Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 406

How much has really changed on South Africa’s wine farms?

Sixty five years ago, Margaret Bourke-White traveled to South Africa, and spent some time in what are today known as the Worcester winelands, in the Western Cape. According to South African Tourism, still today “the largest wine growing area in South Africa, stretch from the Hex River Valley in the north to Villiersdorp in the south. Here there are great value wines and spectacular drives over passes connecting the Worcester wine estates.”   Bourke-White, traveling through that region in 1949 and 1950, described something else: white farmers that were brutal and vicious to workers. A Tot, or Dop, System that forced child laborers, and their parents, to drink fortified morning, noon, and night.  “Not only does this save the winegrower money but it habituates the youngest vineyard workers to a dependence on alcohol,” wrote Bourke-White. Like in the image above: “In a cornfield on the Ryssel farm, a boy drinks his mid-day wine ration from a gourd given to him by the farmer’s daughter.” In the end, Bourke-White concluded, “I couldn’t see much difference in being a laborer living in jail, or a laborer living in a compound (as miners, farmhands, and most other types of native contract labor do). The life of the prisoner is a blueprint of the life of a free contract worker.” 

The Ryssel vineyard, where Bourke-White photographed, may be gone, but not the workers.

As everyone knows, South Africa `went to the polls’ on 7 May. One of those who went was 18-year-old Nicholas Tlatane, a `born-free’ who currently studies at the University of the Western Cape. Another was 81-year-old Hlengiwe Hlutyana, former farmworker and shackdweller. Mirror images of one another? At any rate, the young man and the elder woman both voted with hundreds of others at the polling station in De Doorns, opposite the informal settlement of Stofland.

Remember De Doorns, pulsating heart of the 2012 – 2013 farmworkers’ strike?

A new, 15-minute documentary, “Land of Dust,” focuses on the life in the day of a farming community. In Afrikaans, Stofland means land of dust. While the film has some off moments, opting occasionally for pathos over agency, it’s still worth watching. It will remind you, if you need reminding, that the situation in the winelands is still dire. It’s not abject but dire poverty, and as is so often the case when discussing the Western Cape, it’s dire and aggressive poverty against the gorgeous landscape of the Hex River Valley.

In the two years since the strike, what’s happened? On one hand, formally, salaries have risen from 69 rand to 105 rand, but many farmers pay less. Stofland has grown in the two-year period. The labor market on the farms is as gender segregated as ever. Men leave at 5 am in the morning to work the fields; women leave at 6 am to work in the processing plants. Those women who don’t work in the fields work, like Zimbabwean Petronella Rwizi, establish childcare centers to take care of children.

Women like Hanelie Botwe, who grew in De Doorns in a family of farm workers, leave, go off to varsity, and return, in her case to run the local school, where she is principal. Botwe’s mission is to educate children so that they will not work in the fields and will move beyond a life marked by crime, drugs, and increasing number of squatters. To do that, she must educate the parents as well. When asked, “That’s your hope, but in reality, what are the odds?” Hanelie Botwe smiles and replies, “Reality doesn’t happen.”

Reality doesn’t happen. People, structures and forces make reality. It doesn’t happen.

In terms of conditions, De Doorns doesn’t surprise. Its children are hard hit by lack of food and hygiene. Its adults are hard hit by HIV, TB, and unemployment. Though it’s twenty years on, the legacy of the Dop system persists in high levels of alcohol abuse.

Workers describe the worksite as a place where bosses engage in a reign of not so much terror as force and aggression, and where workers, like Monwabisi Kondile, are “afraid to die too soon.”

Since the strike, some things have improved, but, as Shawn Yanta, a strike leader, says, “We’re not celebrating.” The struggle continues.

A drive-by analysis of Malawi’s election

The whole election seems to have been pretty dodgy. From the outside it looks like all major parties have tried to cook the electoral books with some intense rigging, and the consensus is that it’s by far the closest election Malawi has ever had.

Of the candidates, we suspect Joyce Banda is the best of a bad bunch and may still just scrape through. The worst outcome would be Peter Mutharika, the late Bingu’s Yale-educated brother, who’s a half-wit (there were also rumors that the army would find a way of blocking his election if it came down to it, because they think he’s a half-wit, which might explain this). Atupele Muluzi is the son of Malawi’s second president Bakili Muluzi. Lazarus Chakwera is the guy who pretends he’s from Chicago. He’s an evangelical Christian, but then so is Joyce (TB Joshua congregant after all). Malawians really don’t deserve these people.

The odd, and potentially dangerous, part is that even after 3 days of voting, nobody seems to have any idea of who’s won or likely to win. That makes it very likely that any declared result will be contested.

For much better analysis, read Jimmy Kainja here and follow him on twitter. And Mabvuto Banda.

Why Is No One Else Talking About These Musicians?

