Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 418

#WhiteHistoryMonth: ‘To revolutionize a culture …’

Frank’s Archive* is a project that explores the different functions of books, power and knowledge. My dad, J.E. Frank, has left me numerous books relating to race, class, apartheid and politics in South Africa and the United Kingdom. Leaving South Africa in the early 70s, my father decided to sail around the world and eventually jumped ship in London where he became active in the anti-apartheid struggle and worked with the Institute of Race Relations. At a young age I realized politics must be something important–as at one occasion my beloved Spice Girls poster was replaced by an African National Congress flag without any warning. Something to do with capitalism and the commercial music industry, just big words for me at the time.

Politically active thinkers tend to have a lot of books–and listen to a lot of jazz–so after I inherited his collection I became interested the multiple functions of the books. The collection inspired both my father and me during our studies, lives and involvement in anti-racist work. The idea of trans generational memory and heritage is key to exploring the different meanings of the books. A lot of the ideas and theory developed by writers such as Sivanandan, Fanon, Biko, Cabral and Jackson are still relevant and useful for my generation today. The books but also music such as records by Louis Moholo Moholo and Chris McGregor inform our ideas on resistance and hopefully offer new understandings on the act of archiving resistance.

Below is an excerpt from Ambalavaner  Sivanandan that is part of the archive. Sivanandan is a writer and former director of the Institute of Race Relations in London. He is seen as one of the leading black intellectual thinkers in the UK.  A Different Hunger: Writings on Black Resistance is a compilation of non-fiction articles.

But to revolutionize a culture, one first needs to make a radical assessment of it. That assessment, that revolutionary perspective, by virtue of his historical situation is provided by the black man. For it is with the cultural manifestations of racism in his daily life that he must contend. Racial prejudice and discrimination, he recognizes, are not a matter of individual attitudes, but the sickness of a whole society carried in its culture. And his survival as a black man in white society requires that the constantly questions and challenges every aspect of white life even as he meets it. White speech, white schooling, white law, white work, white religion, white love, even white lies – they are all measured on the touchstone of his experience. He discovers, for instance, that white schools make for white superiority, that white law equals one law for the white and and another for the black, that white work relegates him to the worst jobs irrespective of skill, that even white Jesus and white Marx who are supposed to save him are not really not in the same street, so to speak, as black Gandhi and black Cabral.

In his everyday life he fights the particulars of white cultural superiority, in his conceptual life he fights the ideology of white cultural hegemony. In the process he engenders not perhaps a revolutionary culture, but certainly a revolutionary practice within that culture.

From A. Sivanandan, A Different Hunger: Writings on Black Resistance. (1982: 95).

*You can visit the archive here. Frank’s Archive is an on-going project that doesn’t necessarily have a beginning or an end.

Mindy Kaling isn’t Responsible for Being Your Diversity Councillor

I got together with Nadia Misir and Derica Shields for an AIAC Roundtable to discuss why Mindy Kaling went batshit when she was asked, at the recent SXSW, why there are no other characters of colour in senior positions of authority (ie. other doctors) on her show, The Mindy Project. After saying that such inquiries about diversity are “insulting”, she reminded reporters that she is a “fucking Indian woman” with her “own fucking network television show”. Kaling, who is generally non-confrontational on most political issues, defended her creative decisions this way: “And I’m like, oh wait, it’s not like I’m running a country, I’m not a political figure.  I’m someone who’s writing a show and I want to use funny people.  And it feels like it diminishes the incredibly funny women who do come on my show.” She maintained that her show is diverse: “I have four series regulars that are women on my show, and no one asks any of the shows I adore—and I won’t name them because they’re my friends—why no leads on their shows are women or of color, and I’m the one that gets lobbied about these things.”

Derica: First of all, that last bit is just patently untrue. Did she really miss the yearlong convo about HBO’s Girls (see NPR interview, and here)? Kaling’s good friends with Lena Dunham, the creator and lead actor of Girls – which has no people of colour, despite being situated in NYC (not North Dakota).

Nadia: Well, the SXSW showdown isn’t the first time Mindy’s supposed role as minority spokeswoman in Hollywood has been the focus of headlines surrounding the popularity of her show The Mindy Project.  In January, her cover photograph for Elle magazine’s “Women in TV” issue was scrutinised because it was printed in black and white, starkly contrasting the colour cover photos of her other White colleagues Amy Poehler, Allison William and Zooey Deschanel (on the cover, Elle also used a head shot of Mindy, rather than the traditional full body shot, obviously because Mindy does not fit the anorexic cover model idea that they always use, but that’s another issue).  Mindy responded to the frenzy by tweeting “I love my @ELLEmagazinecover. It made me feel glamorous & cool.  And if anyone wants to see more of my body, go on thirteen dates with me.”

Neelika: So what is going on here? It’s really more than just a question of slotting the “right” collections of “race” representatives on any given show (or succumbing to tokenism, the excuse Lena Dunham hid behind…there certainly seems to be a lot of white tokens in the show, but no one says that).

Nadia: It speaks to the age old problem of American pop culture and mainstream media refusing to keep pace with the reality of a country where national identity is a constantly evolving chimera.

