Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 443

File under: Jürgen Klopp says it …

If Barcelona’s team of the last four years were the first one that I saw play when I was four years of age … with their serenity, winning 5-0, 6-0 … I would have played tennis. Sorry, that is not enough for me. What I love is that there are some things you can do in football to allow each team to win most of the matches … It is not serenity football, it is fighting football – that is what I like … The important thing is new ideas, not money,” he says. “It is important to make the next step. You always want to be the team that can beat the one with more money.

The Guardian

Weekend Music Break 59

Oddisee (real name: Amir Mohamed El Khalifa; he has a Sudanese dad) is on tour in Europe this month, so go check him out if you’re anywhere close. Details and dates here. He also has a new video out:

Zimbabwe-born, South London-raised Eska Mtungwazi gives us these visuals for her new work:

Uganda-born Jaqee (real name: Jaqueline Nakiri Nalubale) also shared a new video this week, recorded in Gothenburg:

A happy tune by Belgian-Congolese Karoline Kamosi aka Leki:

Nigerians WizKid and Femi Kuti team up in ‘Jaiye Jaiye’:

A new disco jam from South Africans Muzart, ‘Party After’:

Hipe produced this track for Ill Skillz, also featuring Sandra Amarie and Melo B Jones:

At the Trinity International Hip-Hop Festival, Nomadic Wax gathered top MCs from around the world. This cipher features artists from USA, India, Burkina Faso, and Kenya: MC K-Swift, Mandeep Sethi, Humanist, Mr. Lif, Kama and Lah Tere:

Nana D grew up in Ghana before moving to the UK in 1980. Here’s his latest collaboration with Jordan Crisp, the quite hectic but fun ‘Ngoma’:

And to end, we were very sorry to hear about the unexpected passing of Robo The Technician last weekend. He will be missed in Johannesburg and beyond.

 

Boogie Down Nima in the Bronx

For almost two decades now, the Bronx has been the focus of much of New York’s newest wave of Africans moving to the United States. Films such as Little Senegal, Bronx Princess, and Prince of Broadway, have been depicting the growing uptown African immigrant population for years. The New York Times has covered some community-wide cultural happenings. And, now there’s even an African restaurant week. However, in the wake of a growing global influence of African youth culture, a recognition of African youth culture and its growing contributions to the New York cultural landscape remains conspicuously absent from the average New Yorker’s frame of reference.

One of the communities that astonishingly still remains under the radar is the Ghanaian community, even in the wake of the ascendance of internationally renown local talent like Blitz the Ambassador. Every year, one of the biggest African events in New York is the Ghanaian Independence Day bash, where legendary performers are flown in to perform for an enthusiastic diaspora crowd of around a couple of thousand. Also, there are dozens of Ghanaian restaurants around New York, many of which hold club nights playing the latest hiplife, azonto, GH rap, or alkayida tunes out of Accra and Tema.

Even though I’ve seen this phenomenon happen with the large Caribbean and Latin communities in New York, both of these groups at least have their own media outlets, and are often represented on the city’s mainstream radio stations. Knowing that West African immigration to New York is a relatively new phenomenon I’ve always wondered what it would take for a local African musical movement to gain more steam in the city at large. So, on warm late summer Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago, I took a subway ride up to Co-op City in the Bronx to investigate.

I arrived at a collection of imposing apartment complexes on the northern edges of the Bronx, to the building of a Ghanaian rapper who goes by Nana NYC. By the time I arrived at Nana’s apartment a cypher was already in progress. A group of MCs coming from all around the United States had assembled in Nana’s living room for the afternoon session. Nana was filming to promote an upcoming hip hop show organized by iRAP TV, a regular TV show series produced by Nana, and shown on cable television in the Bronx (Bronx Net) and Brooklyn (BCAT). All but one MC had roots in Ghana, and most rapped in multiple languages, flawlessly switching between English, Pidgin, and a Ghanaian language such as Twi, Fanti, or Ga. Featuring rappers in the following video are: Fusha (Worcester/Ghana), Rasbobo (Columbus/Ghana), Nana NYC (Bronx/Ghana), Self Made Stunner (Bronx), C-Burn (Brooklyn/Ghana), Biszy All State (Jersey/Ghana), Sammy Khaki (Bronx/Ghana):

Also present that afternoon was an elder-like observer, and important figure in the local Ghanaian music scene, “Hurricane” Hashim Haruna. I was excited to be able to talk to Hashim because he is one of the main organizers behind the massive annual Ghana Independence Day Bash, and was keen to find out how the musical connections between Accra and the Bronx came about. The name of the company both Nana and Hashim are a part of is called Boogie Down Nima. Besides referring to the Bronx nickname Boogie Down, the crew’s name also shouts out the Nima neighborhood in Accra, Hashim and Nana’s home area, which like the Bronx is the neighborhood credited with launching their local hip-hop movement. The crew was also one of the focuses of the Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi directed documentary Homegrown: Hiplife in Ghana, which chronicles the rise of the career of Ghanaian superstars V.I.P. After talking with Hashim and the iRAP TV crew assembled at Nana’s apartment, I came to find out that he was an integral figure in the initiation of a music and cultural movement for young Africans of various backgrounds in the Bronx.