I got the chance to be part of the Redbull Basscamp in Johannesburg during October 2013. For six days, a unique cross-section of hand picked South African musicians holed up in central Johannesburg for lectures from music industry heavyweights in the morning (Hugh Masekela stopped by), followed in the afternoon by studio sessions which would, at times, stretch into the night. It’s the same concept as the Redbull Music Academy, a music grad school of sorts through whose doors the likes of Black Coffee and Flying Lotus have emerged.

As an observer, I was granted first-hand access into the collective composition geniuses of all the participants - the jaw-droppingly talented Nonku Phiri jammed with Rob Brink, drummer for Beatenberg and electronic music producer of note; Okmalumkoolkat spat the grittiest lines in a  mini-rap cypher with Bra Sol from the group Big FKN Gun; and South Africa’s rap phenomenon Cassper Nyovest sat at a computer workstation laying the foundations to a beat which was to feature Cape Town’s very own Youngsta and Johannesburg-based Durbanite Moonchild Sanelly, among others.

Hlasko, Illite MC, Satori, and Card on Spokes (real name Shane Cooper. He won a South African Music Award for his album Oscillations recently) were other names among the participants. Basically, Basscamp was a musical madhouse; a four-floor gateway to intimate musical moments with artists at the bleeding edge of South Africa’s creative culture; an opportunity for great people to exchange ideas and make incredible music.

When all was done and dusted, I reviewed the footage I’d managed to capture and, using interviews conducted with Hlasko (that’s him above with Nonko), Ox++ (Brink), Bra Sol, and Fever Trails (Nick van Reenen of the band Bateleur), compiled this ten-minute perspective on South Africa’s under-appreciated left field music scene. It’s called [insert title]; let your imagination take control.

Quotable:

I’m very bad at genre categorization, it’s always been something I’ve been quite anti I think; I feel like it’s constricting. So calling yourself something separates you from whatever else is happening…it’s not about playing music to just your friends, it’s about playing music to whoever might enjoy it.

**There’s a gallery here.

Using #BringBackOurGirls to #GiveFirstLadiesSomethingToDo

When exactly did #BringBackOur Girls jump the shark and become less about 200+ kidnapped girls and the lack of regard their government has for their safety, but more about every B-lister, politician (and his wife) attempting to use the girls’ disappeared bodies in order to make themselves more visible? Was it when model Irina Shayk, that champion of women’s equality, posed topless with a placard? Or when Wesley Snipes, a bearded Mel Gibson (who once beat the veneers off his then-girlfriend’s teeth), and a lavender-jacketed Sly Stallone milled about at a photo-op at Cannes (above), holding squares of flimsy paper bearing the now ubiquitous slogan?

Even French president Hollande’s former partner, Valérie Trierweiler, accompanied by former prez Sarcozy’s current wife, Carla Bruni (who wouldn’t miss a photo opportunity if Boko Haram plonked themselves in the middle of Paris), and Julie Gayet (the French actor known for charged sex scenes with whom Hollande was having an affair last year, leading to the split with Trierweiler) are busy publicly advocating for the release of the kidnapped Nigerian girls.

It’s like the Third Wives and Undercover Lovers Club, looking for something important to #GiveThemBackTheirDignity.

Before this, France’s First Ladies never paid mind to any African anything, never mind the plight of young women caught in the middle of a failing state’s power struggles. Such subjects were just too unchic. But now, with a hashtag promising to push them into the spotlight, how could Trierweiler, Gayet, and Bruni not take advantage? Trierweiler seems to be using the opportunity to put herself back in the First Lady seat, after months of embarrassing press about Hollande having an affair with Gayet. (BTW, props to the gonads on these women, who don’t mind hanging out together after some pretty crazy times sharing a middle-manager-looking man—all just to get some camera time.)

This strategy—wherein a somber-looking first lady holds up a sign with an appeal in the form of an imperious demand—doesn’t always work. Although Michelle Obama received enormous accolades for posting a pic of herself wearing a flowery dress and a stern expression while holding a placard with a hashtag, it’s been hacked by many who called her on her bullshit and hypocrisy: some people replaced the text with #BringBackOurDrones, “Nothing will bring back the children murdered by my husband’s drones” and “Your husband has killed more Muslim girls than Boko Haram ever could” (as has Bush, Jr., to be fair). There’s even an image of Mala Yousefazi holding a placard saying “If I’d been injured by Obama’s #dronestrikes, you would not know my name.”

But so far, the tried-and-true strategy is working for the French first ladies, whose husbands haven’t sent any drones to kill brown people yet.

But pay closer attention to the video above–watch it again if you can–for exposing some of the contradictions at the heart of #BringBackOurGirls.

