrons give back. We lecture, we teach. We teach kids how to write, how to illustrate. You get b-boys and b-girls going out to the schools to teach the children a different way.”

“I’m not just hip hop. I am a cultural activist. I’m not preaching. I’m practicing. I’m doing.”

*Photo credit: Retha Ferguson for Slipnet

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

Brett Bailey, The Barbican and Black Britons

The South African artist Brett Bailey’s installation, “Exhibit B”, was supposed to open on Tuesday, September 23, at The Vaults, a multi-disciplinary space located in underground sections of London’s Waterloo station. The Barbican had hired out the space for Exhibit B. As guests arrived for the opening of Bailey’s show, which featured black actors chained and in cages, however, they were met by 200 protesters who had blockaded the entrance. The Barbican condemned objectors for preventing artists’ and performers’ “freedom of expression”, but eventually decided that the installation, which was slated to have a five-day run, should be shut down.

Exhibit B is described in PR material as critiquing “… the ‘human zoos’ and ethnographic displays that showed Africans as objects of scientific curiosity through the 19th and early 20th centuries.” Each of the twelve tableaux in the exhibit “features motionless performers placed in settings drawn from real life. Collectively they confront colonial atrocities committed in Africa, European notions of racial supremacy and the plight of immigrants today.  As spectators walk past the exhibits one-by-one, to the sound of lamentations sung live by a Namibian choir, a human gaze is unexpectedly returned.” If Exhibit B was the heartfelt, well-thought out critique of slavery and colonial exploitation that Bailey and the Barbican claimed it to be, why the furore? Why did people object to seeing “tableaux” of silent, entrapped human beings — albeit with the power to gaze back at visitors, inciting guilt, if not recognition of complicity, long-term repercussions on present day circumstances of the descendants of those formerly enslaved peoples, and the ways in which power and privilege continue to be built on these historical practices?

On the most obvious level, the exhibit has been criticized for its cavalier treatment of slavery and racial violence. The protests were well-organised, and supported by people across Britain; as The Guardian reported,

The campaign against the exhibition was led by Birmingham-based activist and journalist Sara Myers but drew support from around the country, including noted figures such as Lord Boateng, Britain’s first black cabinet minister.

We won’t revisit those efforts here. The best of the critiques about Bailey’s “provocative” work are here (by Kehinde Andrews), here (TO Molefe) and here (Esther Stanford-Xosei). And London was also not the first time that Exhibit B faced protests or public criticism by antiracist campaigners; at Playfair Library Hall, University of Edinburgh, it also faced serious criticism.

Maybe Brett Bailey’s lack of self-reflection is to be expected; after all, one of his former collaborators told The Guardian that he was well suited to mount the exhibition because as a white South African, he was sufficiently removed from colonialism. Then there was the bizarre revelation (in TO Molefe’s piece in City Press-linked above) that the South African government funded the work. But one of the most significant results of the Exhibit B debacle was that it galvanized people of color or of African descent in Britain; they organized themselves, and rallied to protest their lack of representations in the arts.All that ability to not only “return the gaze” but to also demand and expect change meant that the Barbican was caught with its pants down. Liberals, of course, love to give a ragged handout and claim that downtrodden recipients should be grateful. Tell them what’s what, and one becomes an “extremist.” Note how The Barbican framed the nature of the protests in its press release

… it became impossible for us to continue with the show because of the extreme nature of the protest and the serious threat to the safety of performers, audiences and staff.

They also cried over the fact that its power and privilege was checked:

We find it profoundly troubling that such methods have been used to silence artists and performers and that audiences have been denied the opportunity to see this important work.

So, who are the ‘extreme’ protestors imagined by the Barbican and who is silencing who?