Neelika: Like everything on TV, The Mindy Project does not represent reality in any remote way. On a recent hospital visit to a friend who has brain cancer, and sitting with her for a few hours: it’s a total UN in there. Everyone with accents that speaks to the globalisation of medicine. Eastern Europeans, Indians, a Nigerian (basically, from anywhere where people are given some opportunities to study and qualify, but where the state has failed that educated class – or they simply want to make more money). Nurses: Americans of every ethnic background. The desk chiquitas were white/local, chortling and flirting, and making the atmosphere a little more bearable in the ICU. And that’s Upstate New York – not exactly diversity central. So no, mainstream TV – including shows claiming to be hip, edgy, and representative of America – does not project any sort of reality, but a fantasy with which America tends to remain enamoured.

Nadia: We know that one woman of color cannot champion on her own. It is a burden too great for one person, a labor that should be shared between people. And Mindy’s voice is not the voice of every person who is not white. That much should be obvious.  However, after two and a half seasons (the second season is currently on hiatus and left off at—GASP—Danny Castellano and Mindy finally locking lips at high altitude in the back of an airplane near the food carts) of Mindy making out with different garden varieties of pretty white boys, one does begin to wonder why they are the only ones her otherwise strong, stylish and quirky character so desires.

Derica: All three of us watch the show regularly; obviously, we are fans. But sometimes, it seems like Kaling is trying to show that a brown woman can do “bro” humour as well as any bro, the main problem with that being that when it’s not physical, bro humour is dull, racist and sexist.

Neelika: And it’s not just that all Lahiri’s boyfriend (and potentials) have been a disappointing series of Standard Prettyboy Whiteboys (see them all rated here. The show’s writers even knowingly include jokes about her only going after whiteboys.)

Derica: It’s also that Kaling’s representations of other brown people have been shitty, especially in the first season. A whole section of the series was devoted to her, and then-boytoy going to Haiti to live in a tent. It was awful and went nowhere.

Neelika: Er, yes. Haiti served as the backdrop for them to do mysterious Samaritan stuff, and to fill up the time for what the lead character did over the show’s summer hiatus. Also for white dude to propose to her when the show came back for the fall season, while the insects of Haiti made an appearance to disturb Lahiri during the “perfect moment”).

Derica: Then there was the pointless, logic-less joke at the expense of hijabi women – apparently, they don’t have health insurance (don’t ask us). The black woman orderly was a raging cliché before they started to shade in her personal life a little (she has a useless white boyfriend named Ray-Ron). In “Christmas Party Sex Trap”, a pretty flawless episode in terms of lols and romance plot fantasy, she “baits” the white dude she’s crushing on by pretending to hold a conversation with a black African dude dressed like an extra dug up from Coming to America. The joke is a two-parter: (a) she talks to standard Exotic African because he “looks cool” (novelty); (b) Mindy would never desire him (that it goes without saying, but her crush doesn’t know her well enough to know that). In the following scene Mindy is humiliated when the embodiment of feminine perfection (in the universe of the show and in America) sings a sexy rendition of “Santa Baby” and all the men in the office go goggly-eyed for her. We get to feel with Mindy and experience her rejection at not being blonde, thin, white etc., but we’re not encouraged to feel with any of the black/brown characters who people the show, largely because they are used as plot scaffolding or punchlines.

There are times that the show gets race while also managing to be funny. We appreciated basketballers episode when in the line for the club outside Lahiri asks “will there be black guys here? because black guys love me” and then explains that with her ass + long black hair she’s many black men’s non-white ideal. Watching her take on the taboo in this completely oblivious way is really funny. In terms of writing it’s bold because it’s exactly the kind of tension that’s rarely addressed on television/in comedy (especially not from the brown woman’s perspective). The show works best when it seems that behind the sympathetic, booksmart-but-not-particularly-aware Mindy Lahiri, there’s a much smarter woman—Mindy Kaling—who is poking fun at the ludicrous elements of being a brown, chubby, highly educated woman in America . . . but it doesn’t always feel that way.

Nadia: Wishful thinking aside, 75% of the lines on the show feels at times like a cruel tease.  It leaves room for generations of viewers who have been fed the same network doses of glamorized whiteness to hope for something different, only to be given the same white prototype—the lawyer, the doctor, the hipster, and even the in-deep/recovering cocaine addict (yes, one of Mindy’s serious boyfriends)—whom we are supposed to view as the epitome of desirability, episode after episode.

Neelika: It seems like there is a tension between Mindy Lahiri (the character) and her accomplished doctor/strong, witty, smart personality, and her very troubled and un-decolonised mind that keeps her imprisoned in choices that evidence just how much one can be influenced by a dominant culture’s voice. That influence can be so over-arching, so expected, so accepted—by those who supposedly benefit from dominant culture, and, more troublingly, by those who do not—that people may react vociferously when questioned about their choices and behaviours.

Why not acknowledge and change, especially when one’s behaviours may be damaging to one’s own psyche, and (if one’s in a position of power, as Kaling is as the creator of her own “fucking show”) even perpetuate problematic views for the consumption of the greater global public? Partly, that’s because you’d lose advertisers. What if The Mindy Project’s doctors were all immigrants with accents, and all variations of an otherness that Americans—who continue to feel reassured when their people in positions of authority are white men—are not ready for? So yes, Lahiri’s show can have one person of colour character who’s a lead, but forget about representing any form of reality.