In the brief footage, we see Trierweiler being interviewed at the Paris protests, intended to draw attention to the issue. The entourage of white French women monopolise the photo-op. We hear Trierweiller saying the obvious to a reporter: blah blah rehearsed statement. Then, we hear an interruption: it is a black woman in a headscarf (with a small Congolese flag), shouting over Trierweiler’s inane comments, wanting to be included, to be heard.

The journos interviewing Trierweiler briefly focus on this interloper: maybe she, too, is saying the obvious, but she is passionate, powerful, and is obviously able to speak to the issue with authority. The camera focuses on that woman briefly. But Trierweiler won’t have it. She turns her head, looks. Another woman (not a white woman, BTW, but someone of either South Asian or Arab background) in the group who is facing the cameras smiles—not in friendly recognition of the shouting woman, but in condescension. Watch and you’ll recognize that “GOD! Look at them. Again with their loud ways” look. Then French film/TV director and producer Lisa Azuelos dismisses the black speaker with a simple “Eh, voila” (So, there you have it…). Eventually, Trierweiler is forced to give the woman a brief audience.

Finally, a bunch of white French women are lined up with the cliché posters (clearly made for them, not of their own making) to be photographed. A group of black women gather together separately; the video camera just pans across them while a tall photographer stands in front of them, blocking our view of them. Clearly, this women in this group were not intended for the photo-op; they are not the intended voice of France, no matter how hard they shout over First Ladies.

What happened? Rafia Zakaria, in “#BringBackOurGirls and the Pitfalls of Schoolgirl Feminism” explains that local stories are most often “transferred to a global context only when they fit the stereotypes of a majority”. I guess this is a lesson to us, Africa. If your movement is about something that is deeply compelling, has a good strategy for reaching folks, and has a well-defined, reachable goal, it will become appropriated and rendered meaningless by part-time feminists and fame-heaux who will use it to…well, heaux themselves. All before you can hashtag a new slogan.

Peter Clarke: “I remember thinking, if he who is black can be an artist, so can I.”

Influenced by the Mexican muralists of the 1930s and ‘40s, and also by the German Expressionists, the South African artist Peter Clarke (who passed away at the age of 85 on April 13, 2104)  built his reputation as a narrative artist with a distinctive, bold graphic style and is best known for his subtle depictions of the social and political experiences of marginalised people in the Western Cape province. In the mid-1980s, however, he veered away from making statements about social and political life in the narrative style that had dominated his oeuvre when he began exploring abstraction, particularly through the use of collage.

Clarke had a strong interest in books and created book covers and illustrations for authors, such as his friend, James Mathews, as well as Es’kia Mphahlele, Alan Paton and Chris van Wyk. He also published his own written work from time to time.

With the advent of formal democracy in 1994, Clarke’s work underwent something of a metamorphosis:

After 1994 I started feeling that one must also explore other things beyond the statement. I felt that it was a time for liberation, a renaissance. So I gave free reign to working with various kinds of material, like coloured paper, cloths and whatever… If I decided only to work in a figurative way, there would be no end to what I want to say about people.

In the late 1990s, Clarke began making ‘artist’s books’ on a range of topics. These consist of works that fold up into boxes of various shapes and sizes that he mostly handcrafted from leather. About his artist’s books, Clarke had this to say:

You can’t fold up a Monet or a Cezanne or any precious work of art. But with one like this, you can fold it up and carry it in a little box. You can sit next to somebody in a waiting room and say: ‘I’ve got something to show you’ and lift it out of its box.

Among Clarke’s early works as a professional artist are those made at Tesselaarsdal, a small rural village near Caledon in the Western Cape. His more recent work included a series of collages entitled ‘Fanfare,’ each of which is accompanied by prose. These works are concerned with various historical, biblical and literary figures, as well as artists, such as Sam Nhlengethwa, Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock. As the prose is, in some cases, by Clarke himself, the works draw on both his visual and literary talents.

Clarke was born in Simonstown, Cape Town, in 1929. He finished his schooling in 1944 at Livingstone High, where he studied art under Hendrik Esterhuizen. On leaving school, he worked as a ship painter in the Simonstown dockyard. In 1947, he came across an article on Gerard Sekoto, the first black artist to be represented in a public collection and one of South Africa’s most important artists. For Clarke, Sekoto’s success as an artist was inspirational. “I remember thinking,” he says, “if he who is black can be an artist, so can I.”

Clarke was largely a self-taught artist who learned much from books and magazines. He did, however, receive some informal art tuition. In 1947 he attended art classes at St Philips School in District Six, where he was taught by the London-born artist, John Coplans. After Coplans returned to Britain, the classes moved to the Roeland Street Technical College, Cape Town, in 1948, where they were run by Johannes Meintjies and Nerine Desmond, a member of the New Group. Clarke later worked with Katrina Harries at the Michaelis School of Art, University of Cape Town (1961), and also spent time at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunste in Amsterdam (1962-1963) and at Atelier Nord in Oslo, Norway (1978-1979).