It so happens that I know most of the protestors, many who are fluent on matters of race in Britain, and alert to their right, as citizens of the United Kingdom, to organised, and peaceful protest. The leaders of this protest are highly respected members of the communities they represent. I have personally heard these leaders, including Sara Myers (the initiator and leader of the ‘Boycott the Human Zoo’ campaign on Change.org), Lee Jasper and Zita Holbourne amongst them, speak on matters of race and the history of organised Black political protest in Britain. They are a diverse group of activists, role models, cultural figures, and intellectuals. Not quite the mob Barbican dreamed up in their Public Relations statements.

On the day of the official hand-over of the petition started by Myers, no one in a position of authority at the Barbican deigned to make themselves available to receive the petition handed to them (despite committing to do so), which was represented by 22,989 signatures of white and black British people and, most importantly, South African citizens.

The Barbican’s refusal to engage with protestors is itself a form of censure. It is one of the many forms that racial violence can take.

Arts producer Julia Farrington, writing about Exhibit B for indexoncensorship.org, makes it very clear that art institutions and funding bodies in the United Kingdom are certainly not thinking about Black artists, curators and audiences when deciding to run shows like Exhibit B. Farrington cites independent arts consultant Jenny Williams:

The black and minority ethnic community contribute around £62m per year into the overall arts budget. Yet, the current yearly figure currently invested in black and minority ethnic-led work is £4.8m.

Given this information, who exactly were the Barbican’s imagined audiences? Bailey (who has been given space to argue his case, including in The Guardian), contradicts himself about this: he has told us the work is ‘for the diversion of (mainly) white audiences.’ Speaking through the Barbican he has also told us: ‘Exhibit B is not a piece about black histories made for white audiences.’

And as Myers points out in her petition,

Bailey himself sounds unsure as to the impact of this work. In an interview with the Guardian he says: “For all I know, I could look back at Exhibit B in 10 years and say, ‘Oh my God, I am doing exactly what they are accusing me of.”

Bailey and The Barbican have demonstrated that they don’t care what the majority of black publics (especially in the UK) think. Neither Bailey nor the Barbican appear to have taken black audiences into account. Perhaps, for them, race is an abstraction, a commodity, a way to draw audiences, or just the right ingredient that creates controversy and notoriety – without, of course, affecting revenues for the institution, or causing aversion to (or worse, a bored dismissal of) the artist’s ill-conceived work.

Bailey assumed the right to represent and speak on behalf of Black Britons’ ancestors – be they of African, Caribbean, or South Asian descent, without consulting those for whom these histories remain a traumatic legacy. Part of Bailey and the Barbican’s public relations campaign is their insistent presentation of so-called objective evidence. They would have us believe that they cannot possibly be racist, and they are teaching us all about suppressed histories. After all, Bailey is fond of reeling out the responses of his black performers: performer after performer is brought out to say that they’re fine with what they are doing, that they understand what they are doing, etc. Of course, none of these exercises include references to the position of relative powerlessness in which an employee (the performer) is placed, having to speak in defence of their powerful employer (Bailey), from whom they are receiving payment, exposure, references for a next gig, etc. In any case, none of these defensive tactics carry any critical weight – not when those in the audience overwhelmingly decide that the patronising exercise of guilt-trauma-drama in front of them isn’t good enough. Full stop.

What’s the matter with … Tim Noakes

This July it was announced that Tim Noakes,who rose to prominence as a respected sports scientist as the University of Cape Town, is in talks with Derek Carstens, former First Rand Bank executive and now Karoo farmer, about improving the diets of farm workers. Noakes, who has a following in Cape Town, has recently gained a certain notoriety – or, depending on your point of view, wild popularity – for advocating a high fat, low carbohydrate diet. Local newspaper, The Cape Times reported:

Once the project begins, the families on the farm will be monitored for five to 10 years. With a diet high in offal – which is readily available in the farmlands of the Karoo – the families will stop consuming carbohydrates, which Noakes says are of no benefit to the human body.

‘This is an ideal set-up,’ said Noakes. ‘And it would be much harder to do research of this nature in a place like Cape Town.’

