Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 445

Cape Town hip-hop just got interesting again

It has often been said in hip-hop circles in Cape Town that the wildly successful Die Antwoord owe a lot of their success to the Cape Flats rappers that they hung out with just before dropping their breakout album $O$. Isaac Mutant was featured on that album, and he is often credited with being the bra that Waddy Jones (Ninja) got his swag from. Mutant, a veteran of the Cape Town hip-hop scene, has just released a provocative new video called ‘Kak Stirvy’ for a new collaborative project he is fronting called Dookoom, which also features DJ Roach, Spooky and Human Waste (Dplanet).

The video for ‘Kak Stirvy’ is shot in Heinz Park, Cape Town; an area of the Cape Flats which is no stranger to hardship. Mutant has strong ties to this part of town, and even lived here for a time. Immediately something about director/producer Ari Kruger’s video screams Die Antwoord. The dark treatment of the images. A discarded teddy bear. A grim overcast Cape Flats street. Two aging coloured women dressed as playboy bunnies. Mildly disturbing. At times, the video veers into the realm of sensationalism and the glorification of “thug life” the way Die Antwoord does in ‘Evil Boy’ and ‘Fok Julle Naaiers’. The difference between those tracks and ‘Kak Stirvy’ is that Mutant is the real deal:

The production on the track is done by the prolific Pioneer Unit’s Dplanet, and is grimy, electronic and dirty; much like Isaac Mutant’s “I don’t give a fuck” rap persona. In an interview with Rob Cockroft for Mahala, Mutant has explained the word dookoom as “a myth and whatnot…everything negative is associated with dookoom.” While Mutant is not wrong here, it’s a little more complicated than that. The word dookoom, a by-product of the Cape’s slavery history, comes from the Malay word dukun, which is a kind of spiritual healer/witch doctor. In the Southeast Asian context it doesn’t have necessarily negative connotations. In the Cape context the doekoem is seen as a practitioner of black magic and is therefore dangerous. The idea of Malays/Muslims as dangerous was common and held even up until the early 20th century — they were said to curse and poison people, possessing knowledge of “Malay trickery.”

On the Cape Flats, when you ask a girl out and she says no, usually she gets labeled as “kak stirvy”. Literally translated, she’s “shit” uppity — “shit” denoting the degree of her uppitiness. In the track, Mutant refers to himself as “kak stirvy”. Here he is playing with multiple meanings of the word, using it as a way to elevate himself above the regular hip-hop crowd, which he has repeatedly called “boring” in his recent interviews. After years of being an underground MC, Mutant is ready to try new things.

The lyrics and flow of the song are a bit of a departure for Isaac Mutant, who is known for intricate rhyme patterns in deep Cape Afrikaans. On the mic, Mutant is something to behold; he is at once the raw energy of Wu Tang’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard combined with the street poetry of Tupac. On Dookoom, his lyrics are slower and repetitive and a lot of English is thrown in. While he has been one of their main sources of inspiration, here Mutant is taking a lesson from Die Antwoord, who successfully repackaged (and appropriated) Afrikaans rap and brought it to a mainstream audience in South Africa and an indie rap audience worldwide.

In one of his Mahala interviews, Isaac admits: “Lyrically Ninja taught me a lot my bru. Like rounding off shit and stylising punchlines, attitude.” He also mentioned in another interview with Cockroft: “But it’s about stylising, it’s about packaging. Us brasse from the ghetto want to be too complicated, we want to brag the metaphors and brag the fokking lettergrepe (syllables) and the people on the streets can’t understand that kak.” In other words, dumb it down. At least just a little.

It has to be said that part of Die Antwoord’s appeal and curiosity with the public had to do with the absurdity of middle class white South Africans posing as gangsters. It will be interesting to see if Isaac Mutant can replicate their formula combined with actual genuine Cape Flats grittiness, and whether the South African mainstream will be as receptive. Either way, he is definitely on the cusp of something.

* Saarah Jappie contributed to this post.

Kenneth Gyang’s “Confusion Na Wa” and the growing desire for variety and novelty in Nigerian cinema

In the discussion that followed the first public screening of Kenneth Gyang’s ‘Confusion Na Wa’ (2013) at the Lights, Camera, Africa Film Festival in Lagos, audience members drew comparisons to Crash, Pulp Fiction, and Quartier Motzart as none of us could quite find a reference point for Gyang’s film within Nigerian cinema itself. But ‘Confusion Na Wa’, which won AMAA‘s 2013 Best Film, may find a timely reception among Nigerian viewers with a growing desire for variety and novelty in homegrown media.