Watching these shows made me want to give Lahiri (and Kaling) a reading list: Ngũgĩ ’s Decolonising the Mind. Judith Raiskin’s Snow on the Cane Fields: Women’s Writing and Subjectivity. And also articles about the biology of imprinting: many birds and mammals—especially those known to have a high propensity for imitation—raised by humans try to court, and even mate with humans when they reach sexual maturity. The imprinted knowledge is retained for life, and of all forms of learning, imprinting is the least likely to be forgotten or unlearned. Most importantly for this discussion, sexual imprinting establishes animals’ preference for a certain species: so Mindy Lahiri, raised among whitebread, has it in her head that this model is all she can be attracted to and desire. In her sexually mature years, that’s what she wants to hook up with, and aspires to romantically.

Before you put me front of the firing squad: I know, I know: we are not geese, who famously follow their parental figures (then follow each other as they trek across vast distances for winter).

Nadia: The imprinting thing may piss some people off, but it is totally accurate, I think. The act of watching television (itself a large part of how we’re socialized when we’re young into the norms of dominant American culture) is basically negative media imprinting.

Neelika: Right. And unlike geese, we can learn and change how we behave, even if it’s something as basically imprinted in us like our sexual responses, and even if it’s all reinforced by crap TV. Perhaps it would help Mindy Lahiri the TV character (and even Mindy Kaling, the real person) to learn that jackdaws raised by a (male) human researcher will later court his favour by presenting him with juicy fresh earthworms — although when not sexually aroused, these birds happily join other jackdaws in flight. It certainly explains a lot about the enormously confusing feelings that second generation children of immigrants (and the anger that their parents feel, as they realise that their children only want to date or be romantically attached to those who are representatives of the dominant culture) deal with in their teenage years.

#WhiteHistoryMonth: Leather from Human Skin in 1880s Philadelphia

Time and again, somehow narratives of slavery miraculously seem to always absolve the northern states of the United States. Having recently watched “12 years a slave” (which I did not find violent at all), I was a bit irritated at how people imagine, even fantasize, what life in the north was like for Negroes. “Wasn’t it just so crazy in the South?” That and how often my friend from Yazoo City, Mississippi grinds her teeth every time she reveals where she is from and is greeted with a “How bad is it there?” from a benign northerner. Wall Street has roots in slavery, prestigious universities have roots in slavery, heck America was built on the backs of African slaves. Here is a #icouldntmakeitup article involving one of the leading medical schools at the time, and the “birthplace of America”, my northern city of Philadelphia:

LEATHER FROM HUMAN SKIN

{Philadelphia News}

The Mercury, Saturday Morning March 17, 1888

I remember that two or three years ago I incidentally referred to a prominent physician of this city wearing shoes made from the skin of negroes. He still adhered to that custom, insisting that the tanned hide of an African makes the most enduring and the most pliable leather known to man.

Only last week I met him upon the street with a brand new pair of shoes. I looked at his foot wear, as I always do – his pedal coverings have an irresistible fascination for me – and said, with a smile:

“Is the down trodden African still beneath your feet?” In the most matter of fact way, and without the shadow of a smile, he answered: “I suppose you mean to inquire if I still wear shoes made of the skin of a negro. I certainly do, and I don’t propose changing in that respect until I find a leather that is softer and will last longer and present a better appearance. I have no sentiment about this matter. Were I a Southerner – in the American sense of the word – I might be accused of being actuated by a race prejudice. But I am a foreigner by birth, although now an American citizen by naturalization. I fought in the rebellion that the blacks might be freed. I would use a white man’s skin for the same purpose if it were sufficiently thick, and if any’ one has a desire to wear my epidermis upon his feet after I have drawn my last breath he has my ante mortem permission.”

The doctor’s shoes always exhibit a peculiarly rich lustrousness in their blackness. He assures me that they never hurt his feet. The new pair he was using when I last saw him emitted no creaking sound and appeared as comfortable as though they had been worn a month. Their predecessors, he told me, had been in constant use for eight months. He obtains the skins from the bodies of negroes which have been dissected in one of our big medical colleges. The best leather is obtained from the thighs. The soles are formed by placing several layers of leather together. The skin is prepared by a tanner at Womseldorf, 16 miles from Reading. The shoes are fashioned by a French shoemaker of this city, who knows nothing of the true character of the leather, but who often wonders at its exquisite smoothness, and says that it excels the finest French calf-skin.

Do not for a moment think that this doctor presents an exceptional case of one who puts the human skin to a practical use. Medical students frequently display a great variety of articles in which in the skin or bones of some dissected mortal has been gruesomely utilized, and in bursts of generosity they sometimes present these to their friends, who prize them highly. One of the dudest dudes in town carries a match-safe covered with a portion of the skin of a beautiful young woman who was found drowned in the Delaware river. It still retains its natural colour. Another young man with whom I am acquainted carries a cigar case made of negro skin, a ghastly skull and crossbones appearing on one side in relief. One of the best known surgeons in this country, who resides in this city, has a beautiful instrument case, entirely covered with leather made from an African’s skin. A young society lady of this city wears a beautiful pair of dark slippers, the remarkable lustrousness of whose leather invariably excites the admiration of her friends when they see them. The young doctor who presented them to her recently returned from an extended foreign tour, and he told her that he had purchased them from a Turk in Alexandria, and that he did not know what sort of leather they were made of, but he supposed it was the skin of some wild animal. As a matter of fact, the skin came from a negro cadaver, which was once prone on a Jefferson College dissecting table, and the leather was prepared in Womseldorf. The rosettes on the slippers were deftly fashioned from the negro’s kinky hair.