Clarke worked in the docks at Simonstown until 1956, resigning from his job to become a full-time artist in his late twenties. For nearly sixty years since then, he worked as a professional artist – a rare phenomenon in the South African art world, where so few have managed to pursue art without some other means of support.

With assistance from his life-long friend, James Matthews, Clarke held his first solo exhibition in the newsroom of the newspaper, The Golden City Post, in 1957. In an interview from the time, he commented:

Before [my exhibition], I was just another ‘coloured’ man. Our people took it for granted that only whites could do such things. Now people are becoming aware of the fact that they can do these things too; they are human beings.

After his first exhibition, Clarke participated in numerous group shows, both here and abroad, and also held many solo shows. In 2011 Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin curated a retrospective of his work, ‘Listening to Distant Thunder: The Art of Peter Clarke,’ held at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg and at Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town. Aimed at honouring Clarke’s life, work and contribution to art and cultural development in South Africa, the exhibition included his early pieces, made as a schoolboy, works that reflect the social disruption on the Cape Flats, as well as his prints, for which he is renowned. Also on the show were works from the late 1960s that reference the trauma of forced removals from Simonstown, and the ambitious paintings he began making during his trips to America, Norway and France in the 1970s. In addition, the exhibition highlighted his late works that look back on the apartheid years and celebrate the new South Africa. At the time of his retrospective, Clarke said in private conversation that after decades of working, he had at last arrived at the national gallery and that, if he had not, his ghost would have haunted the museum.

Clarke’s last solo show, ‘Wind Blowing on the Cape Flats’, was held at the Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva) in London in 2013, curated by Tessa Jackson and Riason Naidoo. Here he was positioned as being “part of a lost generation from South Africa and a voice largely unheard in Europe.”

Clarke was the recipient of quite a few awards, as both a writer and artist. These include the Drum International Short Story Award (1955); an honorary doctorate in literature from the World Academy of Arts and Culture in Taipei, Taiwan (1984); the Order of Ikhamanga, awarded by the government to those who have excelled in the arts and literature, among other fields (2005); and the Arts and Culture Trust Lifetime Achievement Award (2010).

Apart from his work as an artist and author, Clarke also made a contribution to cultural development as an activist and organiser, particularly during the anti-apartheid era. He was involved with the Community Arts Project (CAP) in Cape Town almost since its inception in 1977, and was among those from CAP who attended the historic ‘Culture and Resistance Festival’ in Gaborone, Botswana, in 1982. There he delivered a paper and also participated in the Festival exhibition, ‘Art toward social development: an exhibition of South African art.’ At the festival, a resolution was passed calling on artists to use their skills to serve communities. To this end, he was instrumental in establishing Vakalisa in 1982, an arts group that promoted cultural development in the Western Cape in deprived communities.

An eloquent public speaker who sometimes opened exhibitions, Clarke was also associated with the District Six Museum since its inception in 1994. He designed the poster for the museum’s first exhibition, drawing on a woodcut of his depicting a hand releasing a bird flying to freedom. This image was inspired by a couplet by American poet, Langston Hughes:

Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die / Life is a broken winged bird, that cannot fly

Clarke’s image of the bird was also printed on the museum’s memory map of District Six, and was recently re-interpreted in 3D for the making of a gate at the entrance to the District Six Homecoming Centre. Clarke is also inscribed in the museum through his poems, which are painted on the floor.

“The important thing”, said Clarke, “is the enrichment of the people, even if you are living in a ghetto.” In this respect he taught and organised a programme of exhibitions in Ocean View on the Cape Peninsula, where he had lived since his eviction from Simonstown during the apartheid era.

Clarke was not only an important and inspiring artist but also a role-model and mentor to the young. He was a gentle, caring, humble soul and a humanitarian. An elder ‘statesman’ of the South African art community, he will be sorely missed.

* The painting at the top of this page is “Listening to Distant Thunder” (1970) by Peter Clarke (courtesy of Inivia). The portrait of Peter Clarke is by George Hallett.

#HistoryClass: On Jihad in Nigeria

In 1808 forces loyal to the Fulani scholar Shehu Othman dan Fodiyo advanced on Bornu, one of the great Muslim empires of West Africa, rolling it right back to the swampy fringes of Lake Chad. The Mai of Bornu, the leader of the Muslims, fled into exile and the empire’s capital, Ngazargamu, fell to the Jihad.

The Mai went to Kanem, Bornu’s cousins to the northeast of Lake Chad, for help. Despite enmity between the two states, help was dispatched. The man they sent was remarkable, one of the toughest warriors and most accomplished theological minds on the continent. His name was Sheikh Aminu el-Kanemi and instead of marshalling a counter offensive, he sat down and wrote a letter.

