Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 420

Instagramming Africa

Everyday Africa is an Instagram-based project aiming to document moments from daily life. It was founded in 2012 by the American photojournalist Peter DiCampo and writer Austin Merrill (I first met Austin through his soccer blogging at Vanity Fair (somebody had to do it) in the lead-up to the 2010 World Cup). Initially featuring the work of mostly American foreign correspondents, it now also includes the work of a number of African photographers, like Nana Kofi Acquah (featured before on Africa is a Country), Emeka Okereke and Andrew Esiebo. Chances are you’ve heard of it already as Everyday Africa has received a lot of positive press. Everyday Africa is definitely an important initiative in the north where one-dimensional, highly constructed images of Africans are the norm and so, a while back, I sent Peter some questions (a number of AIAC’ers pitched in too), which he answered. The exchange is below.

Can you talk about the original impetus for Everyday Africa. It was started by American journalists and photographers writing, documenting and reporting in and about Africa, right?

Austin Merrill and I were traveling in Ivory Coast in March 2012, as a writer / photographer team covering the continued strife a year after the country’s post-election violence and the cocoa trade that is the root of turmoil there. Austin is intimately familiar with the country, having lived there at a couple different points in his life, and I had been there before as a photojournalist, and had lived several years “next-door” in Ghana. During the March 2012 trip we began shooting photos on our phones, very casually, and it occurred to us that those images felt much more familiar to us than the ones I was “professionally” shooting for the story we were there to tell.

Having outlined that story above – as you can imagine, it was a bit preconceived. I think often about the process of photojournalism – going into a story, you often feel you “know” the images needed to tell it. If it’s a story with phrases like “continued ethnic violence,” you feel you need photos of refugees, burned down homes, survivors with horrific stories to tell, etc. These are the images that will make sense to the reader; that he or she will find palatable. But there’s an inherent contradiction here: if we’re giving the reader images he or she already expects, then the story reinforces preconceptions and doesn’t teach anything new. Along the way, we also see a lot of daily life moments, but we often pre-edit these out of our story by not even photographing them. Austin and I decided to photograph them.

A couple months later, we were both on the continent again, at the same time but in different locations – he in Nigeria and Zimbabwe, me in Uganda. We kept shooting on our phones, and this time around started a Tumblr blog so we could share the images with each other and a wider audience in real time, or close to it. In the months that followed, we found that a lot of our colleagues shared our frustrations with coverage of the continent and were excited to have an outlet for the day-to-day images. We migrated to Instagram (but kept the Tumblr too) to extend our reach, and things grew rather quickly.

Why is it important for non-Africans to tell African stories?

I’m of the opinion that any culture should be examined both internally and externally. There are, of course, many aspects of a culture that outsiders can’t access or understand fully. On the flip side, it’s easy for people within a culture to put blinders on when examining themselves, whereas an outsider brings a different critical view. At times, Everyday Africa has been criticized purely on the grounds that an outsider should never tell someone else’s story, period. I couldn’t disagree with that statement more – imagine if Alexis de Tocqueville didn’t write about America, or Robert Frank didn’t photograph America. (Those are just a couple examples off the top of my head – one could go on and on here.)

The real issue is that, generally speaking, I don’t think foreign journalists or photographers turn a sincere eye on Africa – instead, they follow the preconceptions I’ve been outlining. They (or should I say, we) tend to parachute in, cover the same well-trodden ground, and move on, without giving the story the same voice they would if covering a similar story in the states or Western Europe. See the ever-popular “How to Write About Africa” by Binyavanga Wainaina, who puts it far better than I ever could. Another good read along this theme is Slate Magazine’s new “If It Happened There” feature, covering US news as if it were foreign news. And it’s also worth noting that there are some great exceptions – people who have moved in for the long-haul and write about Africa just as they would anywhere else.

While I’m open to the criticism that we don’t have enough African photographers – which we’ll get into below – I also feel it’s very important to acknowledge that one of my personal goals for this project, initially, was a critique of the function and methodology of Western photojournalism. My experience was not a unique one – if I’m traveling in Ivory Coast and shooting a predetermined narrative, but I’m seeing all this other stuff along the way that doesn’t fit that narrative, then guess what? The same thing is happening to most other Western photographers doing the same work. This is how photojournalism is often responsible for perpetuating what is not necessarily an outright lie but certainly a reinforcement of stereotypes. Without daily life imagery of normal and even mundane situations, the West will still thinks of Africa as poor and starving with no exceptions, the Middle East as explosively violent at all times and in all places, etc. So, while of course it’s important – vitally, crucially important – to see what “everyday Africa” means from the perspective of Africans, it’s also vitally important to point fingers at the notion of photojournalism and poke holes in it, not only the way it is carried out but also the way it is read by an audience.