Here’s the trailer:

This postmodernist dark comedy traces the criss-crossing paths of a handful of strangers. When Emeka (Ramsey Nouah) drops his phone during a scuffle in traffic, it falls into the hands of a couple of slick pidgin-speaking wiseasses, Charles (O.C. Ukeje) and Chichi (Gold Ikponmwosa). Their ploy to sell the phone back to Emeka by barter or blackmail sets in motion the film’s tangled but playful plot of coincidental encounters.

Charles and Chichi are young hustlers looking for any opportunity to get ahead in a city full of dead ends. Though Chichi dreams of something bigger for himself, Charles lives on familiar terms with poverty, the police, and a mother this close to disowning him. Snatching Emeka’s phone is no ticket out but with the information they find on it, the two pranksters expect to collect N150,000 for its return. It’s a ludicrous sum but, according to Charles, scams follow the basic laws of market economics: the cost of sensitive information all depends on “wetin people dey willing to pay for am.”

Babajide (Tony Goodman), a righteous man who fancies himself the “ideal citizen,” notices changes in his son Kola’s behavior that sparks in him a deep sexual paranoia. The father tries everything to set Kola straight: lecturing him on how to become a man, giving him a day job to learn responsibility, and even initiating painfully awkward banter about the female secretary’s bodily attributes. Ultimately, out of fear for one immoral persuasion, Babajide pushes his now embarrassed son toward a more orthodox set of vices. Kola (Nathaniel Ishaku) cannot make heads-or-tails of his father’s delusions. He is more concerned for his sister who, while dad obsesses over his son, has an unfortunate encounter with Chichi and Charles.

Everyone in the office sees Bello (Ali Nuhu) as a sap, someone you can dump your extra workload on before you head home early, someone so naive he wouldn’t know a bribe if landed before him on his desk. His wife, Isabella (Tunde Aladese), who openly mocks his cowardice, has found satisfaction in the arms of a lover, Emeka. The two carry on a sexting relationship spiced with such absurd euphemism it had the festival audience in stitches.

If this synopsis seems fragmented then it is close to capturing the film’s narrative style which toys with the relationship between causality and coincidence, or rather order and confusion. Gyang and his co-producer Tom Rowlands-Rees masterfully demonstrate that the act of telling a story is often more important than the story itself. This story is couched within a narrative frame: death opens and closes the film. A narrator’s voice jokes in direct address about how in life, you’re born, something happens to you, you die, you soil yourself, and then you meet God.

Irony marks the telling of this story, and not the irony of sarcasm (though there is plenty of that too), but irony as a technique creating distance, as when Charles and Chichi joke about film in Nigeria today and how in the West “their cartoons don pass our film.” Chichi has The Lion King in mind, what he thinks is a masterpiece of colonial ideology. This immensely bores Charles, who has always liked the Disney movie. After all, he reasons, his own scams and pranks fit right into an urban African “circle of life,” not some sentimentalized racist stereotype of Africa, but rather the arch of felicitous mixups and sometimes fatal coincidences they live through each day. (The careful viewer will relish the film’s “signifyin’” on the The Lion King and western stereotypes of Africa generally.)

The attitude seems to characterize the creative direction of Cinema Kpatakpata, the movie’s production company comprised of Gyang, Rowlands-Rees and Yinka Edwards, one of the best cinematographers working in Nigeria today (Figurine, Phone Swap, Lions of ’76). They find standing out preferable to fitting, Gyang explains and, made on an astounding USD $27,000, this movie does not fit the “New Nollywood” trend of costly production and marketing. Gyang, who cites South American filmmakers Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, Alfonso Cuaron and Fernando Meirelless as influences, is gaining national and international recognition as one of a younger generation of savvy Nigerian filmmakers. He was in official competition at the Berlinale Talent Campus in 2006, has worked with BBC World Service Trust as the director of ‘Wetin Dey’, and won “Screen Producer of the Year” at the 2010 Future Awards for co-writing, co-producing, and directing Televista’s series Finding Aisha. It is important also to note that ‘Confusion Na Wa’ was one of four scripts selected by the influential Hubert Bals Fund of the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

So, is the country mired in confusion or abiding in a macabre circle of life? Both possibilities take a particular sensibility to appreciate, a particular ironic vantage point that one finds in the eponymous Fela Kuti song “Confusion.” Family values, moral decency, the virtue of hard work, anything that could anchor an ethical message is dragged into the confusion. This comedy embraces the freedom of uncertainty over the drudgery of moral dogma. Its story depicts murder, drugs, adultery and foul language in a way that only gently pushes the envelop of decency while investing more energy in making a snide joke of all the righteous and virtuous characters (uptight men really) who bemoan the “moral decline” of the nation. Still, the filmmakers manage to keep this one as light as a dark comedy gets.