“Greetings and friendship” it began. “The cause of my writing to you is that when God brought me to Bornu I found that the fire of discord had broken out between your followers and the people of this country. When I inquired why, some said the reason was in religion, others that it was to be found in tyranny.”

Fulani herdsmen living in Bornu told him the war was to correct “heathen practices”, but that explanation did not satisfy him. “Will you therefore tell me your reasons for going to war and enslaving our people?” he asked the Shehu. El-Kanemi summarized the accusation:  “Because you are told our chiefs go up to places and there slaughter animals for the purpose of giving meat as alms, because you are told our women go unveiled, and because you are told our judges are said to be corrupt and oppressive. This practice of the chiefs that you have heard of is a sin … But it is not right to say that they are heathen. It were better to command them to mend their ways than to make war on them.”

Moreover, the Fulanis themselves were guilty of crimes, el-Kanemi said, “You are destroying books; you scatter them in the roads, you are throwing them in the dirt.” Oaths were broken and “they slaughter men and capture women and children.”

El-Kanemi saved his most withering attack for last. Far from being a religious reformist, the Shehu must be desirous of something else entirely; worldly power.

The letter ended: “I wish to inform you we are on the Shehu’s side, if the Shehu is for truth. If he is departing from the truth, then we will leave him and follow the truth”.

Between Bornu in the east and Gwandu in the west, where the Shehu lived, could take two months to travel. When the jihadists received the letter they were furious. They replied severally and at length. The surviving correspondence was written on the Shehu’s behalf by his son Muhammad Bello.

Bello bristled, el-Kanemi should not listen to illiterate people, he said.

“Our only reason for fighting” Bello wrote “was to ward off their attacks upon our lives and our faith and our families. When they commenced to trouble us they drove us from our homes… Verily the Shehu revealed to us the truth. We saw this truth and followed it.” Later he states; “their heathenism is proved to us in that they make sacrifices to stones and large trees, and make trouble to the Muslim faith and prevent men from becoming Muslims”.

When the sultan of the city-state of Gobir saw how their community was drawing new members, Bello writes, he reneged on a deal given to their community by his predecessor. This deal had effectively granted the Shehu’s community autonomy from the rule of Gobir, especially from its taxes. The harassment continued until the Fulani fought back. “They prevented us from practising our faith… they oppressed us,” Bello said.

(The incident with the books was easily explainable, Bello wrote, it had been a minor squabble over “the spoils of war” and he had personally picked up all the pages. If anyone had been guilty, he said, he most surely would have been a low type, and would certainly have been punished.)

The Shehu defeated Gobir, but Gobir’s allies continued to fight until the whole land was at war with them. And now they had come to Bornu. Bello warned; If Bornu helped the Hausas against them “Your prayers, your giving of tithes, your fasting and your building of mosques shall not prevent us fighting you.”

Bello might well be angry, for El-Kanemi had questioned the key assertion of the Fulani revolt, that backsliding was tantamount to apostasy; that disobedience was unbelief.

Over the next few years the war drew to a stalemate. The correspondence between Bello and el-Kanemi continued –some were conciliatory, full of poetry, many were lost in transit. Impolitely, El-Kanemi’s men killed one of Bello’s messengers. He consolidated Bornu’s strength and the Mais returned to rule under his stern stewardship. The Jihadists just didn’t have the ability to take over Bornu. Most of the Shehu’s captains had their flags and their conquests, only one –who had been designated Bornu, missed out.  The Shehu died and Bello became Sultan of Sokoto, leader of the Muslims.

But a debate had been opened; what was the nature of the Jihad of Othman dan Fodiyo?

In H. A. S. Johnston’s book The Fulani Empire of Sokoto, Johnston lays out the three theories;

There is the orthodox view; that it was primarily a movement of religious purification. A revisionist view; that it was a movement of Fulani  ethnic chauvinism, and another approach; that it had social and economic roots, that the Jihad was essentially a peasant’s revolt.

Johnston makes valuable points; that the religious nature of the Jihad could alienate as much as it drew people to it. Oppression before the Jihad was probably not as bad as it had ever been. Corrupt practices continued under the bureaucracy that followed the death of the Shehu.

Johnston plays down the social and economic factors. He writes that it was uncharacteristic of the “tolerant and easy going Hausa” but not for the “passionate and intense” Fulani, as if the whole question of identity and character could be settled by blood. He comes down in a nebulous judgement, concluding that the truth of the nature of the Jihad is probably somewhere in between the three theories.

In The Sokoto Caliphate, Murray Last sharpens this nebulous conclusion. While there were many motives and interests at play, he says, the ripening came when someone of the “quality and the calibre” of the Shehu appeared. “The Muslim protest against the Hausa states found the leadership necessary.”  I find this idea very interesting, and it is where this lecture ends. Character, glimpsed in the correspondence of Bello and el-Kanemi, can be very influential in sparking revolt.