Hashim arrived in New York at 16 years old in the late ’90s. By then the hiplife scene had already taken over Accra, and the local youth culture had started to make waves in diaspora communities. However, when Hashim arrived the Ghanaian community life was centered on events like funerals, and baptisms. The African hip-hop movement, fueled by a revolution in youth expression in West Africa was exploding in various locales around the world, but there was still nothing happening among youth in the African immigrant communities in the Bronx. So, Hashim decided to start throwing promoted parties for young Africans in community centers, echoing the exploits of a young Kool Herc in the same neighborhood in the 1970s.

The parties were a hit, and overtime the Bronx gained a reputation as the best place for parties. As one Brooklyn-based Ghanaian MC told me at Nana’s, “The Bronx has the best parties!” Over time, Boogie Down Nima’s events grew to incorporate mega celebrations such as the annual Independence Day Bash. Because of the growing success of the event, Hashim and company are able to fly whole bands in from Ghana, and are able to organize tours for them to Ghanaian strongholds in cities across the US.

In the immediate wake of his success promoting parties in the Bronx, Boogie Down Nima started collaborating with Americans interested in global hip-hop such as Ben Herson of Nomadic Wax, and Eli who has also directed documentaries about hip-hop and youth-led social movements in Cuba, Brazil, and Colombia. It is through these connections that the Boogie Down Nima crew has been able to come across a diverse array of international hip-hop artists and would connect with artists from all over the world. iRAP TV was born out of this growing international hip-hop movement, and remains a stronghold for street-level representation of a second generation of international hip-hop artists in the United States.

The goal of iRAP TV and the focus of Boogie Down Nima today, is to build an international hip-hop movement, one in which artists from diverse backgrounds can celebrate their ethnic identity, difference, and uniqueness, yet stand at the same level as their American counterparts. Hashim and Nana want to make sure that the upcoming rappers from their community shine by representing, and being proud of who they are. Nana explained, “if younger rappers don’t benefit from the work that we’ve been able to accomplish over the years, than that work was for nothing.” While African clubs, and promoted parties are becoming more the norm in New York, and hip-hop and mainstream pop artists with African origins like Wale, Chamillionaire, Akon, and French Montana are able to reveal their African identities and still maintain a sense of coolness perhaps unavailable to previous generations, there is still work to be done to bring diverse notions of hip-hop, and blackness to the fore in mainstream American society. I asked the rappers in the cypher what they thought of African artists making it to the mainstream, and high profile international collaborations with African stars like P-Square, or D’banj, many of them thought that these steps were not enough. One rapper illustrated his frustration saying, “Everyone thinks French Montana is Spanish!”

A secondary goal I sensed amongst many of the rappers in the creation of an international hip-hop movement in the United States was to be able to gain respect as individual artists back in Accra. Many of the artists felt that if they couldn’t gain acceptance in the place they were based, then their recognition in the places they came from wouldn’t have the same weight. However achieving this goal will be an uphill battle for US based artists. Plus, they have to compete with European counterparts who are often able to find local success by playing on African identity, partly due to critical cultural mass of first and second generation African immigrants, a distance from American cultural hegemony, a distance from American racial politics, and perhaps just physical proximity to home. US-based African artists still have to deal with an American public that generally remains in the dark about the contemporary realities of African people, affairs, and culture.

In order to keep up the efforts to spread the word and attract new audiences, tomorrow November 2nd iRAP TV will host what according to Nana is the “first African-organized Hip Hop battle” at Cue Lounge in the Bronx. Their goal is to start opening up such international events to a diverse American audience, and encourage the participation of people of all backgrounds. Keeping true to the Boogie Down Nima style, flying in for the occasion is Ghanaian rapper Kwaw Kese, “the king of the streets” in Ghana. If you’re in New York on that day, make sure you head uptown to check it out!

Also, next November 5th, Africa is a Country contributor Jesse Weaver Shipley will be at CUNY pre-screening his documentary Is it Sweet?: Tales of an African Superstar in New York. Jesse’s book Living the Hiplife, which covers the Bronx Hiplife phenomenon in its final chapter, was published in January of this year.

Cross-posted with MTV Iggy, t his article is part of a mini-series of posts I’ve been doing on African music cultures in New York. Check out previous posts on Liberian Hip-Hop in Staten Island on this site, and a city-wide overview here.

Three Signs of Ghana’s Art Times

Ghana is currently experiencing a surge of contemporary performing and visual arts. Here are some notes on goings on about Accra-town.