Ayn Rand in South Africa

Prince Albert, a backwater town in South Africa’s Karoo region, was the site of a truly world historic event on October 20th, 2013. The event in question was the official launch of the latest addition to our growing register of political parties — namely the South African Libertarian Party. (BTW, at their launch they also made sure they didn’t elect the only black member, who helped found the party.) Claiming inspiration from the prehistoric congressman from Texas, Ron Paul (he is also a Tea Party favorite), and that notorious Roman crank Cato the Younger — the Libertarian party looks set to storm the ballot boxes “Atlas Shrugged” in hand as they get crank South African reddit users to the polls in numbers.

But are they really necessary when there is another new entrant to the political scene talking libertarian master theorist Friedrich Hayek’s language of “economic freedom”? I am of course talking the Economic Freedom Fighters, led by former ANC Youth League president Julius Malema.

Surely their radical program based upon land expropriation without compensation, nationalization and their commie pinko headgear is the very antithesis to libertarianism worship of property rights? One might ask. But is this really the case? I for one believe the only rational position for South African libertarians to take in our current political context is to Juju and co in EFF if they are to stay true to their own ethical and moral imperatives demanded by their ideology.

Libertarianism intellectual roots in its more sophisticated articulates can be located primarily in the founding father of liberal theory — John Locke, as well as a number of eclectic economists and political theorists — primarily the so-called Austrian school of economics. The less sophisticated versions spout the wisdom of a cult called objectivism originating from the work of one tik-addled, pop novelist and welfare recipient known to the world as Ayn Rand.

Post-Rand, the American political philosopher Robert Nozick revitalized libertarian theory with his book Anarchy, State and Utopia. The book itself was a response to his Harvard colleague’s John Rawls A Theory of Justice — a treatise on liberal egalitarian theory which is pretty much the most important text in analytic political theory.

In the book Nozick takes the Lockean view that individuals in the state of nature are free “to order their actions and dispose their possession and persons as they think fit” (1974: 10). The essential problem at the heart of this situation is that there exists no effective or just way to settle disputes over individual rights and private property. There exists no fair manner to enforce individual rights. This is where the need for civil government arises (Nozick, 1974: 11-12). Now the fundamental purpose of the state in this sense is to protect and enforce an individual’s right to private property, any attempt by the state to interfere with one’s right to private property as an attack one’s rights and a form of tyranny. Following this he lays a theory of distributive justice and property rights known as “entitlement theory”

Entitlement Theory can be outlined as follows:

A principle of justice in acquisition - This principle deals with the initial acquisition of holdings. It is an account of how people first come to own common property, what types of things can be held, and so forth.
A principle of justice in transfer - This principle explains how one person can acquire holdings from another, including voluntary exchange and gifts.
A principle of rectification of injustice - how to deal with holdings that are unjustly acquired or transferred, whether and how much victims can be compensated, how to deal with long past transgressions or injustices done by a government, and so on.

In South Africa blacks were forcible dispossessed of their land in a historical process which began with the arrival of Dutch explorers to the Cape back when those monstrous black hats were all the rage, a series of rather bloody ‘border wars’ in which sturdy Afrikaners and red-coated British slaughtered the natives and took their stuff. Eventually codifying dispossession in law through the 1913 land act and later the forced removals of Apartheid and the creation of dumping grounds otherwise known as Bantustans.

This by the standards outlined by Nozick clearly outlines any conception of a just principle of acquisition of property and following this clearly mandates a principle of the rectification of injustice. And before the comment section is stormed by those who put forward the lie that the land was empty or that the blacks were colonialists too and all such other spurious propaganda — I’ll just say denying the reality of our history and the violence of the past put you on the same level as those who deny the Arminian genocide or make apologetics for the slave society known as the American confederacy (something popular among US libertarians). Furthermore much of this process happened within living memory.

How then could this past injustice be rectified, while millions of black South Africans remain in poverty, without land, while those employed are paid far less than living wage? As far as I can see it would be to pursue a principle of radical land redistribution and returning property rights to the original occupants of the land or compensating the victims with something more than the symbolic ‘reconciliation’ of the TRC. Here libertarians if they are truly committed to a theory of justice which demands legitimate compensation for past dispossession must either put forward a radical redistributive program which brings results unlike our pathetic market based response to the question of land.