A quick story: I was once traveling in Europe with a close American friend who I grew up with. My only previous travel at that point had been in the Middle East (this was years ago), so I started talking about that. My friend exclaimed, “I would never travel in an Arab country… What do I know that’s good about them!?” I was very startled. I thought, no matter what the nightly news tells you, there’s a lot to assume that’s good and shared by every culture: a love of family, the care taken in preparing and consuming a good meal, an appreciation for music. The list goes on. But that’s exactly it: if we aren’t shown that those things exist, it’s difficult for an unfamiliar audience to assume that they do.

One more question along those same lines: This is an initiative run by two white, non-Africans to document and market African culture. What do you say to people who question your motives?

To start with, I disagree with the term “market” here, only because the point of Everyday Africa is not to present any one view. My aim is for something more experiential, something that fits the stream (Instagram, Tumblr, etc.) as a narrative. Meaning, we’re not trying to counter the “war and poverty” narrative by giving a “happy Africa” narrative – instead we’re trying to present Africa as it would appear if one were to simply go outside and walk around. (I recognize that that’s a problematic statement – my walk is different from your walk, and no matter what, different people will choose to photograph different things on different days. You can’t see everything, and you can’t photograph everything you see.) But the point is that we don’t go looking for certain pictures the way a photographer would when trying to market one aspect of Africa or another – we’re not trying to sell you any one view of what Africa is.

The reason I feel it’s important this work be shown is that, as I said above, it’s important for non-Africans documenting Africa to acknowledge that they generally see a lot more than what they can show in traditional media. That said, yes, in some ways it is problematic. (I often wonder if it would feel less problematic if we had chosen a different name. If I told you that we were non-Africans who wanted to show the parts of Africa we feel are familiar but don’t usually get to show, you might think that’s great. When I say we’re calling it “Everyday Africa”, you might think we’re getting presumptuous.)

We’re addressing this with some new phases in our work. As the popularity and inertia of the project spiraled much quicker than we had anticipated – which, by the way, is a great sign that we’re not the only people who felt this was a gap in coverage of the continent – we had to put some serious thought into what it was we had on our hands. What are the two most important elements? That in calling it “Everyday Africa”, we should be looking at what that means from a variety of perspectives. And that the photographs are from phones, the great technological democratizer of imagery – it’s such a cliché to talk about the overwhelming popularity of mobile phones in Africa that at this point it’s barely worth mentioning. And increasingly, those phones have cameras, and people are documenting their own lives.

Now, we’re trying to create a new platform, one that allows for anyone to post images, so those stories can be shared widely, and we can look at what daily life in Africa means from a greater range of perspectives. We’re trying to create a platform that allows the viewer to sort the images by country – all the images from Liberia, from South Africa, etc. – but far more interesting is that they will also be able to sort them based on who the photographer is, be it farmer, businessman, African photographer, Western photographer, tourist, tour guide, villager, mother, nurse, etc., however the photographer identifies himself or herself. As professional photographers, we have made nice pictures – but to me it’s potentially much more interesting to be able to click a button and see every photo taken by a teacher, for example, regardless of country, and see how they view the world around them.

We’re very happy with what we’ve accomplished so far, though we may have already reached our pinnacle of popularity in the Western editorial world. But for us, that’s just a starting point.

Can you describe a few unique visual aesthetic trends that you’ve been able to observe in the self-imaging of Africa?

To start with, these are topics – Africa’s self-imaging and photographic practice, related to identity – that have been written about at length and by experts, which I am not. (A recent example that comes to mind is Edwidge Danticat’s piece in Harper’s, “Look At Me”, which is basically a survey of The Walther Collection’s current exhibition on African photography, but still a wonderful overview.) The strongest tradition in African photography, in my opinion and many others’, is portraiture. On the professional level, there are numerous classic examples – Malick Sidibe, Seydou Keita – moving toward the more modern, metaphoric, and conceptual – Samuel Fosso, Nandipha Mntambo, etc. George Osodi’s portraits of Nigerian kings have been popular lately, and are an interesting collision of the traditional and modern. We (Everyday Africa) have been lucky to work with Andrew Esiebo lately – his portraits in barbershops are great. (To write in great detail on all these names would be impossible, but suffice it to say that these are artists I feel anyone interested in this topic should familiarize themselves with!)

What I find striking (and less written about and discussed, although Danticat touches on it) is how this tradition is rooted on a functional level. In my experience, living in rural Ghana, photography is about seeing what a person looks like, connecting with them, remembering an event or a time or place. My Ghanaian friends wanted important events in their lives to be documented, but with posed portraiture, not with candid documentary images as is more common in the states. I have a series of pictures called Life Without Lights, all shot at night, looking at the lack of electricity in rural northern Ghana – when my friends saw the dark images, they didn’t understand why I liked them, why I made pictures in which you can’t see the subject’s face.