I. Song of the Pharaoh

A new play, Song of the Pharaoh by leading playwright Mohammed Ben Abdallah has been in the works for over a year, being rehearsed, work-shopped, and performed at Ghana’s National Theatre in downtown Accra (image above). It initially opened 12 and 13 September and returns 1 and 2 November. The National Theatre Players and the National Dance Company, both resident companies at the National Theatre, are leading the production but it also involves collaborations from Noyam Dance Company, The National Symphony Orchestra, and a number of young and established guest artists. The performance is being fine-tuned in preparation for planning an international tour. I have been one of Abdallah’s assistant directors who is leading a team of artists in shaping Song of the Pharaoh’s dance, music, costume, and set design. Abdallah is one of the most important playwrights working in Africa today. Previous plays include Trial of Malam Ilya, Fall of Kumbi, Verdict of the Cobra, Land of a Million Magicians, and Witch of Mopti. Over the past four decades his work has pushed the creative boundaries of theatre, linking Western and African dramatic traditions. His mentor playwright Efua Sutherland was the architect of Ghana’s National Theatre Movement expanding on Anansegro — the tradition of trickster storytelling — in the 1950s and 60s to create a modern Ghanaian theatrical style. Abdallah built upon this work, coining the term Abibigro (literally African Play in Akan) to mean Total African Theatre. Abibigro has evolved over several decades by Abdallah and his students like Yaw Asare and Efo Kodjo Mawugbe (both of whom have passed away). This genre encourages artists to combine multiple African, diasporic, and European performance styles — music, dance, storytelling, comedy, dramatic narrative, experimental — into a flexible theatrical experience for the modern stage.

Song of the Pharaoh is a major new musical-dance drama that tells a story of love, incest, and betrayal, and of political and religious transformation in ancient Egypt. Its form is a modern comment on the nature of staged theatre, bringing Ghanaian music and dance together with an eclectic blend of North and West African sounds and movements through new choreographies. The narrative is framed by three storytellers taken from the Ananse storytelling tradition into the modern city as time travelers who narrate the tale and mediate between the contemporary audiences and characters who populate various worlds. The story focuses on the rise and fall of the enlightened Pharaoh Akhenaten who ruled Egypt during a time of growth and artistic flourishing. It also tells the tale of the love between Akhenaten and his childhood companion and wife, famed beauty Nefertiti. As Akhenaten gains power he must navigate family betrayals that will shape his rule and eventually change the history of Egypt. Akhenaten was a leader who encouraged new ways of thinking and creativity in the land of Kemet. He attempts to reform the religious beliefs of his kingdom by promoting the worship of Aten, a new merciful god. In the process he incurs the wrath of his uncle the high priest of the ancient god Amon. This sparks a familial power struggle that reshapes the religious and political world. Abdallah wants audiences to reflect on how and why Akhenaten has been seen as the first proponent of a monotheistic religion and linked to myths of both Moses and Oedipus. He built a new capital called the “City of Light.” During his reign, artisans, craftsmen, and common people were encouraged to think creatively. This dramatic tale is set in ancient times but uses these tales of the Pharaoh to engage existential questions of love and familial conflict, death and memory. The play will keep audiences entertained with majestic dance sequences, delicate musical numbers, and suspenseful dramatic action, but leaves viewers unsettled. If you are in Accra 1 and 2 November head to the National Theatre to watch.

II. Chale Wote Street Art Festival

The two day event held 7-8 September was organized through ACCRA[dot]Alt and featured performance art, photography, film, painting, installation art, theatre, fashion, music of all sorts, street boxing, and local cuisine situated all along Accra’s High Street from the Jamestown lighthouse past James Fort Prison and Brazil House to Ussher Fort and the old Kings way building. The name means “man/friend let’s go” but is the popular name for flip-flops. Billie McTernan wrote a lovely piece about it here on the blog. This event is exciting in how it blurs artistic work into daily life. The rising generation of artists in Accra are media-wise and street-savvy. They make stuff and they increasingly creatively work to reach new audiences and make new interventions locally and internationally.

Among the many striking artists present was the photography and performance work of Bernard Akoi-Jackson. His performance of Goldman was a brilliant disruption of daily pace and the relationship between tradition and modernity. Akoi-Jackson also displayed his photographic work in the old cells of Ussher fort prison block. Along with other installation art, films, and performance pieces art work did time inside the crumbling walls, sharing space with old prison graffiti images and writing. Fashion models/performance artists from artist/designer Afua Asona dominated the entrance to the prison. The presence of numerous young intellectual, tech-savvy photographers like Rodney Quarcoo (the images above are his), Seton Nicholas and Senyuiedzorm Adadevoh at the event highlighted the rise of this media as a crucial aspect of youth art culture in Ghana and across the continent.

Wanlov the Kubulor of FOKN Bois fame and his Sister Deborah Vanessa of Uncle Obama’s Banana fame created an impromptu performance simply through their charismatic presence on the streets of Jamestown as kids and adults laughed and joked, posing for pictures with them. Sister Deborah walked graciously down the High Street while her brother strolled next to her. Wanlov wore a necktie and an open red football jacket, no shirt, no trousers, and briefs adorned with eyes and a red foam nose sticking straight out from his groin that attracted a lot of attention. When a sudden heavy storm broke, many headed for the shelter of a drinking spot or hair salon. Wanlov ran into the street to play football with kids and teens and splash in the puddles. Seton Nicholas grabbed his camera, handed me his hat and headed into the rain to capture the pleasure of the moment.