In our current political landscape there is only one political party that has put forward such a program and has a decent chance of having some impact among voters — the EFF. The EFF has made the point of land appropriation without compensation one of their seven non-negotiable points. While libertarians might share some distaste for this method and the EFF’s other policies, particularly because they think public services and such are the first steps to totalitarianism and the camps. They should put this aside for the sake  of justice and the sacred value of property rights, as part of a strategy eventually leading to Freemarket Utopia put forward by Ivo Vegter in the Daily Maverick every week.

I’ll leave the details of the libertarian entry up the libertarians or let them put forward some sort of radical redistributive program other than attacking workers and unions and attempting to get rid of the minimum wage. But in its current form libertarianism and its worship of the market is utterly irrelevant to South Africa.

Mozambique’s Pandza Music

The new mix by Bram De Cock (a.k.a. DJ LeBlanc of Rebel up! DJs) features Pandza music from Mozambique—a digital, more lo-fi interpretation of local Marrabenta mixed with Dancehall and Hip-Hop, and a mid-tempo, laid-back vibe. He collected the music on a trip to Inhambane and Tofu, about 300 miles north of the capital Maputo on the Indian Ocean. We asked DJ Le Blanc a few questions about this music style popular among Mozambican youths.

How did you get interested in Pandza?

Bram De Cock: My first encounter with this style was in 2010, through an online mix tape from 2009 by Wolfram Lange, a German geographer based in Rio de Janeiro. He travels a lot and on these trips always dives deep into local music scenes, making mix tapes with the stuff he found and sharing them on his excellent blog Soundgoods.net. Check out his mix, which covers Mozambican Pandza, Marrabenta, Dancehall, and Hip-Hop, here.

Who are your favorite Pandza artists and where did you learn about them?

It was in Tofu, one night out, in a local beach bar where I heard Pandza for the first time: the full album of Skhem Khem on repeat, blasting from a distorted single speaker (the charm of mono…), around which young people and some drunk fishermen were dancing and singing along with the songs.

It sounded like a great album and then later, I was lucky to find a pirated copy in a taxi rank in Inhambane (I don’t think it was even officially released, as often these CDs are burnt at home and distributed among friends and taxi drivers). Skhem Khem is featured in my mix but I made a YouTube mix as well with four songs to promote their original take on Pandza. I like the lo-fi production; the combination of cheap-sounding midi synths, digital drum kits, funky basses and live guitar licks, glued together by sweet auto-tuned voices.

I learned from the South African Tsonga disco singer and producer Mr Jambatani that Skhem Khem sing in Tsonga—together with Bitonga one of the popular local languages in the region of Inhambane. Harmonically and melodically, you can hear similarities to South African Tsonga disco.

From Maputo comes the more popular (judging by his presence and hits on YouTube) Mr Bow. He is also featured in my mix, but here’s an example:

More Mr Bow here, here and here.

But if one talks of Pandza stars, then you can’t get around Ziqo, sometimes tending a bit too much to RnB to my taste, which in the Lusophone world means Zouk/Kizomba, but there is some cool stuff like this one:

Or this, this and this.

And talking about a real hit, MC Roger is worth checking out, too:

What’s your favorite song about?

This is difficult as my Portuguese is very basic and most songs are in local languages, but telling from the mentioned YouTube videos I guess a lot of these songs often talk about the same things that bug young people today all over the world: partying, money, fancy cars, brand clothes, love, girls and maybe also, in the good tradition of the older socially critical Marrabenta, tackling larger societal problems.

Listen to DJ LeBlanc’s pandza mix below:

Pandza mix – mozambique by Leblanc on Mixcloud

Confronting Afrikaners’ cultural masochism

South African artist Richardt Strydom’s photography is beautiful to me – albeit it in a perverse, guilty kind of way. Through self-observation and re-positioning, his art challenges ideas of power, agency and complicity through analysing and dismantling notions of Afrikaner male identity: “In my experience my forefathers, the previous generation, were the only ones to speak – the only ones who were heard and the ones who forced their agency upon everyone and everything […] In their wake there are no spaces, not even the private, that remain untainted and undefiled. But I no longer consider their words as truth – their yarns of fancy and oppression. Their constructed identity and myths have long since become the objects of my dismantling.”

Strydom believes that, due to apartheid’s legacy of violence, hatred, and domination, certain Afrikaners have long been unable to “speak in a credible voice”. For them, Afrikanerdom’s legacy has been one of guilt and shame; underlined by a sense of ‘cultural masochism’ which has warped their identity, while it has created a ‘persecution complex’ for others.

Strydom explains, “Philosopher Johann Rossouw said that certain Afrikaners today attempt to deal with their sense of fear and disillusionment by resorting to various psychological strategies such as the revival of crude racism, and I think the latest Red October stunt is a good example of this. I also agree with Rossouw who suggests that this fear and disillusionment ‘can easily lead to a state of self-paralysis, where they start convincing themselves that they are a handful of civilised people delivered to an uncivilised, vengeful majority’.”