Since the emergence of nutrition as a field of scientific enquiry in the early twentieth century, the poor, the hungry, and the socially and politically disenfranchised have often been the subjects of research into diet and malnutrition. Last year, University of Guelph-based food historian Ian Mosby published evidence that during the 1940s and 1950s, scientists working for the Canadian government conducted a series of experiments on malnourished residents of rural Aboriginal communities and residential schools.

Rural impoverishment in the 1930s – brought about by the decline in the fur trade and cuts to government provision of poor relief – meant that First Nations people struggled to find enough to eat. They could not, in other words, afford to eat, and this knowledge informed the advice they provided to researchers for eradicating malnutrition. In his article ‘Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952,’ published in the May 2014 edition of Histoire Sociale/Social History, Mosby writes:

Representatives of the various First Nations visited by the research team proposed a number of practical suggestions for ending the hunger and malnutrition in their communities. In addition to more generous relief during times of extreme hardship, these included increased rations for the old and destitute, timber reserves to be set aside for the building and repairing of houses, and additional fur conservation efforts by the federal government, as well as a request that they be given fishing reserves ‘so that they could get fish both for themselves and for dog feed, free from competition with the large commercial fisheries.’

However, researchers decided to set up an experiment in which First Nations peoples were provided with vitamin supplements to gauge their relative effectiveness in combating the side effects of hunger. Crucially, researchers were well aware that ‘vitamin deficiencies constituted just one among many nutritional problems.’ In fact, they calculated that the average diet in these communities provided only 1,470 calories per person during much of the year.’ First Nations people needed food supplies, not vitamin supplements. Mosby concludes:

The experiment therefore seems to have been driven, at least in part, by the nutrition experts’ desire to test their theories on a ready-made ‘laboratory’ populated with already malnourished human ‘experimental subjects.’

In other areas, researchers regulated what kinds of food Aboriginals could purchase with their welfare grants (the Family Allowance):

These included canned tomatoes (or grapefruit juice), rolled oats, Pablum [baby food], pork luncheon meat (such as Spork, Klick, or Prem), dried prunes or apricots, and cheese or canned butter.

This experiment was also an attempt to persuade First Nations people to choose ‘country’ over ‘store’ foods. They were to hunt and to gather instead of relying on shops. To these ends, some officials tried to prevent some families from buying flour:

In Great Whale River, the consequence of this policy during late 1949 and early 1950 was that many Inuit families were forced to go on their annual winter hunt with insufficient flour to last for the entire season. Within a few months, some went hungry and were forced to resort to eating their sled dogs and boiled seal skin.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is little or no evidence to suggest that the subjects of these research projects consented to being part of them.

These Canadian research projects were by no means the only nutrition experiments conducted on oppressed peoples in the (former) empire. They were all produced by a similar set of concerns: by an interest in civilising indigenous people, but also because, in the case of Canada, ‘it [was their] belief that the Indian [sic] can become an economic asset to the nation.’

Noakes is correct when he says that conducting the research he proposes to do on rural farm workers would be almost impossible in a city. Although he insists that he will seek ethics approval, I wonder how he and other researchers will go about winning the informed consent of a group of people who are dependent on their employer – Noakes’s collaborator – for their livelihoods, and who have, historically, very low levels of education.

Also, Noakes seems to believe that only carbohydrates are at the root of farm labourers’ poor diets. As the First Nations people referred to above argued, malnutrition is caused by an inability to access good, nutritious food – and usually because of low wages. Instead of feeding Carstens’s employees offal (and it’s interesting that Noakes advises his largely white, middle-class readership to eat the more expensive fatty cuts of meat, while reserving cheap offal for poor farmworkers), it would make better sense to investigate how much they are paid, and how easy it is for them to afford transport to shops selling healthy food.

Noakes argues that ‘We can’t build this nation in the absence of sufficient protein and fat.’ To what extent is this project purely for the benefit of Karoo farm workers? And to what extent to prove a controversial theory proposed by a prominent researcher?

Image Credit: Twitter.