And I say that with one glance at the past… and another hard look at the present.

Rap Battle of the Week on Reddit: Johannesburg’s Tumi vs Atlanta’s Ness Lee

Two weeks ago, Club Zen in downtown Johannesburg got packed to its rafters with hip-hop afficionados who came by the carloads to support Scrambles4Money, a South African battle rap circuit established in 2012. The auspicious Talk is Cheap event, now in its second installment, had Johannesburg’s Tumi Molekane and Atlanta’s Ness Lee as headliners. Tumi, a battle rap fan and truly remarkable emcee, brought infernal punchlines from the word go. The full house reached a loud crescendo on an average of every four bars over the three-odd minutes granted per round. He exuded confidence, even managing a quick rebound from a memory blackout during his surefire first verse. 

In the youtube video uploaded earlier last week (it’s currently Battle of the Week on Reddit), Ness Lee stands his ground. In true battle rap fashion, he appears unperturbed; he stands by, seemingly absent-mindedly, as Tumi casts menacing lines in his direction. It’s a way of saying: “Try your darndest homie, I’m not moved!”

Ness Lee then attempts a couple of lukewarm one-liners to get the audience hyped up. It’s not until well into his verse that any large-scale response ensues. “One of your fans said that you were outside my league and that you would eat me for lunch,” raps Nes while hunching to have a clear look at Tumi’s stomach. “I agree!” he continues. Cue: Thunderous applause!

Battles are a precious part of hip-hop culture. Over the past years, pre-written battle raps and battle rap leagues have sprung up in different areas around the world – from Singapore, to the UK, to Canada where Scrambles4Money organizer and a superior battle emcee Gini Grindith went to participate in King Of The Dot’s World Domination in 2013. Battle rap showcases are entertaining to watch. It’s fascinating to think that for about a month, all two rappers probably do is do background research and come up with all manner of dirt to use against their proponent on the day of battle.

More than a clash of egos, this was a match of two emcees who might as well be on the same level if their rhymes are anything to go by. This wasn’t a judged battle, but opinion seems skewed towards Tumi’s side. He had the home crowd advantage and used location-specific details as bait to get audience reaction. Nes Lee held his own down, he did a bit of research (example: the “*140#” reference). Ultimately, and this is purely by the number of times the crowd went apeshit, Tumi emerged the more superior of the two. His performance in the last round is nothing short of sheer excellence!

However it was all hugs and pounds after the referee called it. Nes Lee, a battle rap champion in his own right, tweeted that it was “an absolute pleasure” to engage Tumi in battle. It’s this trait of sportsmanship which makes battle rap exciting.

South African audiences are still getting used to the concept of prepared rap battles. In time, there’ll even be lower noise levels – though it’s hard to not loose it when a punchline like: “Fuck your struggle, you know what we call black power?/ when ESKOM lights cut out!” is uttered. This three-round, thirty-minute opus may very well be the best on the continent by far.

* Opening image taken from the Scrambles4Money Facebook page.

Nigeria’s Catch 22: American style democracy will only throw up more more GEJ’s

There are so many problems in Nigeria, true. But it bears reiterating that we’ve not even correctly identified the biggest one of them…

Our biggest problem is not the fact that we are an artificial country. Asides Japan and Somalia, I can’t think of many other “real” country. Our biggest problem is not Islam. Brunei, which is doing well has an almost even religious split like Nigeria does. As does Lebanon. And before some of you chew me off on about Lebanon, Lebanon’s reality is that most of their problems were created by outsiders…

Since we have eliminated the religion and tribe bit, what really is Nigeria’s problem: I’ll quote the late, great, Chinua Achebe here: The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership!

Sadly, we have dovetailed into a catch 22 situation. Nigeria’s Catch 22 situation is simply this: our leadership is bad, because our followership is bad, unimaginative, uncreative, uninspired. Nigeria’s followership does not understand basic concepts like civic responsibilities and duties. We do not hold our leaders to account.

Lets accept one real, hard fact about this “democracy” that we have: democracy, American style, is nothing more than a popularity contest. Citizens such as we have in Nigeria, CANNOT in any circumstance, throw up good leaders in such a popularity contest. Something must give. What is it that must give? For Nigeria to throw up sound leaders who are capable of looking at current trends and plotting a future course.

We have to accept the hard truth that given the kind of citizens we have at the moment, our leadership MUST be exclusive and not inclusive.

I won’t pretend to have the answer to what the criteria for exclusion should be, I’ve been thinking about it for years. But it has to be so. Someday maybe, we will have that genuine exclusion criteria. BUT, and I insist, BUT, American style democracy, will only throw up more GEJs.*

* If you haven’t figured out who GEJ is, it’s the poplular acronym for Goodluck Ebele Jonathan.