There was a spoken word tent led by Mutombo Da Poet set up in the Brazil House courtyard in front of a mural of local hero boxer Azuma Nelson. And in the old broken down Kingsway building, a DJ tent with rotating DJs including Kobby Graham and Ben Lebrave AKA BBrave, featured deep sets intermingling local and international tracks. Graffiti artists organized by Nima Muhinmanchi Art with German graffiti artist David Bethmann were adorning the walls and floors of the building. An impromptu elegant drinking lounge was set up next to them by Rockstone’s Office, Accra’s ultra pub and lounge run by hiplife superstar Reggie Rockstone and his business savvy impresario wife Zilla Limann.

The blurring of lines between participants and audiences showed as celebrities and social media folks like Awusi Michell, Grace Ayensu, and Panji Anoff came to enjoy themselves though got drawn into various activities by performers, fashionistas, and vendors. It was an event to see and a place to be seen. For a brief measure Accra’s High Street became a total participatory theatre.

III. The Black Stars of Ghana

The Chale Wote festival highlighted the fact that there is a rising generation of artists and media folks in Ghana who are building on the legacy of older generations of painters, writers, and performers — some of whom receive recognition and some of whom continue to create amazing work in relative anonymity. An evocative series of video interviews entitled The Black Stars of Ghana, Art District featuring artists like Marigold Akufo-Addo, Wiz Kudowor, and Larry Otoo provides extensive conversations with important Ghanaian visual artists bringing recognition of several generations of painters. These videos are intense and personal, highlighting the artists’ biographies, the development of their work, and how they imagine the role of visual arts for contemporary Ghana.

Each artist is filmed in front of a canvas, colorful images, painterly worlds. Their discussions follow the narrative of the way individual artists-eccentrics-geniuses see the world in unique ways and how they externalize the life and aesthetic world in the minds through the practices of making art. In watching the videos you are left with the impression of a cohort of artists who make work out of passion, who do whatever they have to in order to find the means to focus on their aesthetic practices. And you also get a sense of how true artists try to link their work to broader social concerns and daily practicalities. Here.

Who will make the great Thomas Sankara biopic?

Twenty-six years ago this month, Thomas Sankara was brutally murdered. His biopic is still waiting to be made.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recounting the history of great revolutionary figures of the past is a technique for opening up the field of political possibilities in the present. Such a history can be a resource for those engaged in emancipatory struggle and for thinking through the subsequent project of constructing a better society. In 1938 the Trinidadian intellectual CLR James published The Black Jacobins, his history of the Haitian Revolution and Toussaint l’Ouverture. The whole project was addressed to the leaders of the great wave of decolonization that James could see on the horizon, particularly in Africa.

Clearly, the time for a Sankara biopic is now. But who should make it? We threw the question open on Twitter and our followers offered a good number of strong suggestions with a definite Pan-African flavor. Gaston Kaboré, Alain Gomis, Haile Gerima, Frances Bodomo and Tunde Kelani were all mentioned. Others suggested Raoul Peck (who grew up partly in the newly freed Congo inspiring his later documentary and biopic of Lumumba) or John Akomfrah (either of them would be fabulous). Ken Loach’s name also came up. Of course, someone else reckoned this was a job for Spike Lee, but we asked him if he’d take it on and he never got back to us.

And then there’s the next big question: who should play the lead?

The blueprint for the feature already exists — Robin Duffield’s 2006 documentary Thomas Sankara: The Upright Man. Enjoy.

The Story of Cameroon’s First Metal Band

It’s been over a month since I watched Dutch artist Steven Jouwersma’s short film “N’gosa Bedimo” (Music from the Ghosts), and still I’m not quite sure what to say. You see, on one hand, the post should have been a slam-dunk. Jouwersma’s film and the project which it documents—an attempt, over the course of a three-week art exchange in the village of Bonendale, to start “the first metal band in Cameroon”—are rife with neocolonial undertones. “N’gosa Bedimo” is practically begging for the type of critique that this website does so often. And yet, in this case, a takedown seemed too easy, empty, even a little cruel. Watch it first:

Sure, I could have pointed to Jouwersma’s explanation that the impetus for his project came from the discovery of a color-coded world map showing the number of metal bands per capita by country (the countries with the greatest proportion of metal, such as Norway, in dark red, and those with the fewest, such as Cameroon, in light green), and drawn some insightful connection to colonial evocations of an empty, virgin Africa ripe for European cultural imports. I could also have complained about Jouwersma’s cherry picking of local cultural and religious beliefs in order to make them appear to parallel the mythologies surrounding Western metal bands. Certainly I could have offered a strong critique of the fact that “N’gosa Bedimo” plays on tropes of a dark, mysterious Africa in order to weave a quasi-supernatural tale around the metal band that Jouwersma formed in collaboration with local musicians.

All of those critiques would have been valid; and yet, I kept asking myself, what would be the point? This was a small film made by an independent artist. It had 343 views on YouTube. Why draw attention to it if only to slam it?