The Upright Citizens of Burkina Faso

‘Here in Burkina Faso, we put the dust under the carpet… but there are so many things to sweep!’ Interview with Smokey, burkinabè rapper and cofounder of the movement Le Balai Citoyen (The Civic Broom)

In Burkina Faso, the president is Blaise Compaoré. And the Burkinabè have had plenty of time to get used to him: he has been ruling the country since 1987. The next presidential election is set to be held in 2015. Except that it seems that ‘Blaise’, as the Burkinabè call him, is not entirely ready to leave his brand new presidential palace. Like many African presidents before him, he is planning to revise the Constitution, to allow himself to run for another term. In order to make this decision seem more democratic, he is even considering organizing a referendum on the matter. But this election will cost billions of CFA francs and the opposition warns that there may be a risk of fraud. Therefore, the opposition parties and movements are trying to prevent this outrageous attempt to revise the Constitution by taking to the streets in Ouagadougou, the capital, on a regular basis. During the last protest, on August 23rd 2014, we met Smokey and his comrades from the ‘Civic Broom’, a movement they set up during the summer of 2013. They use the lexical field of cleaning with humor to demand the ‘tidying’ of the political scene and the departure of Blaise Compaoré. Smokey and his friends ask the citizens to invest the political field and ‘take control of their destiny’. Their message is spreading through social networks, protests and the radio station Ouaga FM, but also during the concerts they are holding, since both of the founders of the movement are musicians: Smokey is a rapper and Sams’k le Jah is a reggae singer.

Smokey, whose real name is Serge Martin Bambara, has long been writing politically engaged songs. He is the artist behind the album Putsch à Ouaga (‘Putsch in Ouaga’) that came out in 2001. He is currently preparing a double album that should be released before the end of 2014.

What is there to sweep ?

So many things … You should ask instead: what is there not to sweep? Bad governance, political patronage, poverty, lack of respect for human rights, freedom of speech almost nonexistent… Burkina Faso gives the impression of being a democratic country, but in reality we put the dust under the carpet. Unfortunately, it often goes unnoticed by the so-called ‘international community’. But we know what has been going on here for over twenty-eight years : economic crimes, blood crimes… A constitutional judge has recently been murdered, on the same road where a famous journalist had already been killed in 1998. So this is a rogue state. Corruption, decay, there are so many things to sweep !

How was the Balai Citoyen born ?

It was created last year, on August 25th. We held a first press conference, and then we held an official one with other structures such as the Génération Cheikh Anta Diop or the Mouvement des Sans Voix (‘The Voiceless’). We tried to get together with other movements because our slogan is “Our Number is Our Strength’. We want to represent about two million ‘Sweeper Citizens’, as we like to call ourselves. With this goal in mind, we try to unite our base, because there are a lot of different social movements scattered around Burkina Faso. Our advantage is that the Balai Citoyen is already pretty famous because it was founded by well-known musicians. We are a political movement, but we don’t want to come to power or access any political office. We intend to represent a civic strength that can pressure the authorities to get them to work towards the people’s interests. The task may seem easy, but in reality we face a big challenge: a mute and fatalist public opinion. However, a few years ago, things started to change, the youth started to move. My colleague the reggae singer Sams’k le Jah and myself have been meeting people, hosting debates and conferences, visiting universities, outside of the capital, meeting students and sparking political debate. We organized politically engaged concerts. Little by little, it started to rise; there is now a political awareness within the youth. We got the idea to transform all these various disorganized actions we were taking into a more formal framework, a structure like the Balai Citoyen. We were inspired by movements like Y’en a marre in Senegal but also more generally by all the movements that contributed to reinforce the class struggle, as well as 1970s movements like the Black Power, Blaxploitation and Black Panthers. They are inspiring because they were carried out by people who got involved in a mission theoretically designed for citizens who are already knowledgeable about politics. But we think that it is a mistake to let the political class dominate the political scene. Workers, farmers, students, store-keepers, craftsmen, artists must take over the political field. They have to understand the political game and make the government, who is the people’s employee, feel a form of pressure, a sword of Damocles over its head. The government must be aware that if it goes against the people’s interests, it will lose the next election. For years, there has been a disinterest about politics that made the bad situation we currently live in possible.