Nollywood in Paris

The Nigerian Diaspora has always been the main vehicle of Nollywood’s expansion, namely in cities like London, New York and Toronto among other places. The city of Paris on the other hand, was not included in this and did not develop any special relationship with Nollywood.

If Paris is undoubtedly an African culture hotspot, the attention there has always been primarily on francophone African countries where the dynamic when it comes to cinema is very different from what is happening in Nigeria. Forget the debate about too many films coming out; in Congo, Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal the question is “where are the movie theatres?” Filmmakers from those places look to the West to fund their films and that is reflected in the films they make.

Due to historical ties, France tends to think of Africa as one homogenous place that speaks French. The representation of Anglophone countries is marginal and Nigeria, despite its population, its economy and its artists (of which some have even called France home at some point–Fela Kuti, Ola Balogun, Keziah Jones, Asa, etcetera) is largely unknown and often mistaken for Niger.

But that was until 2013, when the first edition of a festival called NollywoodWeek put Nigeria on the map as a producer of cinema and not just of home-videos.

With a tasteful selection of several “made-for-cinema” films that were recently released in Nigeria, NollywoodWeek presented the French audience with an updated window into what is currently taking place in contemporary Africa. A much-needed update as most French moviegoers reference the great Sembene Ousmane’s works as a modern representation of “African Cinema.”  Now finally on the big screen audiences glimpsed the Africa that walks fast and confidently, the Africa that is not trapped in its own thoughts, the Africa that moves forward. For many in the audience, which was a mix of French spectators and 2nd generation Francophone Africans born in France, watching movies like Phone Swap, Tango with Me, Last Flight to Abuja and Maami was an eye-opener.

Based on the number of articles and reports about Nollywood that came out in the French media since that first edition of the Nigerian film festival it seems like we might be witnessing the beginning of something new between France and Nollywood. The French take cinema seriously (after all, they invited it) so who knows what’s in store!

We just have to wait and see what happens after the second edition of NollywoodWeek to determine if it is just a fling or a real love story.

The second edition has an impressive line up once again with movies like Half of a Yellow Sun, Confusion Na Wa and Flower Girl. The festival takes place this June from the 5th to 8th in Paris, France.

Here’s the festival trailer:

More information can be found on the website.

Street Life in an African City: Oxford Street in Accra

The evidence of material on African cities does not inspire confidence.  They are increasingly overcrowded with no clear plan for matching population growth to available facilities.  Sewage and garbage disposal are perennial problems. Laboring street children are everywhere. The hope some five decades ago when many countries gained freedom from their former colonial masters was that the cities would act as engines of growth. It was also hoped that they would act as the crucibles within which heterogeneous identities could be merged into a national template. Now the progressive politicization of ethnic and religious identities in places such as Nairobi and Kano have quickly disabused observers of that hope.  And it doesn’t help either that youth urban styles appear to be heavily derivative of European and Western models: witness for instance hip-life in Accra (a mixture of hip hop rhythms with local language rap forms) and the speech repertoires inspired by televangelism from the 1980s.

And yet it appears also that the dominant crisis-management discourse, heavily enamoured of international financial agencies, is actually helping to obscure more pressing questions.  I have often wondered to myself, for instance, what it would really take to  engage with the mundane  and apparently ephemeral details of the African city.  I think here of the spontaneity of street life, the slogans, mottoes, and inscriptions of lorries and passenger vehicles, the appropriation of official spaces for non-official uses, and, all in all, the blatant insertion of local social imaginaries into the public discourses that attempt to define the city.  But it would not be adequate either to settle for a simple inventory of subaltern urban forms. That can only lead to a brute numerology; there are countless statistics already that tell us everything we need to know about the crisis confronting the African city.

Issues of method arise.  How does one keep focused on the mundane and the apparently ephemeral and from this construct a viable understanding of the African city?  More pressingly, how does one tie these passing quotidian features to questions of historicity, transition, and agency, all three of which cannot be escaped if a proper counter-discursive corrective is to be made against the current  crisis-management understandings?

These questions became pronounced over the past decade as I worked on the social and urban history of Accra, but from the perspective of a single street. This street, fondly named Oxford Street by denizens of the city, does not actually exist.  No map of Accra registers its presence. This is for the simple reason that that is not its official name.  Rather, it is part of a much longer road called Cantonments Road, with Oxford Street being the roughly one-and-a-half mile stretch towards the southernmost end of Cantonments Road.  In fact, behind the Cantonments/Oxford Street names lies a whole series of peculiar stories and urban features, the detailing of which gives us a good entry into the history of Accra in general.  But my aim has not to write a straightforward history; quite the opposite.  Though I grew up in Accra, the fact that it was in a quite different neighbourhood (Kaneshie it is still called), means that my research on Oxford Street has forced me into a re-discovery of the familiar, to appropriate South African writer Njabulo Ndebele’s famous book title.  I am a witness to the particular and attempt to detail the ordinary.  All this while tracking the evolution of the city in which I grew up from the colonial period to the present day.