Image Source: Places in Time.

UPDATE: Yes, there’s a source for this.

The Undemocratic Alliance

The Democratic Alliance (DA) likes to style itself as South Africa’s ‘official opposition’ party, a rather meaningless turn lifted from Westminister style ‘oppositional politics’ to distinguish themselves from the multiplicity of political parties outside of the ANC that decorate the South African political landscape.  By this we mean the conflation of having an opposition party with ‘Democracy’ and political pluralism. It further prides itself on its great ‘liberal’ history in its former incarnation as the Progressive Federal Party (PFP) as the liberal opposition party during the heydays of apartheid, where the likes of the Helen Suzman fought apartheid from the benches of a then exclusively white parliament.

The DA’s recent failed attempt to merge with the most platitudinous  of all South Africa’s political parties–Agang SA and appoint former Goldfields CEO and a World Bank managing director Mamphela Ramphele as their presidential candidate for the 2014 elections. This ill-fated political romance, died but is reflective of trend throughout the history of  not only the DA, but the entirety of South African liberalism.

As Pallo Jordan, notes in this perceptive take: ‘South African liberalism has consistently failed since its emerged in the Cape Colony in the 19th century to the liberal party to the PFP to commit itself to any universal conception of rights.’ Jordan suggests that South African Liberalism choose a series of compromises in such forms as ‘qualified franchise’ or ‘federalism’  in their opposition to the racist policies in both apartheid and the era of segregation. The reason for these compromises was in order to not alienate an almost monolithically reactionary white electorate with such horrifically bolshevik ideas as universal franchise or in other words trusting the natives with a vote.

More recently since the formation of the DP in 1990 and the end of the Apartheid in 1994, The DP/DA chose to pursue an electoral strategy of eating into the electorate of National Party (that party that governed Apartheid), by playing on outright fears among whites of majority rule through the racist dog whistles of such slogans as ‘Fight Back’, essentially meaning ‘Fight Black’ or their eventual merger with the rebranded NNP. Ironically the NNP left the DA in the lurch in a similar, but slightly more prolonged and surprising manner to Ramphele, when the National Party leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk decided to piss on Verwoed’s grave and earn himself a pay raise by joining the ANC (he is currently a minister in Jacob Zuma’s Cabinet).

Other examples of the DA’s illiberalism often not mentioned in a mass amnesia within the rank and file of the DA, include former leader and now verbose ex-ambassador Tony Leon’s faux-verkrampte tough on crime approach, specifically his support for the death penalty or their less than enthusiastic stance on civil unions.

While the party is no longer as in the thrall of social conservatives or masculinist posturing under the leadership of Helen Zille, it has been as ready to ignore the constitution from sending the police into crush protests throughout the Western Cape, illegal evictions, a general haughty indifference to the suffering over the poor, a continuing Victorian moralism about the behavior of poor blacks and coloureds and of course a general ineptitude and clumsy attitude when it comes toward handling matters of race.

Of course there is the matter of the DA’s actually economic policies which remain firmly in the camp of what is known as ‘neoliberalism’ and remain based upon the belief that only the market is capable of changing peoples lives, uplifting people from poverty delivering services if free from the bounds of state interference and such malevolent forces as organized labour who dare to prioritize the needs of their members above the needs of capital.

The overriding theme in all this is that the DA like its ancestors has consistently chosen to compromise its liberal values in pursuit of power, a power they have never come even close to. Let us remember that the PFP for many years had only one representative in Parliament- Helen Suzman- who represented the rather well-heeled suburb of  Houghton, namely because despite the PFP’s compromises, even their limited opposition to apartheid was an anathema to the white electorate.

Most of the short-lived enthusiasm  for the Dagang experiment was based off the delusion, apparently sustained by the DA’s leadership that the only thing holding back the DA’s electoral growth was the racial group of its leadership, or in other words if their leader was black they would break through to previously hostile constituencies, simply alienated by Zille’s bad dancing, cooking and skin color. This is representative of the DA’s limited understanding of race and racism. In essence racism refers to individual acts of oppressive behavior rather than a structure of racial oppression built into South African society.

For liberalism and the DA, racism and  was an irrational product of Afrikaner backwardness which held back capitalist development and the growth of the economy. Furthermore many confuse ‘petty apartheid’ or the daily harassment of enforced racial segregation- think  ‘whites only benches’ with the essence of apartheid.

What they fail to understand that apartheid and segregation was integral to capitalist development in South Africa, through securing a pliant cheap labour force and a vast reserve army of the unemployed, through creating a migrant labour system in which millions were relocated to the native reserves later known as Bantustans, while enjoying no rights in South Africa. The native reserves functioned as a steady source of cheap labour for the factories and mines of white capitalists who had steady access to a labour force which they could pay far below any sort of living wage. This migrant labour system still remains largely intact in the mining industry for example.

The DA continues to exhibit a paranoia in governance which mirrors that of the ruling party towards those who dare dissent in the Western Cape. Rather than dealing with the real service delivery issues, continuing geographic apartheid and poverty and inequality in Cape Town, they continually blame a ‘third force’ for protests, mostly the ANCYL and a mythical campaign of ‘ungovernability’ unleashed by the ruling party to undermine the DA’s rule in the Western Cape. This ANC often blames similar protests in the municipalities they govern on ‘foreign agents’ or the EFF of late.