There are some representations of Africa and Africans that deserve our scorn: The cynical attempts by celebrities and corporations to exploit the same tired stereotypes for their own fame and fortune; the dehumanizing accounts offered by mega-charities which spend more on overhead than they do helping people on the ground; the simplistic narratives put forward by governments and mainstream media outlets which often do more to engender hatred and conflict than they do to enhance cooperation and understanding.

Sometimes, however, those engaged—rightly—in critiquing Western representations of Africa and Africans make the mistake of directing the same high-powered rhetorical artillery that they use for Madonna and Fox News at a small independent filmmaker or, worse still, at a nineteen-year-old international volunteer who posts a picture of herself cradling an African baby on her Facebook wall.

It’s not that these people can’t be criticized. It’s just that this criticism shouldn’t come in the form of a takedown on a website. It should come in the form of a discussion. It should involve a genuine attempt to understand where that person was coming from, after which one might gently offer a critique in the hopes of causing that person to consider something they hadn’t before; to think about things in a new way.

Last week, I finally spoke to Steven Jouwersma. Not surprisingly, I found him to be genuine, likeable, and articulate about his work. I realized in talking to him that I had been so wrapped up in the problematic aspects of his representation of Cameroon that I had failed to realize that the primary objective of his project was not to say something about Cameroon, or Bonendale, but about the nature of art. For him, the project was about musical innovation, seeing what happens when a certain musical form is divorced from the context of a specific “scene.” (He drew a comparison to an artist who produced a work where a brass band played house music.)

Jouwersma was also receptive to my critiques of his work. The project, he acknowledged, “of course has some colonial aspects to it—I bring something you don’t have.” But all artists, he argued, “import their idea of what art is supposed to be …. There’s always a kind of violence there, of something to critique upon. I hope to be open about it.”

I’m not sure that Jouwersma would do anything differently as a result of our conversation if he were offered a similar opportunity in the future. I would like to think, though, that I at least made some suggestions of things he might consider in his upcoming projects. Certainly he caused me to look at his work, and other projects like it, in a new light. And so we both learned a little; and we learned in a deeper and more lasting way than we would have if I had simply written a scathing critique, patted myself on the back for my critical faculties, and moved on to the next target.

‘What is wrong with this headline?’

It may seem odd to quote Paul Dacre, the editor of the jingoist UK Daily Mail. He defended his slanderous headline about the late Marxist academic Ralph Miliband (‘The man who hated Britain’) and father of the leader of Britain’s Labour Party by writing that “popular newspapers have a long tradition of using provocative headlines to grab readers’ attention” and “[i]n isolation that headline may indeed seem over the top, but read in conjunction with the article we believed it was justifiable.”

The headline ‘What is wrong with the Germans’ (on July  26, 2013) that was used for a post we did about two pathetic German reality TV shows, was meant to grab attention and to provoke, and it did. This is where the similarities between the two headlines end. A provocation that aims to be more than just an insult and a hatchet-job is one that stirs a meaningful debate and even helps searching for the truth. (Even though novelist and essayist Tim Parks sees a more harmful process at play in the choice of headlines.)

To ask the question ‘what is wrong with the Germans’ might as well have been formulated differently: ‘What is wrong with the French, the Greeks, the Spanish, the Danes, the Swedes, the Swiss’, and so on. You get the point.

The larger malaise is what Achille Mbembe, only apparently mild-mannered, calls Europe’s new provincialism. This isolationism, accelerated by the political and social consequences of the economic depression that begun in 2008, and that reigns all over Europe, is assuming more and more frightening proportions and exacts a human toll that can only be accepted with a mind-set that subscribes to nothing more than a new barbarism.

With a border control that more than ever reflects not only a physical isolationism against undesirables but also an isolation of the mind, it seems apt to question the continued existence, perhaps even aggravation of race and gender stereotypes across Europe. After all, and that is one dimension that the many commentators of the blog largely missed, the atrocious TV reality shows are not only an insult to Africans and black people, but they also promote and enforce ridiculous images of women: race and gender denigration go hand in hand.

While there were many comments, the following three themes stand out:

* How far has Germany come in dealing with race and racism? This question dominated the commentaries. For some, the blog was an exercise in political correctness, spoiling the pleasure of harmless fun. With a Nazi past to grapple with, they are tired of the reminder of the duty to remember and responsibility towards ideologies that meet up with Nazism. For others, this Reality TV show was more evidence of the continued unease and difficulty of Germans dealing with racial and ethnic difference, if not a sign of the outright denial of the existence of real and harmful racism across the country.

* The claim by some journalists that the Reality TV show with white women making fun of themselves in the picturesque setting of an African pastoralist settlement, African men and women in their traditional clothing included, was somehow reversing the colonial gaze, is truly flabbergasting. How can we talk of a reversal of the colonial gaze when all the gazing is done in Germany, via RTL TV? The Africans merely serve as a backdrop. And how could making fun of white women be seen as a reversal of stereotypes that smacks rather of a ‘tit-for-tat’ revenge, targeted against women? Rather, it re-enforces stereotypes and denigration. Within the format of the show, how could the African protagonists rise above the role of entertaining subjects and acquire real agency that would indeed talk back to the former imperial centre?