So there is this obsession with the photograph as a means of identity that ranges from the functional to the high-concept in African portraiture – which perhaps interests me coming from a Western photojournalism tradition because we get so caught up in making a “good” photograph or an “artsy” photograph, like my Life Without Lights work, that we sometimes forget to make a “meaningful” photograph, if that makes sense.

As far as Western trends that Africans practice, I’ll speak to what I know best, which is photojournalism, and simply say this: it’s always wonderful to see how much more intimate photojournalism of Africa is when Africans are also behind the camera. David Goldblatt comes to mind, as does Akintunde Akinleye’s World Press Photo winning image.

How this all plays out in Everyday Africa is that it’s been very obvious that the photos made by African photographers on our feed tend to be the most intimate. This goes for the work of Nana Kofi Acquah and Andrew, who I’ve mentioned, as well as Jide Alakija, a wedding photographer who joined us for the special Nigeria segment. We also featured some work from Swazi students learning photography in a class called My Future, My Voice, and it was incredible – simple, intimate moments of the students’ friends and family members.

How does the historical imagined Africa of the West figure into your vision of the content? How does it figure into the ways Africans see themselves?

I think “imagined” is a key word here. What I find troubling is that the exotic and /or degrading version of Africa we’ve grown used to in photography can actually cause Africa to become imaginary in the Western mind – to occupy the same part of our brain as fantasy and adventure. Take myself for example – I grew up reading Tolkien and watching Star Wars, then went through that late teens / early twenties phase of becoming politically aware and wanting to learn more about “the world” (vast that it is), simultaneously began studying photography and particularly exotic images of far-off places… and all of that manifested itself into my becoming a volunteer and moving to Ghana, with undefined desires to find adventure and help people. I’m hardly alone in this path.

So for my own photography in this project, I want to cut through the photos that create that very imaginary Africa – or, in the nature of the stream, to show them alongside of images that are more familiar. Basically, if I could turn back time and show this project to my 21-year-old self, I’d want him to understand that when his plane landed in Ghana, he would also see things that were familiar.

But at this point – I can really only speak for myself. We have so many contributors now, and I don’t give any of them much direction.

Who curates Everyday Africa? Can anyone submit images and post them?

We’ve done a variety of things on our feed. If there are no special segments happening, then there is a group of 14 or so photographers who have the login info and post freely – I’ve just asked them to try to space out their posts by a few hours, so that we keep a robust, steady flow. I don’t direct them on what images to post, generally.

We’ve done several special features on the feed and are trying to do more – we’re trying for one week per month. Sometimes this is simply the work of one photographer who is just joining us. Other times it is more interesting – for example, when Nichole Sobecki joined us, Sarah Leen, Director of Photography at National Geographic, selected Nichole’s photos and posted them with commentary. The most fun, most interesting thing so far was a recent segment on Nigeria: Helon Habila, the Nigerian author, selected the work from four photographers – Jide Alakija, Andrew Esiebo, Glenna Gordon, Jane Hahn – and posted their photos with his commentary. We’ll be doing other things along these lines, and some even more creative ideas that I don’t want to give away just yet.

And while the long-term goal is to have a new platform that anyone can contribute to, we also plan in the short-term to have a segment of user-submitted photos (we get them all the time), hopefully sometime soon.

Many of the Everyday Africa photos are candid shots taken of people on the street. For decades a debate has persisted among photographers regarding the ethics of street photography. Some see no problem with capturing images of unsuspecting strangers while others bemoan street photography’s frequent evasion of subjects’ consent. How does this ethical issue of consent come into play when foreign photojournalists like you engage in street photography in African countries?

I believe in street photography, and the photographer’s right to photograph candid street scenes. Of course, if someone tells me not to photograph them, I don’t photograph them – but in the interest of preserving a scene, I’m a fan of candid photography, regardless of the location. I’d be delighted to see more street photography shot by Africans in America or Europe. In fact sometimes I do see it, on Instagram.

My favorite function of the Instagram feed has been to post “live” images, which I feel are even more impactful in countering stereotypes; not only do our photos have an ‘everyday’ feel, but they also seem closer and more familiar when we are able to say, “this just happened thirty seconds ago.”

Unfortunately, that hasn’t been practical in terms of keeping a steady flow on the feed. Many of our contributors (including the African ones) only live on the continent part-time, and we’re often dealing with connectivity issues. So it’s often more practical to post a batch of images after a trip, rather than during. Nana Kofi, for example, was traveling in Ivory Coast recently and was rarely able to get online – but we saw his images once he got back online, at home in Ghana.

Can you say something about the kinds of phones used by photographers who contribute to Everyday Africa?

At this point almost all of our images are from iPhones. When we mention that, we get accused of being walking advertisements for Apple – but frankly, I couldn’t care less which phone the images are made on. They just happen to mostly be from iPhones. I’m sure that will change as time goes on. Just a few days ago, in fact, Nana Kofi revealed on his Facebook page that he’s been shooting more on his Android now, and the photos are beautiful! But I think so far, he may be the only one.