What’s all this about? Well, it is promote a radio show I do for Jacobin Radio. Listen at the link below (it’s the second episode only) as I discuss the DA’s politics with another AIAC’er T.O. Molefe for Jacobin Radio. In the first half I sketch the history of liberalism in South Africa. The interview with T.O. starts about 22 minutes in if you’re impatient.

Listen.

Image: Wiki Commons.

Lesotho’s Politics Go Pop

Lesotho’s Prime Minister and leader of the coalition government Tom Thabane has found love: ‘It is one of the best decisions that I ever made in my entire life,’ the statesman said in a recent newspaper interview (in Sotho). The circumstances in which the news was revealed, was less rosy: a bomb explosion and unidentified gunmen shooting at his lover’s house.

This all took place at night. In what now appears  to have been a series of coordinated attacks, the assailants paid the police  commissioner’s house a visit before frolicking to the other side of Maseru to unleash their  toys on the Prime Minister’s lover’s residence a few minutes’ drive out of the city  centre. The assumption seems to have been that he would be staying over for the night. No fatalities resulted from both incidents.

In the same interview, Thabane–a man of many shades and a veteran public servant who has worked in  different capacities under all of Lesotho’s Prime Ministers (there have been three  democratically-elected ones since we attained independence 1966)–employed his excellent  oratory skills when he got asked about the manner in which the relationship became public knowledge.

“It’s rather unfortunate that the  public had to find out this way, but it’s nothing new,” he said, adding that he’s  deliberately kept the affair out of the public’s gaze to avoid any misgivings before concluding that time for the affair to be known had arrived.

Frank, erudite, and headstrong, Thabane has been the source of both contention and praise among Basotho throughout his political career. Even as the country’s government is being run by two  other deputies, he’s being accused of surrounding himself with cronies who’ll yield to his every wish, an accusation he’s categorically denied yet something  increasingly difficult to overlook following the recent fraud allegations levelled against Molobeli Soulo, the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office (that’s his full title), something certain quarters have interpreted as a conspiracy by Thabane against Soulo.

Lesotho’s rappers have latched onto Thabane’s larger-than-life persona. Using the myth – as opposed to the person – of Tom Thabane as a point of departure, the trio of Moji Mokotso (Jiji F; image at the top), Thulo Monyake (Lemekoane; second image below), and Mokebe Mohasoa (Skebza D; final image) have composed a song in which they liken themselves to the  Prime Minister (and leader of the All Basotho Convention party) – from the style of dress, to the amount of power he wields. “Step up in the building like I’m Tom Thabane,” goes the refrain, half-sung in a style not much different from a lot of mainstream rap music currently.

It’s a forthright musical statement, much like the bold pronouncements of the person who inspired it, and hints at Lesotho hip-hop’s growing self-confidence and desire to explore new sounds. Jiji F puts it better:

The way people feel his presence; his inspiration to a lot of people and influence; the respect he is given. Also, the lifestyle that he lives that appears luxurious, and the fact that he is [a] Mosotho [whom] we all know and can relate to [...]

Lemekoane, a producer, rapper, engineer, and connector in the Lesotho music scene, says that he simply helped put the song together. He “figured it would be good to have three generations of rappers on it. Jiji F from the new school; me from middle school and Skebza from the old [school of Lesotho hip-hop].”

The All Basotho Convention, the party Thabane formed after breaking away from the then-ruling Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD) in the run-up to the general elections in 2007. Lemekoane concludes with a nod to the party’s colours (yellow, green, and red): “Three different colors so to say.”

* Elsewhere in Southern Africa, South African rapper Cassper Nyovest’s ode to kwaito musician Doc Shebeleza got downloaded thousands of times (as well as getting him one of the best crowd responses when he opened for Kendrick Lamar during the LA-based rapper’s recent tour of the country), while Zimbabwean rapper Junior Brown entered the ZiFM charts at number one with his song ‘Phil Chinyangwa.‘ (the mogul himself reportedly got on stage during the mixtape lunch on which the song appears).

This trend of pop culture appropriating public figures’ names is nothing new (think: Outkast – Rosa Parks). It’ll interesting to see how the takes root on the African hip-hop landscape.

Bonus: Cassper Nyovest performs a snippet of ‘Doc Shebeleza’ in this video:

5 Films to Watch at Scandinavia’s Biggest African Film Festival

Stockholm’s CinemAfrica film festival, which opens this Wednesday, is Scandinavia’s biggest and longest-running African film festival. This year’s festival marks a rejuvenation of sorts, with some of the most exciting young filmmakers as guests, including Jonah’s Kibwe Tavares, art-world superstar Wangechi Mutu, multivalent director/producer Jim Chuchu, debut-directing literary artist Abdellah Taïa, and Frances Bodomo, fresh off Sundance success. In addition, special focus events – centering on everything from music video aesthetics, via the late Stuart Hall, to pan-african feminist activism – add context to what we hope is an interestingly diverse film programme.

I’d like to recommend a set of films that may be new to readers of this site (full disclosure: I’m a member of CinemAfrica’s board and programme committee). Literally first up is the opening film, Soleils, co-directed by Burkinabe veteran Dani Kouyaté, which perfectly encapsulates the festival’s tagline, “own history”. Packaged in a seductively didactic fable lies an intellectual and conceptual challenge to the way the history of Africa has been written, with the young woman Dokamisa’s (literal and historical) amnesia being cured by a magical, griot-guided journey through time and space, palaces and prisons, dreams and frightening realities.