Allow me then to take undue advantage of double vision and describe Oxford Street from the perspective of an erstwhile denizen of Accra as well as that of someone who has lived abroad for many years. I have encountered many other cities in Africa and elsewhere and have not been nervous of wantonly connecting Oxford Street in my mind to places in Istanbul, Amsterdam, Johannesburg, and of course London and New York where I have been. The evocativeness has been partly in terms of the implicit mimesis of the opportunities for self-fashioning that Oxford Street represents, and which are replicated in many cities across the world,  as it is in the contradictory structural features of the commercial boulevard, especially that between authenticity and imitation on the one hand, and between legal sale and fugitive vending on the other.

On entering the Oxford St from the north end (that is, from Danquah Circle), one is struck by how crowded it looks, with both vehicles and people, many large commercial buildings, and a proliferation of large-size billboards advertising everything from cell phone company products (MTN: ‘Everywhere You Go’; Tigo: ‘Express Yourself’) to the services of the United Emirates Airlines; from Nescafe to sanitary pads; and from the Nigerian Ovation magazine to DStv with the face of Jennifer Lopez staring coyly from the billboard. To enter the Street is also to be confronted by a range of features that are recognizable from high streets elsewhere in the world and yet are marked here by a mix of decided local characteristics. Your regular banks sit cheek-by-jowl alongside vendors of football paraphernalia, which proliferate exponentially during the years in which Ghana participates in international soccer tournaments such as the World Cup or the African Cup of Nations competition.  Papa Ye, the local fast food giant, has to contend with the vendor promising the exact same chicken-and-fried-rice-with-Coke combo right across the street from it, with the added enticement of a ghetto blaster with full-on Bob Marley music to accompany your food, while Woodin (retailer of beautiful print cloths) contends with ‘already-made’ (i.e., pre-sewn) variants of dresses and shirts made from the same print cloths but available for much cheaper off the street vendors.  Electronic goods stores abound, as do jewelry shops, along with the offices of all the major cell phone companies such as Airtel, MTN, Glo and Tigo.  Koala, a grocery store to rival Trader Joe’s, Sainsbury’s or Loblaws, is also on Oxford St, while the huge edifice to American fast food retailing that is KFC opened in September 2011 to add a further transnational dimension to the food offerings on the Street.  Several large Chinese and other high-end restaurants. Even though Accra has not known a large or even substantial Chinese population this has not prevented the establishment of quite popular Chinese restaurants, some of which date from the late 1960s and early 70s.  The Chinese restaurants in the area include Chikin’ Likin’, Tsing Tao, Noble Chinese Restaurant, Peking Restaurant, and Dynasty, perhaps the most well known of them all.  There are also hyper busy internet cafes, hotels, B&Bs, forex bureaux, and a large and luscious Italian-themed ice cream parlour make of this commercial stretch a visitor’s dream and the local dispossessed’s mouth-watering nightmare.  On adjoining streets and byways off Oxford Street and within a roughly five hundred-metre radius are various Embassies and High Commissions, the Goethe Cultural Institute, and Ryan’s, reputed to be the best Irish pub outside Dublin, along with several other such watering holes and dance venues.  And since at least the summer of 2006 a mega-sized television screen has been permanently mounted in front of the Osu Food Court and streams live TV advertisements and reality shows such as Big Brother Africa on a 24-hour continuous loop.

Any temptation to see Oxford St as a postmodern transnational commercial boulevard is, however, quickly to be tempered by the many signs of cultural phenomena that reach back several generations and some of which may be seen replicated in varying forms here as well as in different parts of the city and indeed in other urban areas across the country at large: the young man selling fresh coconuts whose skill for discerning the tenderness or hardness of the inside of the fruit before deftly splitting off the crown with his cutlass seems purely esoteric; the woman that sells ripe plantain roasted over a slow charcoal fire under a tree on the lively kerbside corner (for good strategic reasons trees and kerbside corners feature prominently in the life cycle of roasted plantains); the female hawkers nonchalantly walking along with their wares balanced on their heads but without the prop of hands and selling things as varied as ice cold water, or oranges, or roasted peanuts, or even charcoal, smoked fish, onions, chillies and cassava and plantain for the evening’s fufu.  One or two of these women may even have a young child strapped to their back.  These variant features bring the mix of businesses and vendors on the street much closer to commercial districts in other parts of the city such as Makola, Kaneshie Market, Dansoman High Street, or Spintex Road, all of which are veritable beehives of commercial activity with their own distinctive characteristics. And yet Oxford Street is different from all these, and for a reason that almost passes without notice. . . .

* This post was first published on Arcade.