Will more African photographers be represented on Everyday Africa?

To be honest, we never sat down at the beginning of the project and said, “we want x amount of photographers from here, here, and here.” People just asked to contribute, and I generally said sure, and things grew quickly from there. There was never an intention to omit African photography. Looking back, if I had known how unwieldy this beast of a project would become, I probably would have tried to unroll things more slowly, choose photographers regionally, etc., but well, here we are.

I was really thrilled when Nana Kofi wanted to be a part. I love his work and he’s been one of our strongest contributors, and we’ve added more African photographers since then.

The desire for more African photographers is not at all in response to criticism. Of course we want more! Like I said, it all stems from wanting to view the continent visually from as many viewpoints as possible. So we want more African photographers, and eventually will open this up to people who aren’t professional photographers but are shooting pictures on their phones. One issue with getting more African photographers in the short term: the professionals who are strongly using Instagram often don’t need us! They have a better following and better feed than we do anyways!

Is the decision to include only pictures taken or sourced on the continent deliberate?

Yes, although we’ve toyed with the idea of doing diaspora segments. I’m sure it will happen sooner or later.

How do you deal with the challenges of covering Africa as a signifier for a range of meanings—a continent, as a diaspora, as land-mass filled with diverse people? When and why is essentializing “Africa” important? When is it dangerous?

I’m sure these are questions Africa is a Country have to deal with often! But, perhaps like yourselves, our feeling is that if the problem of stereotyping is continent-wide, then we can try to deal with it on a continent-wide basis. That said, there certainly is a danger. I’m heartened by the large volume of comments we get that are location-specific – “I’ve been there, I live there, it’s my favorite place, thanks for showing this place,” etc. – but I do worry that people scrolling through their phones simply see our photos in their feed, think “Africa sure is cool,” click the ‘like’ button, and move on. Then again, in some ways that’s what we want, for people not to have to think of the continent in such heavy terms all the time. We recognize that we can’t teach people about any one place in great detail, or outline the differences between the Ashanti and the Maasai – it’s simply not the purpose the project serves.

Imagine a Tumblr called “Everyday South America”, or “Everyday Asia.” Would it make The New Yorker? Get so much media play?

Great question. Thinking about The New Yorker and the editorial world as a whole, I think the answer is yes, if the photos were good. But in terms of the idea, and not the image quality – perhaps not. People realize that, while every region has its media-generated stereotypes, Africa has arguably been the most damaged by them – which means they recognize the need for a project like ours.

Finally, the New York Times recently featured an Instagram image on its front page (of Alex Rodriguez). What does that mean for news photography?

You saved the least interesting question for last – don’t ask me, ask a news photographer!

* Image Credit: “Two hawkers are heavily engrossed in a conversation at the beach where they sell beads” in Lagos, Nigeria by Nana Kofi Acquah.

#WhiteHistoryMonth: The American reservation became the South African reserve

Mahmood Mamdani:

(I)n 1993 … (I) first went to South Africa to study apartheid as a form of the state. I realized that basic institutions of apartheid had been created long before the name and the state came into being. The ethnic cleansing of the African population of South Africa began as early as 1913 when the Natives Land Act declared 87% of the land for whites and divided the remaining 13% into so tribal homelands into which to herd the native population. These homelands were called “reserves.” I wondered why the name sounded so uncannily like the American “reservation.” The answer was illuminating, and chilling. White South Africa became independent from Britain in 1910. That same year, the new settler government sent a delegation to North America, specifically to USA and Canada, to study how to set up tribal homelands for, after all, they had first been created in North America, half a century before. The American “reservation” became the South African “reserve.”

Source.

Image Credit: “Portrait of a Native American named Big Head, ca. 1905.” (Library of Congress/Edward S. Curtis)

White History Month: The American reservation became the South African reserve

Mahmood Mamdani:

(I)n 1993 … (I) first went to South Africa to study apartheid as a form of the state. I realized that basic institutions of apartheid had been created long before the name and the state came into being. The ethnic cleansing of the African population of South Africa began as early as 1913 when the Natives Land Act declared 87% of the land for whites and divided the remaining 13% into so tribal homelands into which to herd the native population. These homelands were called “reserves.” I wondered why the name sounded so uncannily like the American “reservation.” The answer was illuminating, and chilling. White South Africa became independent from Britain in 1910. That same year, the new settler government sent a delegation to North America, specifically to USA and Canada, to study how to set up tribal homelands for, after all, they had first been created in North America, half a century before. The American “reservation” became the South African “reserve.”

Source.