(Trailer with English subtitles here.)

Another one of the exciting young filmmakers visiting the festival is Nevline Nnaji, whose background as a YouTube blogger combines in an exciting way with traditional film schooling in the documentary Reflections Unheard: Black Women in Civil Rights. Using an amazing collection of interviews and archive footage, the film examines the intersectional power issues faced and fought by black women in the US civil rights struggle of the 60s and 70s – including sexism in the civil rights movement, racism in the feminist movement, and invisibility in both.

(The director talks about her visit more thoroughly in this YouTube blog video.)

In-competition films are Africa is a Country favourites Crop, The President, Of Good Report and Under The Starry Sky – as well as the brilliant The Rooftops, directed by Algerian great Merzak Allouache. Entirely different from his Cannes-hyped chamber drama road movie The Repentant, this large-scope ensemble piece boils down all of Algiers society into the microcosm of life on its roof terraces – its class differences, its joys and sorrows, the hypocrisy and the human decency.

There’s also plenty of short films on offer, including a “Future/Past” packet of films where science fiction ties into history, with a director Q&A conducted by AIAC’s Megan Eardley. A key film there is the multi-levelled, psychologically impactful Twaaga by Cédric Ido, about a young child’s superhero obsession, explicitly set against the background of (and contrasted with) Thomas Sankara’s revolution in Burkina Faso.

Finally, my personal favourite of all the films on offer is Electro Chaabi – quite simply, Hind Meddeb’s film is one of the best music documentaries I’ve ever seen. About the new electronic mahragan music emerging in working-class Cairo neighbourhoods in the wake of the Arab Spring, it comes incredibly close to its subjects in a way few extrinsic documentaries do. During an entire year, culminating in national fame and its inevitable seeds of discord, the filmmaker lets us follow the daily lives and the deep personal thoughts-turned-music of many of the scene’s key players.

CinemAfrica opens this Wednesday, March 19 and runs until Sunday, March 23. All details here.

The Jews of Egypt

The subject is fascinating, both broadly and specifically. Specifically, “Jews of Egypt” explores the history of a group that has been all but forgotten in a country whose current Jewish population, by several accounts, amounts to roughly 200 individuals. More broadly, the film’s value is manifold. It investigates how history is written, and the impact of parties who are written out of said history. It also calls into question assumptions surrounding Judaism in the Middle East and support of Israel; and beyond this, the relationship between nationalism and religion.

“Jews of Egypt” is a full-length documentary that uses archival and contemporary footage, as well as interviews with scholars, political figures, Egyptian Jews, and some Egyptians (who appear to have been chosen at random on the street), to document the history of this population, and the reasons for their departure from Egypt around the time of Nasser.

Here’s the trailer:

Based primarily on testimony from Egyptian Jews, the film paints a stark narrative of an inclusive and prosperous existence, which rapidly disintegrated with the establishment of the state of Israel. The producers and participants have taken care to articulate the difference between the Zionist movement in the region, including its manifestation in Egypt, and the rest of the Egyptian Jewish population, several of whom were key opposition figures.

Interwoven into this narrative is the interesting story of leftist political activist Henri Curiel. His life exposed on both a personal and political level, create a particularly attention-grabbing segment.

So much of this film is about identity, and yet there are clearly areas of identity not grappled with that may have contributed to the animosity toward, and subsequent departure of, most of Egypt’s Jewish population (there was never an official policy of expulsion, the population in question either left as a result of coercion or feeling unsafe). Yet these areas of identity, such as language, origin, and social standing, are not nearly as important as highlighting one of the dark sides of Egyptian nationalism, and exposing the dangers of blanket xenophobia.

Interestingly, yep perhaps unsurprisingly, a large number of the testimonials are explicitly intended to distance Egypt’s Jews from Israel. A majority of the interviews are conducted in France, where a large portion of the population settled following their departure from Egypt. One interviewee goes so far as to say: “Egyptian Jews never thought of going to Israel because it was the place for oppressed Jews, and we were the opposite.” In fact those interviewed universally express a love for the country, and exhibited exceedingly fond memories of their lives in pre-1950s Egypt.

Much of the coverage this film has received so far has focused more on the opposition it has faced in Egypt, and less on the content itself. In terms of production the film has some issues that should be mentioned in brief. Firstly, there are some inconsistencies with the translations both from Arabic to English and from French to English. Secondly, a lot of filler footage is reused ad nauseam. These issues however are more distracting than damaging to the story being told. And as the filmmakers refused external funding to maintain a level of neutrality, perhaps they should be excused.

This is a part of Egyptian history that is certainly worth being told, yet one gets the impression that a significant portion of the broader narrative is missing. In part this film seems like it is intended to remind Egyptians of the Egyptian Jewish population of days gone by, and dampen anti-Semitic sentiment. This being the case, it is a shame it has been met with such resistance at home.

* “Jews of Egypt” opens in the US on March 28 at Quad Cinema in New York City. Courtesy of Artmatten Films.