* How much control have the Himba who feature in the show about their participation? Were they knowledgeable participants, giving the producers their fair share of ‘primitiveness’ and hence entertainment as the shows required? A recent letter that some of the Himba people involved in the show had sent to an NGO that works with indigenous peoples seems to indicate that they were not fully aware of the purpose and content of the show.

Only interviews with the Himba involved would fully settle this question. What is however not in question is that the Himba are a marginalized people that are in conflict with the government over land use and development policy. Like the San in neighboring Botswana, they are seen as a problem because of their different lifestyle and their refusal to fit into traditional development patterns.

At least some sectors of Germany’s civil society are mobilizing against the copy-cats of the show; the most recent iteration launched by the rival TV channel ProSieben and filmed in Tanzania. German reality TV clearly has more appetite for stereotypical Africa.

Johannesburg: where criminals don’t discriminate, property developers do

Johannesburg is all those things big cities are: Busy, big, mad, bad, mixed and moneyed. If not moneyed then on the constant overhaul and remix of the hustle and grind. When I was back I stayed in the Vodacom building, or Ponte as locals know it. Ponte Tower is at the edge of Hillbrow. Yes, Hillbrow: suburb of sin as international news agencies would have you believe. Regularly, it’s just a neighborhood where families stay. There’s good food, fresh fruit and everything else you can buy on the street. It’s close to the main arterials of taxi routes and has Joubert Park and the Johannesburg Art Gallery (free entry) at its edge. In short, people are living here. They are not thugs, they are not thieves (okay maybe a few), most are simply trying to get their kids to school and themselves to work and are the people of that great city, Johannesburg.

Travel to the east side of the city and now we don’t hear of Jeppestown or Troyeville, places that actually are on the map. Rather, this area has been rebranded the Maboneng Precinct. Quite literally (and I speak from experience) a two-block radius that houses a swish restaurant I’ve never been to, one of those themed boutique hotels and two equally expensive apartment blocks. A pizza place and an independent cinema I have been to, a great Ethio restaurant, a smattering of young designer stores and further down the street a courtyard space hugged by a few galleries and a large interior space that turns into Cape Town’s Old Biscuit Mill every Sunday replete with people who salsa on one of the rooftops. Welcome to “The Place of Light.”

In a new film,”Place of Light,” the filmmakers (remember the co-director from last year’s sensationalist “Afrikaner Blood” film) have tried but failed to offer an even-handed discussion of the seeming benefits and pitfalls of ‘urban rejuvenation’. The film is really 20 minutes of boosterism of Maboneng, with 2 minutes of mild critique. Falling short to highlight the real outcomes of such developments, the academics they do interview — even when they touch on the issue of displacement — never speak explicitly of the divisive nature that gentrification brings to longstanding communities:

Don’t get me wrong, it’s hard not to get excited about change in Johannesburg’s CBD, to laud the opening up of a space in which to stake a claim in the burgeoning new turn this city will take. But for Dr. Elga Manga to say, “For me Maboneng really represents the future of South Africa. It’s how we all want to live. It’s the way we should be living” in the context of what I’d just seen in this documentary made me balk. Not because I don’t want to live in the centre of town and be a part of everything that Joburg has to offer but because of the way this intersection between the individual and the city is presented by the Maboneng ‘regeneration project’ (gentrification is too suitable and honest a word).

In Maboneng this intersection is a strictly curated experience that takes place along clearly delineated class lines. Class lines that keep some in and most others out. A curated space, this Maboneng: even the ghettoized image of the old-school boxer is included for added street value and is allowed into the space so that the residents feel they’re at the cutting edge. I think it’s worth asking whether George Khosi was also offered residential space inside Maboneng and not just the rooftop for training? A space kept closely cordoned off to the everyday passerby, curated and spearheaded by developer Jonathan “JJ” Liebman, where even visitors to Maboneng act as the neighborhood watch.

Says one shop owner, John Mallis, highlighting how he sees the rejuvenation project has ‘cleaned up’ (cleaned out more like it) the space:

Criminal elements are not welcome. People in the street if they see someone they don’t like they’ll come in and tell us: there’s somebody here that we don’t like, won’t you go and see or call the police or do something. The criminals find they’re not comfortable so they leave.

Yes, and by ‘someone they don’t like’ does that mean a black person walking down a street where you assume they have no business to be? Usually that’s the case with racial profiling. Yes. I think that’s what you might actually be saying if a black man of working class means came walking down Fox Street. Anyone of these men could be that man who you deem: “someone they don’t like.”

(“Jeppe on a Friday,” a documentary by Arya Lalloo and Shannon Walsh is actually what you should take the time to watch. It chronicles the lives of five men whose livelihoods are tied to Jeppestown and makes clear the impact spreading gentrification will have within the area.)