Image Credit: “Portrait of a Native American named Big Head, ca. 1905.” (Library of Congress/Edward S. Curtis)

#WhiteHistoryMonth: Audre Lorde’s Harlem childhood

An excerpt from the early part of Audre Lorde’s biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982):

In 1936-1938, 125th Street between Lenox and Eighth Avenues, later to become the shopping mecca of Black Harlem, was still a racially mixed area, with control and patronage largely in the hands of white shopkeepers. There were  stores into which Black people were not welcomed, and no Black salespersons worked in the shops at all. Where our money was taken, it was taken with reluctance; and often too much was asked. (It was these conditions which young Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., addressed in his boycott and picketing of Blumstein’s and Weissbecker’s market in 1939 in an attempt, successful, to bring Black employment to 125th Street.) Tensions on the street were high, as they always are in racially mixed zones of transition. As a very little girl, I remember shrinking from a particular sound, a hoarsely sharp, guttural rasp, because it often meant a nasty glob of grey spittle upon my coat or shoe an instant later. My mother wiped it off with little pieces of newspaper she always carried in her purse. Sometimes she fussed about low-class people who had no better sense nor manners than to spit into the wind no matter where they went, impressing upon me that this humiliation was totally random. It never occurred to me to doubt her.

It was not until years later once in conversation I said to her: “Have you noticed people don’t spit into the wind so much they way they used to?” And the look on my mother’s face told me that I had blundered into one of those secret places of pain that must never be spoken of again. But it was so typical of my mother when I was young that if she couldn’t stop white people from spitting on her children because they were Black, she would insist it was something else. It was so often her approach to the world: to change reality. If you can’t change reality, change your perceptions of it.

Steve McQueen and the Dutch

The Best Picture win for 12 Years A Slave in the 2014 Academy Awards last weekend has not gone by unnoticed in the Netherlands. Not because of the thematic of the film but because ‘our Steve McQueen’–as the Dutch now call him–lives in Amsterdam together with his Dutch wife, journalist Bianca Stigter. So that makes this Oscar a ‘bit Dutch too.’

It was in Amsterdam that Bianca Stigter started reading the book on which the film is based (Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853) and McQueen started working on his ideas for the film. Dutch newspaper Het Parool claims the success of 12 Years A Slave started in the Amsterdam neighborhood De Pijp where the couple lives.

All this is quite ironic given recent developments around the commemoration of slavery in the Netherlands (read more about that here and here), that the Dutch would suddenly want a part of this.

I doubt if the same would have been said if McQueen made a film about the Dutch and the slave trade or if he voiced opinion on the commemoration of slavery in mainstream media. McQueen would have probably been told to “go back to your own country” and that the Netherlands’ history of slavery is nothing compared to America’s.

That said, 12 Years a Slave did leave an impact on some people. One of them being Paul de Leeuw, a leading Dutch comedian and singer, who until recently supported the blackface character Zwarte Piet. De Leeuw has even played Zwarte Piet on TV. After seeing 12 Years a Slave and reading the book, de Leeuw stated this week that we should definitely get rid of Zwarte Piet. ‘Hierarchies and domination need to disappear,’ according to de Leeuw, ‘and 2014 should be the year we start doing things differently.’ He said nothing about the history of slavery in the Netherlands though.

#WhiteHistoryMonth

Every February in the U.S. schools, McDonald’s, television, corporations, the advertising industry, celebrate Black History Month. The whole thing is a charade. That black people don’t get a break from police brutality, plain murder, red lining, profiling or plain neglect, whether here, in the UK or places like South Africa, doesn’t matter. In 2007, Gary Younge (he is an ally) suggested that what we all needed is a White History Month. Gary reminded us: “So much of Black History Month takes place in the passive voice. Leaders ‘get assassinated,’ patrons ‘are refused’ service, women ‘are ejected’ from public transport. So the objects of racism are many but the subjects few. In removing the instigators, the historians remove the agency and, in the final reckoning, the historical responsibility … There is no month when we get to talk about [James] Blake [the white busdriver challenged by Rosa Parks]; no opportunity to learn the fates of J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, who murdered Emmett Till; no time set aside to keep track of Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, whose false accusations of rape against the Scottsboro Boys sent five innocent young black men to jail. Wouldn’t everyone–particularly white people–benefit from becoming better acquainted with these histories?” So, dear readers–in the service of good sense and because we love celebrations–this March is the inaugural White History Month on Africa is a Country. Yes, we’re a few days late, we know, but good things take time some time. Stay tuned.

White History Month

Every February in the U.S. schools, McDonald’s, television, corporations, the advertising industry, celebrate Black History Month. The whole thing is a charade. That black people don’t get a break from police brutality, plain murder, red lining, profiling or plain neglect, whether here, in the UK or places like South Africa, doesn’t matter.

In 2007, Gary Younge (he is an ally) suggested that what we all needed is a White History Month. Gary reminded us: “So much of Black History Month takes place in the passive voice. Leaders ‘get assassinated,’ patrons ‘are refused’ service, women ‘are ejected’ from public transport. So the objects of racism are many but the subjects few. In removing the instigators, the historians remove the agency and, in the final reckoning, the historical responsibility … There is no month when we get to talk about [James] Blake [the white busdriver challenged by Rosa Parks]; no opportunity to learn the fates of J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, who murdered Emmett Till; no time set aside to keep track of Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, whose false accusations of rape against the Scottsboro Boys sent five innocent young black men to jail. Wouldn’t everyone–particularly white people–benefit from becoming better acquainted with these histories?”