You are based in Ouagadougou: how do you reach other regions?

We created local clubs. Any group of ten ‘Civic Sweepers’ can create its club in its own town or neighborhood. Then each region forms a coordination, and we manage the national coordination here in Ouagadougou. There are also clubs abroad, that we call our embassies: Paris, New York and Montreal are very dynamic. We recently opened one in Abidjan.

What are your main actions?

We carry out political actions, such as protests and press conferences, against the modification of article 37 of the Constitution and the organization of a referendum, But we don’t act only on a political level: we also carry out actions of service to the community. For example, on August 30, we organized a blood donation. We also held a big cleaning day at the Ouidi maternity ward. We clean both literally and figuratively. Before that, we organized a protest to ask for the Sanou Sourou hospital’s rehabilitation and to denounce power cuts. We are a pacific movement and don’t want to advocate for violence: we need the youth to start believing in politics again and understand that we can do politics without being terrorists. We can use our legal rights, those that democracy offers us. We didn’t make the rules: they were set by the government ruling the country in the last three decades. We just have to use those rules and stay in the legal framework and it is already going to be a good cleaning.

Does this attitude help to protect you against repression?

It protects us against brutal repression, but not against sneaky repression. Some of us have been hurt and beaten up. Others have received direct and indirect threats. However, brutal public repression doesn’t happen anymore because we, in the Balai Citoyen, have set up a certain sense of discipline that our activists have acquired.

The protest’s itinerary has been changed at the last minute to keep the protesters away from the presidential palace, what do you think of that?

It seems pretty obvious to me that Mister Compaoré or his comrades have been reacting this way because of the vicinity of the presidential palace. The fact that the CFOP [the coordination of the opposition movements] wanted to march so close to the palace was a way to tell the president: ‘Next time, we might walk directly into the palace’. Here in Burkina Faso, power has become almost ethnic. It is a big problem for it can come down to xenophobia or ethnic intolerance. A specific ethnic group holds the power and considers it to be a sacred right. You can’t disrespect the king, and the king is the president. You have to bow down to the president… What is going on? We at the Balai Citoyen, we cultivate a form of impertinence that is beginning to annoy the authorities. The Compaoré clan has started to consider the success of the CFOP’s protests as a capital offence, and even as a danger. This is why they forbade today’s protest. The CFOP met them and they had no argument to turn down the protest as long as the CFOP had accepted to modify the itinerary and move it away from Kosyam [the presidential residence]. The huge mobilization this morning is a sign that something big might happen. There were thousands of people.

How do you see the Balai Citoyen’s future?

Our short term goal is to prevent Blaise Compaoré from running for president again and from modifying the Constitution. We will use all legal and civic means, including civil disobedience, without burning traffic lights or official buildings. We don’t want the referendum either: it is going to cost billions of CFA francs to taxpayers though its only purpose is to legitimize the Constitution’s modification and allow one person to run for president. This is too much, we don’t want this referendum.

Our second goal is to watch the next government. A new government means a potential slippery slope for new abuses, as within every power that doesn’t feel watched over. The Balai Citoyen will continue to exist. Today, we are working with the opposition parties: tomorrow, we might fight against those same people who will have come to power. We need a true change in power. New governments need to understand that from now on, they will have to work with the citizens.

What is the Balai Citoyen’s relationship to music ?

We use it to broadcast civic messages. It is easier with music. The Balai Citoyen unites all sorts of social categories, but some reknowned figures have carried the message: we are lucky to have famous artists like Basic Soul, one of the first rappers in Burkina Faso, like Sams’k le Jah (in the pic above with Smockey) who is a reggae singer or like myself. Our faces are easily recognizable and allow us to broadcast our message to the people. They know us so they listen to us.

Image Credit: Noise of Africa Blog