Jonathan Liebman is honest about his intentions. All he sees is a mess and he’s looking to capitalize on that mess. He forgets that most people don’t know how to fix elevators or install proper plumbing in buildings that have been forsaken by property owners. Government officials who don’t receive rates and taxes don’t offer basic services to buildings in any city in any part of the world so let’s not frame the people of Johannesburg’s repurposed buildings as the problem. Rent controlled buildings and low-income housing would do more for the regeneration of this area and its people than hip new hang out spots and art galleries would. Private business doesn’t need to prioritize the poor but it does need to take stock of the frame of reference in which it wants to operate. If “engaging with urban Johannesburg” as Jonathan puts it is what Maboneng and similar ventures want to do, then engaging needs to extend into the spaces that already do exist with the people who already live in this space. Not just have them be the backdrop for the ‘groundbreaking experience’ for those who’ve never engaged with “the greater Johannesburg” (whatever that means) Russell Grant says has changed his whole lifestyle: “My world is completely different. I feel more part of the city, more part of greater Johannesburg. My whole lifestyle if different.”

Yes, granted. We are changed when we move to the city, when we take a chance on our dreams in a place that affords us the space and the opportunity to do so. But let’s not forget we don’t live in a bubble. It’s not just our dreams that exist inside that primal, transitioning space of the city. Others make a way here too. Their striving deserves as much recognition as ours. So go to the local lunch place, get your haircut inside the makeshift barbershop and buy your milk at the bubie (bodega). If anything, you will find yourself discovering more of the city there than you will inside the small confines of Maboneng.

Not Nollywood: An Interview with Nigerian Filmmaker Tunde Kelani

Tunde Kelani is a seasoned Nigerian filmmaker wrapping up his sixteenth film, Dazzling Mirage. On the film’s website Mainframe Movies, his production company founded in 1991, promotes this as a “movie and a movement.”

This is not Nollywood. Observers, scholars, and critics usually describe Nollywood as everything but “cinema.” For some critics, it’s all absence except for its productivity: “third largest cinema in the world!” And it’s true, Nollywood doesn’t have the educational, mobilizing, historically, and culturally thick practice that Kelani brings to each and every production (here on his YouTube page you can see clips from his musical Arugba and click to check out other work). That is what always sets him apart. As does his independence from the production schemes that are Nollywood.*

Kelani just visited Indiana University for the workshop “Digital Paradox: Piracy, Ownership, and the Constraints of African Screen Media,” on October 18, 2013, part of the larger New Media and Literary Initiatives in Africa project (full disclosure, I am part of the collective and Sean Jacobs, AIAC heavy, once participated). Maami, an adaptation of Femi Osofisan’s play, screened on Oct. 17 (we reviewed it here, before it ran at the Lincoln Center’s AFF in 2012). Kelani, affectionately known by filmmakers and writers as TK, kindly sat down to speak with me after the event.

Kelani got his start in photography as a teenager, cut his teeth in television (as a cameraman), and studied film at the London International Film School in the 1970s. Deeply imbued in Yoruba oral literature and theater, a passionate cinema goer in his youth (Lawrence of Arabia, The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, and Westerns), Kelani’s mentors came from theater, literature, and film – Frances Oladele, Wole Soyinke, Kola Ogunmola, Duro Ladipo, Oyin Adejobi, and Ola Balogun. All of this shaped his filmmaking practice.

In the 1970s, Kelani worked as the BBC TV correspondent and in Nigerian TV. “It was like being on a big film set,” so monumental and dramatic were the historical changes and events of the time. For Reuters he traveled to Ethiopia to cover the drought and to Zimbabwe three times to cover independence there.

In the early 1990s filmmakers adopted video technologies in the wake of economic crisis. Traveling theater took a backstage to film at this moment as films could travel in place of large companies. Kelani started Mainframe Movies as a production company so he could produce films and not just lend technical support. Having emerged from the world of theater and literature, adaptations of books and plays for cinema are the core of Kelani’s filmmaking practice and through them he celebrates writers and their work to what he sees as a public that reads less and less.

Dazzling Mirage is a love story adapted from a novel, Kelani tells me. “Nigeria is the epicenter of sickle cell disorder in the world…..Every year 150,000 children are born with the disorder in Nigeria and half of them will die before the age of 5. Perhaps what we can do is draw more attention to the disorder.” The film tells the story of a couple – both of them hospital employees who choose not to have children because they have sickle cell – who adopt a child whose mother died during childbirth. At the age of 2 they learn the girl has sickle cell. The film is about the girl’s struggle to have a normal life with career, love, and family.

The Nigerian government does not treat sickle cell as a priority because it is not a communicable disease. “If that is the case then I knew that we are all ignorant and that we needed more information and awareness about sickle cell disorder.” Hence, the film. “We turned the film itself into some kind of a movement. We have a slogan that says let’s be sickle smart. It means to know your genotype, to go for genetic counseling, to help us all make informed choices.”

Listen to TK talking about the trajectory of adapting the novel by Yinka Egbokhare (with whom he speaks in this clip) for the screen, here.