So, dear readers–in the service of good sense and because we love celebrations–this March is the inaugural White History Month on Africa is a Country. Yes, we’re a few days late, we know, but good things take time some time. Stay tuned.

Image Credit: David Goldblatt

Finding the Afro- in Brazil

Last week I wrote a post about my excitement around the African musical permutations I was hearing this year in Trinidad’s Carnival. Since this week I was in Brazil for my first Carnaval Carioca, I wanted to also write about my experiences seeking out similar connections as a newcomer to this country. It’s no secret that Brazil is America’s largest African country. So as a DJ of African descent who specializes in the music of the Black Atlantic, I was excited to hit the ground here and experience the Brazilian Atlantic musical permutations first hand. I’ve come to find that while Brazil is a nation with a strong pride in its African roots, the continued role of race in the formation of country’s deep social divisions reveals some confusing contradictions.

As the social reasoning goes in Rio, wealthier residents live in the formal city and are generally, but not always, white or light skinned. The residents of the informal favelas are mostly, but not always, dark skinned and of African descent. The marginal position that the favelas and their residents hold in society is reflected by the position their cultural production is treated. According to my friend Maga Bo, funk is one of the most African cultural manifestations in contemporary Brazilian music because of its roots in the Maculele rhythm of Capoeira. Funk is also the cultural form that most represents life in Rio’s favelas today. It and its practitioners are constantly subjected to either attacks by the state, or not unlike hip hop in the U.S. – appropriation into the machinery of capitalism. This mirrors the twin processes of removal and gentrification happening to the favelas’ actual residents. Additionally, its often vulgar lyrics and favela origins cause even some self-identified Afro-Brazilians to look down upon it. The marginalization of certain aspects of Afro-Brazilian culture, combined with my own current status as an outsider, often leave me frustrated when seeking out Afro-Brazilian culture in the city.

Therefore, when I do come across African cultural permutations here it is both surprising and exciting. The first weekend I arrived in Rio I went to a large mainstream club in Lapa. The DJ played a lot of electro pop inflected funk, and a rock cover band played songs by bands like Bon Jovi. It wasn’t necessarily my cup of tea, but in the middle of the night, my predilections were satisfied when the DJ ran a set of tunes that sent me into a dancing frenzy. One of those songs that really stood out was ‘Ziriguidum’ by Bahian band Filhos de Jorge:

The reason I was so excited to hear this tune is that I know the melody from the song of a salsa-obsessed Beninois singer named Gnonnas Pedro. In the 1960s Pedro gave himself a Spanish-sounding name, revealing his desire to be associated with the Afro-Cuban sounds which were making their way all over the African continent at that time. These beginnings would eventually lead him to a long career of singing funk, salsa, highlife, soul, and updated Beninois traditional styles for such legendary projects as T.P. Orchestre Rythmo and Africando. ‘Yiri Yiri Boum’, having appeared on reissue compilations from outfits such as Putamayo and Sofrito records, is perhaps his most internationally recognizable hit:

However, I didn’t know until recently that while Pedro did a great rendition, he didn’t write the song. The origins of the tune bring us back across the Atlantic to a Cuban composer named José Silvestre Méndez, and the great Beny Moré who recorded the song while on residency at a nightclub in Mexico. His version is likely the recording that made its way to Benin by vinyl LP, where Pedro picked it up. The trans-Atlantic connections of the melody (Portugal and Jamaica added to the list) now make it even rival ‘The Peanut Vendor’ in my mind.

It turns out that ‘Ziriguidum’ was one of the biggest songs in Salvador’s Carnival last year, and so it makes sense that it would have reverberated around the country in the following months. The melody would eventually make its way down to São Paolo, graft itself onto Maculele, and turned into an Atlantic super jam by Funk Ostenaçao artist MC2K:

For me, such musical connections add a bit of the familiar to the unfamiliar, helping me sort through the confusion that is Brazilian identity politics. Sure, MC2K is singing about and showing off girls shaking their butts. But the fact that he includes Capoeiristas in a video for a song that uses Maculele, and samples a pan-Atlantic Afro-Brazilian roots song from Bahia, shows me that the underlying cultural connections aren’t totally lost on the “vulgar” and “low class” funk artists.