#WhiteHistoryMonth: Canada’s Art History

In 1786, François Malépart de Beaucourt, a painter in New France (later Quebec), completed a portrait of a woman he owned. Though Canada’s slave-owning history is often whitewashed, it exists in documents such as the painting Portrait of a Negro Slave. That portrait and what it says about Canada’s history and Canadian art historiography, is the subject of this excerpt from Charmaine Nelson’s Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art:

Art historical discourse has traditionally suppressed race as a valid topic of scholarly inquiry through the exclusionary deployment of methodologies that privileged biographical, connoisseurship and formalistic inquiries. These socially detached and/or culturally exclusive, predominantly aesthetic histories supported the (re)constitution of materially and ideologically exclusive canons and successions of white male masters. This colonial bias has impacted every aspect of the discipline, from what cultural objects are deemed significant enough to be researched or written about, the accessibility or preservation of a cultural object (which is directly connected to its canonical value and acquisition by an institutional collection), the access to documentation to facilitate research (the archives and libraries are not neutral), how one frames one’s research, which questions are validated and therefore posed in the face of an art object and last but surely not least, the very identities—the sex, race, etc.—of the art historians themselves.

A poignant example of the art historical devaluation and suppression of issues of race exists in the Canadian historiography of a celebrated eighteenth-century portrait painting of a black female slave. Within the annals of Canadian Art History, François Malépart de Beaucourt’s Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786), a rare visual document of a slave in early New France, has traditionally been discussed almost entirely in terms of its stylistic and tonal properties, the location represented in the portrait and the status and oeuvre of the painter. For example, Dennis Reid, author of the canonical text A Concise History of Canadian Painting (1988), described it as an object that François Malépart de Beaucourt painted possibly “while sojourning in Guadeloupe.” But I would argue that the speculation on a tropical location, although legitimately triggered by the lush mountainous landscape, the tropical fruit still life and the quality of light captured in the landscape vignette beyond the black woman’s bare right shoulder, also serves to expel Trans Atlantic Slavery and the presence of black slaves from Canadian territory and narratives. Disavowing not only Canadian slavery, but Trans Atlantic Slavery generally, Major-Frégeau argued that the black female sitter could be a perfectly free young West Indian. And through this expulsion, slavery can be always elsewhere. As [Barry] Lord has astutely argued [in Painting in Canada: Toward a People’s Art (1974)]: “Why is this foreign setting necessary? Along with the imported fruit and the colourful costume, it helps to make the subject exotic, unfamiliar, yet appealing. To imperialists and to their comprador allies . . . the working people of the colonies always appear as exotic, and it is one of the artist’s services to them to picture colonial people in this way.”

The extraordinary rarity of fully finished oil portraits of black slaves in western art generally can hardly be overstated. As such, a critical analysis of this painting holds the tremendous potential to shed light on the experiences of black female slaves in Canada, but more generally on the conditions and practices of slavery in New France. The prolific disavowal of the racial implications of this unique portrait has occurred despite the artist’s obvious desire to foreground the slave’s sexual and reproductive utility through the exposed breast over the plate of tropical fruit, despite the known historical documents that record the slave as the legal property of the artist and despite the circulating title of the work that indexes both the significance of the race (Negro) and the subordinate legal status of the sitter (slave) and even despite the obvious opportunities to address the circumstances of production, the function and circulation of a unique portrait whose commission was likely (and unusually) not instigated by its sitter herself (for how many slaves had the agency or the wealth to commission portraits?). Instead, François Malépart de Beaucourt has been regularly and problematically lauded as Canada’s first native artist and the inherently coercive nature of his (potential) sexual relationship with this female slave diffused through the deployment of the term “mistress” to describe what would have been a polarized, “miscegenating,” colonial “union.” Whereas Morisset used the term mistress, Webster made similar implications about the sexual intimacy of Malépart de Beaucourt and his black female sitter when he described her as his slave and servant “and perhaps more.” (65-66)

Before And After The Disco: Ibibio Sound Machine’s Self Titled Debut Album

Ibibio Sound Machine’s debut offering is a distillation of a day, shaped from a twenty-four hour palette of light, as their sounds are filtered through its unstable changes in tone and texture. If silence is the canvas for which musicians paint upon, then by the end of the album, there is only an indistinct memory of silence left as a throbbing afterglow. Eno Williams, the British/Nigerian front woman and vocalist, opens the album by bringing the sun up to a morning in bloom with ‘Voice Of A Bird (Uyio Inuen)’, a brightly coloured gospel-hymn with miniature melancholic inflections. An introduction that is mirrored in the album’s afterword ‘Ibibio Spiritual’. These two tender monologues expand a transcending field to the work, sung in the South-East Nigerian Ibibio language through which Williams recalls and retells surreal and fantastical folk stories told to her by her family as a child. Her performances during the work can be eccentric and confrontational, some sung quavering, some part-rapped, in or against the rhythm – but always in flight.

The genesis of the project began in London between Williams and friends and producers Max Grunhard, Leon Brichard and Benji Bouton while ‘discussing the idea of making a record using [Williams’] mother tongue’. Initially tracking the bass and drum tracks they joined with Ghanaian guitarist Alfred ‘Kari’ Bannerman from the band KonKoma, who like Max Grunhard are fellow signings to the Soundway record label and its expanding contemporary roster. Later Brazilian Anselmo Netto was added to the line up on percussion and completed as an octet with synth and horns, provided by Tony Hayden and Scott Baylis. The second track, ‘I’m Running (Nya Fehe)’, lurches them into life, revealing their full sound as the song levitates on the slightly aged morning air, content to hover and not find a destination to hastily in an energetic stasis. Heartbeat monitor bass and the background squelch of machine sounds allows clearances for Bannerman’s limber guitar to pirouette in clean runs and flushes — that remain throughout the album — thoughtfully placed and at times restrained. A delivery that distinguishes his sound from the lead of multiple guitars in traditionally defined Highlife.