Unfortunately, 75% of the way through the film, they ran out of funds. Always keen to try out new technologies and innovative social media, TK has turned to crowd sourcing. Here’s the indiegogo site: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/dazzling-mirage

“We need the audience absolutely. Perhaps it’s like a tripod: the medium itself, the makers, and the audience. We have to find synergy. We have to find new ways of funding films.”

Even if Kelani’s work is not Nollywood, he does embrace new technologies, which have also been characteristic of Nollywood. Here are some thoughts on new digital technologies and filmmaking on the continent, from this seasoned veteran who is still on the cutting edge:

“We don’t have excuses anymore in Africa. By the new digital technologies we have the tools to tell our own stories. The difference was the chemical process of celluloid films was a medium of exclusion. There was no way we could control the means of production. But the reverse is the case in this era where with a modest investment we could actually own the means of production and use that to let us be heard. So what is done is giving us a voice. So that’s the purpose of everyone talking about the negative effect of Nollywood. There was a time when only a few people could read and write in the world and you wanted something written you had to go to someone who could write. But today everyone can buy a pen, a biro…. So Nollywood is like finding out you have a voice, today everyone has a voice, so there’s a lot of shouting! But it’s better than being silent. It’s a powerful force that cannot be negotiated. So suddenly we have assets, we have a voice and we are supposed to use it to come from local into global….Africans are blessed that this is a knowledge era but more importantly this is an era of the fusion of all media and we are going to play.”

* I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the amazing work being done by scholars, filmmakers, and organizers who attended this workshop:

Moradewun Adejunmobi, UC-Davis – an interview with her here and an article abstract

Akin Adesokan, Indiana University – an abstract for an interesting article here

Mahen Bonetti, African Film Festival – on 20 years of AFF

Jonathan Haynes, Long Island University – the afropop.org interview by AIAC blogger Wills Glasspiegel

Black Violin

A couple of weeks ago, Black Violin played at Bloomington’s historic Buskirk-Chumley Theater. Sitting in the front row with my daughter, who plays the violin (her idea, not mine), I fretted when I noticed the house wasn’t at capacity. What a welcome, I thought. But my worry was in vain. Black Violin had the entire audience on their feet in no time with their mix of classical, hip-hop, rock, R&B, and bluegrass. They mobilize their talent and energy and people respond in kind.

Kevin “Kev Marcus” Sylvester and Wilner “Wil B” Baptiste are the classically trained violin and viola playing duo that anchor Black Violin. With them are master turntabler DJTK (Dwayne Dayal), tight drummer Beatdown (Jermaine McQueen), and cellist Joe Cello (Joseph Valbrun, though he didn’t make the Bloomington show). Kev kindly spoke with me after the show as the others broke down and packed up equipment.

Hailing from Miami, I asked about the musical soundscape there. Kev said this: “We’re Caribbean guys. Wil is Haitian and I’m from Dominica [a small Antillean island] and living in Miam there are all the Afro-Cuban influences. Then there are all the white influences, black influences, and everything else……When we have family parties, it’s souca and calypso compared to us loving and listening to hip-hop and we studied classical so we have so many places to draw inspiration from.”

Kev and Wil started playing together in high school and both had scholarships to different music schools for college. They studied classical music but started playing the music they listened to outside school on their strings and produced something completely new. Check out “A-Flat” from their sophomore album, Classically Trained out in May 2013 on their independent label Di-Versatile Music Group. The video was shot in Brooklyn:

To get a sense of them live, here they are performing “freestyle,” as they do at every show. Social media savvy and friendly, they invite the audience to video, take pictures with flash, and post to YouTube and Facebook hashtagging it #blackviolin. The music revolution will be televised!

Black Violin played at both of President Obama’s inaugurations and they’ve played, together or individually, with Jay-Z, Nas, Alicia Keys, and Akon in the States, in Dubai, and in South Africa. But they seem happiest on small stages reaching out to new audiences and realizing their mission: “entertain, educate, and inspire.” And since they are genre busters, as Kev said, “we have no demographic…we have something for everyone.”

Neither Kev nor Wil comes from families where people played musical instruments at home. Though people listened and danced to music at family celebrations and parties. I asked him what he most likes about the violin: “I think the violin mimics the human voice the most of any instrument. I could never sing but I can sing with my violin. What speaks to me now, after playing for 22 years, is that I can do things no one else can do. And the fact that I am continually trying to push it, and as a group we are trying to push it. I also like that I don’t look like a violinist. That is one of my favorite things about it.”

Ah yes, blackness and violinness and the betrayals of history and its books. The violin is a European instrument. But the African continent is home to the kora, ngoni, bolon, kibangala, and other stringed instruments. Jazz violinist Regina Carter, who received a MacArthur genius award in 2006, used it to explore the “African Roots of Violin” that resulted in her album Reverse Thread. And we can hear that transatlantic exchange too in Black Violin, a band that takes their name from bebop era jazz violinist’s Stuff Smith’s Black Violin album. Three cheers for this iteration of the black Atlantic!