The weight that Bahian music carries in the Brazilian national conscience was solidified for me by the time this year’s Carnaval rolled around. That’s when another big tune from Salvador, Psirico’s ‘Lepo Lepo’, hit the streets. The song is a “pagode de miséria” ballad about the power of love (sex) over money that sounds (and looks) like a mix of bachata and jump up soca:

You couldn’t escape renditions from (often white and middle class) Carnaval revelers anywhere in Rio. Perhaps its ubiquity in the party has been the reason why the song has received some blowback, and has become the subject of countless parodies. However, in the process of enduring alcohol soaked renditions on the city’s public buses, I’ve come to understand that axé, and other Northeastern musics such as forro and pagode are probably the most visible aspects of Afro-Brazilian culture in mainstream Brazilian society (David Goldblatt makes a pretty good case for Futebol though as well). And, it is often through these musics that an explicit African pride is channeled, which for me continues to pop up in unexpected places:

Even though the Northeast can still be thought of as the cradle of Afro-Brazilian culture, Rio’s historic position as a locus for Northeastern migration has allowed it to contribute to the mainstreaming of Afro-Brazilian music as well. Besides being the birthplace of the previously mentioned funk, Rio is recognized as the birthplace of samba. Rio’s famous samba schools are the historic epicenter for both local social activism and the formation of an Afro-Brazilian identity for the country in general (check out Marlon Bishop’s program about Samba on Afropop for more context.)

From their beginnings through to today, favela residents use these schools and their vaulted position during Carnaval, as a soap box to express their views on society. Runners up of this year’s Carnaval competition, Academicos do Salgueiro started as one such organization, and watching their performance was another revelatory surprise for me. Their theme of ‘Gaia’ or harmony with nature, with a composition originally built around a 6/8 rhythm and floats and costumes that drew on African aesthetics, really dug hard into representing the African roots of Brazil. Seeing them live, it was hard to not get carried away by, and sing along to the resounding chorus praising the Orixas of Candomble:

I wrote last week that it seems like in the Caribbean older ideas of political pan-Africanism are fading, and contemporary Africa is providing new inspiration for a generation of globally aspirational cultural producers. On the other hand, in Brazil it seems to me that African-ness continues to be informed by ideas of national heritage and cultural roots.

It wasn’t just Salguiero celebrating Africa at this year’s Carnaval competition in the Sambódromo, Brazil’s African heritage was and often is a recurring theme. However, this year the thread came up against an interesting juxtaposition with the prevalence of a theme similar to the one I was noticing in the Caribbean: the interrogation of Brazil’s position in the world. To me, these two threads symbolize the crossroads that Brazil is at just before it hosts FIFA’s World Cup. As more and more eyes look to the country, Brazil may have to find ways to reconcile the contradictions between their pride in their roots and their contemporary social divisions. In other words, like any global superpower, Brazil will have to figure out how to project all their confusing contradictions into our globalizing world.

Elizabeth Barrett’s house on Harrington Street, Cape Town

Elizabeth Barrett is a brave woman. In the early hours of the morning, just before Christmas, a fire broke out in her old Victorian style house in Harrington Street, Cape Town. It threatened not only her life and worldly possessions but also the lives of 14 children that she had taken in for the December vacation. She managed to evacuate most of the kids in the heat of the situation, but was forced to run back into the burning house, back through the searing heat and smoke, haul out the last child hiding under a bed on one of the upper floors. Having saved the lives of the children, the fire destroyed her home of 30 years and the frail, yet resilient social history attached to it.

The incident could easily be read as a metaphor for the struggle of an idyllic past against the rapacious tide of development consuming historic quarters of Cape Town’s inner city. And this is exactly what photographer Nicholas Eppel has captured in his first solo exhibition, entitled ‘A House on Harrington Street’. It reflects three years in the life and household of Elizabeth Barrett.

You can view the photographs online, here.

As a project of The Centre for Curating the Archive, the exhibition of photographs are meant to stand as a “testimony to community living against the rapid gentrification of the inner city.” Consisting of “30 photographs—still lives, portraits and intimate moments of the household prior to the fire”—the exhibition is hosted by the Cape Town school of Photography, situated in what is presently known as the east-city, or more pejoratively, The Fringe.

The exhibition has received significant publicity, having been the feature of an extended article in the February, 2014 edition of street magazine, The Big Issue, and coverage in the (South African) Mail and Guardian and South African History Online, bucking the trend of trendy development campaigns that don’t always acknowledging the ongoing life and livelihood of folks still living there.

I find Eppel’s work striking because it reveals the intimate details of the on-going, ordinary life of a woman in urban Cape Town. That she dedicated herself and her meagre resources to philanthropic work of caring for orphaned children makes her story particularly heart-warming. But it’s the way the images bring home the frailty and sensitivity of her world, of her home, that quietly stood as a buffer against apartheid and later, the grand schemes of ‘improvement through creative design’ that is the vogue in contemporary Cape Town, that make for compelling viewing. Having been incinerated, razed tragically before Christmas, the images hark hauntingly to a world, a home that is no longer there.