The intercontinental band made their live debut at this year’s Rencontres Transmusicales in France, where like the record, they atomise their sculpted space-time amplifying it into tireless and kinetic performances. This is characterised no more than their first single ‘Let’s Dance (Yak Inek Unek)’ an incendiary device that wails into being with an oscillating synth vibration, detonating upon command of the brass section into staccato sub-bass which Williams collaborates with, and juxtaposes, amongst the sharp trills of the horns. While pixelated glitches from the electronics meander in and out of focus like a broken metronome that has found freedom from its swinging monotony. It is muscular and inexhaustible, a maximalism with a stern soul that more than fulfils the promise of its title:

Augmented 80’s computer game sound effects continue in ‘The Tortoise (Nsaha Edem Ikit)’ punctuating in sporadic mannerisms, while funky stabbed bass lines are heard as if coming up from deep underwater, rising and forcing themselves through to come up for air. The softer sustained horns come together with the rest of the band in harmony for the chorus, each noise employed to accompany each other percussively, a technique that can be heard in many of their other songs. This cohesive rhythm section has been produced to stand firm in the middle of their field, which has given all the tracks an enduring propulsion. The second side of the album – especially its later songs – prove the malleability of Ibibio Sound Machine’s cosmological constants of drums, bass and vocals. A foundation that furnishes a surprising range of options, reframing the band and granting the day’s light of the first side to be reclaimed by the night, as we are taken from the alchemy of an eclectic disco, to a psychedelic noir after party where reality is ever so slightly skewed. The meld of tight conga’s patted by cat’s paws and sharp snare on ‘Prodigal Son (Ayen Ake Feheke)’ sets up the quietest backdrop for Williams to tear with her vigorous perforations. The dishevelled horns interrupt as a reminder of their presence before the song strays into an exchange of dry pulses for warm spectrum washes of synth colour – out breaths that hang in the smokey air like trembling kaleidoscopic clouds. The band’s two worlds of human and machine weaves itself into a provocative understanding.

Ibibio Sound Machine have mined the seams of the past: West African Highlife, 70’s Nigerian Afro-Beat, combative Post-Punk, Soul and the ‘golden era of funk’, but on a planet of the future. These influences echo in the album, but only as aural alliances. They have re-wired future binary signals with the analogue organic past, enabling a migration to a reimagined future projection. A collection of unfinished conversations that do not seek resolution or a finality, but are in transit as past ideas of a future, floating through dimensionless space without sentimentality. We become observers as their fluorescence is thrust through a prism onto an exploding disco ball that sends streaks of light onto a landscape of unknown time.

Ibibio Sounds Machine’s album is out on the 17th of March of this year on Soundway, and they are in session for the Lauren Laverne Breakfast Show on BBC 6 Music, Tuesday the 18th of March.

‘Only Black People in Africa Get AIDS’

Some news sites are having WTF moments (The Daily Mail and the sites who cut and pasted the story–like Linda Ikeji) at the comments made by Rachel Dilley, a 48-year old single mother of two who told a British TV morning show about how she was infected with HIV. She had unprotected sex with a man she met on a dating site and claimed she had no idea she was at risk. At the time, she admits she was clueless about HIV and AIDS: ”I just didn’t know anything about it – I just thought you got it in Africa. I didn’t know a white person had ever got it.”

Here, watch:

Didn’t she hear about the pandemic in the early 1980s US (she’s old enough to have, but may have dismissed it just as easily, and just as ignorantly, as a disease that affects gay men)? You can imagine the comments that followed her admission. Some of the reaction to Dilley was justifiable outrage about her easy designation of Africa as the location of illness: HIV is a horror that would never touch her, safely ensconced as she was in whiteness and British-Europeanness. But some of the criticism was just smuggy-buggy superior.

As much as I want to denigrate Dilley and laugh at her ignorance, so many people are like her; I might venture so far as to say that most people are like her. I can’t tell you how many white South Africans believe this — and they live in South Africa. And that view is prevalent throughout India and Sri Lanka, despite the fact that HIV is becoming more prevalent in the subcontinent (the adult HIV prevalence in India is estimated to be between 0.27-0.30%; this number seems low, until we remember that  the population of India alone is at about 1.2 billion, meaning that there are around 2.1 million people living with HIV in India).

Most films and reporting about HIV on South Africa tacitly work with that same assumption, as do media personalities who help spread such views. Remember Justine Sacco who tweeted before she got on a plane to Cape Town: ”Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” One exception was the film, “State of Denial,” in which one of the main characters was a middle class white woman who was HIV-positive. I’ve had men (one an academic) proposition me with the bonus that…since they are white, there’d be no HIV, and no need to worry about using rubbers.

To be honest, it took courage for Dilley to admit to her colossal ignorance on television, perhaps knowing that she would be roundly criticised and ridiculed. Many millions believe as she once did. Yeay for this mother of two that she mustered up the strength to put herself in such a vulnerable position in order to educate us about what the real face of HIV+ looks like.