As the remains of a world that once was, the exhibition therefore begs the question, how, in the changing city, do we accommodate such lives, such worlds, inflected with their gritty histories and ordinary folk who are not in want of gimmicky creative solutions when it comes to being in the city and making a meaningful difference in others’ lives?

Cape Town Pride’s Race Card

It’s beginning to seem that with every major pride event in South Africa comes an accompanying discussion of the country’s underlying racial fault lines.  In 2012, Johannesburg Pride infamously erupted in clashes between groups who wanted to use pride as a space to advocate for local LGBTI issues, particularly misogynist and homophobic violence directed at queer black women, and those who saw Pride as an apolitical space celebrating an ostensibly larger queer ‘unity.’  Last year, Joburg Pride moved to the well-heeled Sandton district, as local community groups organized ‘Peoples Prides,’ which included a pride celebration in Soweto and a subsequent march and rally on Constitution Hill in October.

This year has been Cape Town Pride’s turn to come under increasing scrutiny.  The Mother City’s Pride celebration was a ten day affair, lasting from 21 February until 1 March.  This year’s theme, was the ostensibly diverse and supportive, “Uniting the Cultures of Cape Town.”  However, the organization has run into considerable controversy.  Funeka Soldaat, chairman of the organization Free Gender, a black lesbian organization based in Cape Town’s Khayelitsha township, announced that the organization would be boycotting Pride’s proceedings, instead hosting a dialogue and prayer session along with South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign.  Soldaat argued, in no uncertain terms, why Free Gender would not be participating in CTP.  “Cape Town Pride is run by white men and they are excluding women and the black community…The festival is seen as a place to go to drink and have fun. It has become meaningless.”  Soldaat argued that Pride, far from uniting the cultures of Cape Town, instead proposed that they be homogenized through a blanket wealthy, white, queer celebration in the most affluent parts of the City.  Free Pride argued that a single committee should plan and coordinate Pride events throughout the many diverse neighborhoods of Cape Town, from wealthy Green Point to poorer Coloured and African communities in places like Mitchell’s Plain, Gugulethu, and Khayelitsha.  Pointing to the leadership of the current Pride planning committee, Soldaat pointed out its overwhelmingly white, affluent and gay male affiliations.  Soldaat and Free Gender’s rejection of current Pride celebrations calls attention to the neoliberal logics of many contemporary Prides, which reduce the performative and political aspects of the event to a mere party that merely reinforces existing race, class, and gender hierarchies in the country.  To demand for increased representations of people in the larger Cape Town community challenges the presumed right of privileged white men to speak for women of color in the context of South African LGBTI issues.

Community journalist project GroundUp interviewed CTP director Matthew Van As in response to Soldaat’s comments on the organization.  Van As argued that CTP was not discriminatory, and those who believed the event solely for white, affluent gay men “imposed this perception on themselves.” But the very nature of having events primarily focused on the wealthy region of Green Point, and by not having representation from poorer people, people of color, and women are genuine problems.  To say that this hurts the interests of ‘unity’ proves that organizers are blinded by privilege to even see what is bound up in unity.  To lead organizations that exclude the majority of queer people from leadership or organization, that continue to invest in a commercial model of queer visibility, where one’s status is celebrated if you can afford it, is hardly unity.  It is hegemony instead of unity; the ability to dictate for all what queerness is and can be in post-apartheid South Africa.

When asked if CTP would consider making a public declaration in support of people like Zoliswa Nkonyana (whose rape and murder called attention the epidemic of misogynist and homophobic violence against queer township women) and Paul Semugoma (the queer Ugandan man who was granted asylum in South Africa after nearly being deported), Van As questioned whether Pride was the appropriate platform for such ‘emotionally charged issues.’  According to GroundUp, Van As then “suggested that CTP could not force the gay community to hear something that they may not be ready to hear.”  But then, who is the ‘gay community’ Van As is referencing?  Certainly it’s not working class black queers in townships, who bear the brunt of antigay violence in South Africa.  Such a claim echoes the cries of white pride organizer Jenny Green in 2012, who shouted, “This is my route!” at the activists who demanded that violence against black women be a major part of the pride in Johannesburg.  Who is being spoken for in the totalizing phrase ‘community’?  And in a country like South Africa, with a lengthy history of minorities speaking for the majority in the name of ‘unity,’ how can we avoid these moments of queer silencing, where a corporate model of Pride is used to homogenize and silence those without privilege and power?

Fortunately, it does seem that populist groups are threatening to rock the boat of Pride unity.  Last year’s People’s Pride march reinforced that LGBTI rights are intersectional and cannot be removed from larger histories of colonialism, capitalism, and exploitation in South Africa.  The work of Free Gender and Treatment Action Campaign may also be another productive starting point.  Both groups met on 1 March, the final day of Cape Town Pride, to hold a larger dialogue on homophobia throughout the continent.  Grassroots movements like these, then, seem to offer potential for a queer rights movement that emphasizes intersectional struggles over a unity that privileges only a few.