Violator II (above) is a work that addresses this theme of pseudo-persecution. It’s a double self-portrait that depicts self-inflicted violence, which is underlined by Freudian, Jungian and Nietzschean theories. “The scars and injuries represent psychological scars that manifest physically and may be perceived as both metaphorical and real.” Violator II also deals with the notion that the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ are one and the same: the perpetrator as victim and the victim as perpetrator. “The violence is directed at the Self by its own violent Other-side, while at the same time playing on what Valji et al describe as ‘the mythology that whites are the primary targets of [violent crime] merely because of their race’.”

Violator II forms part of his 2009 series A Verbis ad Verbera – From Words to Blows, which suggests that the Afrikaner male has a “crisis of representation” due to an “inability to speak in a credible voice” because of apartheid’s weighty baggage of ethnic guilt. In another work from A Verbis ad Verbera (above), entitled Speak and Spell, self-harm is evident. In the first frame the words “Daddy Fucked Me” are carved, capitalised onto his forearm, while the second frame depicts Strydom with his tongue split: a grotesque, speechless man-serpent. “In this series of works I try to express a symbolic cultural masochism that stems from the frustration or inability to establish an authentic identity that is free of hegemonic constructed myth – an identity that ceases to be at odds with current reality…A sense of entitlement, after all, is not equivalent to a sense of belonging.”

Strydom further explores notions of ‘cultural masochism’ in his 2012 series White Masks, which is informed by Frantz Fanon’s seminal work and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind, which posits that in order to be truly African one has to let go of discourses that frame Africans as ‘other’.

Strydom’s Dubul’ ibhunu (“Kill the Boer”) portraits, which form part of this series, are an arresting comment about Afrikaner identity and a bold, unsettling statement about getting to grips with this uncomfortable, offensive ‘otherness’, and purging it from the modern Afrikaner’s psyche. Strydom adds, “In this body of work I invoke the notion of symbolic self-mortification as a means of transcendence. I see my own work as a representation of ‘being en route’ […] in other words, moving away from a constructed identity towards becoming someone other.”

His latest series delves deeper into notions of power, and the fluidity of identity. Entitled Dwang (“Coercion”), the images primarily focus on violation – and the subsequent subversion of it. During apartheid, it was mandatory for all pre-adolescent boys at state schools to undergo medical checks. Dwang references Strydom’s personal experiences of this: except this time round, the artist is pictured with adult, complicit male models, his fingers fondling their mouths.

These images are clearly erotically charged: the oral fixations are incredibly sensual. “I suppose one could argue that there is a pleasure in looking – it is voyeuristic and that is the eroticism of pictures,” says Strydom. “The double coding is intentional. I’m an artist because I’m addicted to images. I feel my interest in the manner images function – or can be exploited to shift meaning – is intimately tied up with the content of my work.”

Another major focus of Strydom’s work is making the private public. “Working with personal memories and experiences is a deliberate decision to delve into the subjective and present the personal archive to the public. The danger in that is that at times I feel it comes off narcissistic or vapid – so there’s also apprehension in that – I see that as part of the ugliness of self.”

According to Strydom, Dwang is about conjuring demons from the past. “I’m forcing myself and the viewer to confront a problematic image. I’m coercing my male peers, members of my ‘in-group’ to re-live a particular unpleasant experience from my own childhood – but one I share with other men of my generation. For me it’s a kind of collective exorcism. The whole context of Afrikaner nationalist education was so absurd that an incident involving a mob of middle aged men sticking their fingers in your mouth straight after fondling an entire school of young boys’ genitals, was an experience that seemed par for the course. It’s only when you reflect on it as an adult that you realise how invasive it was – how violent.”

Strydom’s work is also tied up with the act of looking – and the power play that accompanies it. For him, looking is never a neutral activity, it’s socially constructed. The artist and the model are therefore both depicted in the same frames of his images in order to “show how the artist inscribes or projects eroticism onto the body of the subject – the model, as a knowing subject and participant, is however complicit in this performance.” By doing so, Strydom subverts the old power dynamics of examiner/examinee. The violator’s power is shifted: the victim is now a complicit, consensual adult and not a helpless boy being probed.

Referencing Afrikaners’ struggle to forge an authentic identity, the struggle with ethnic guilt, as well as uncomfortable pre-teenage experiences, his twisted and sensual images attempt to dig deeper into his – and our – psyche. Through this process, he attempts to deconstruct and dismantle his own social conditioning as an Afrikaans man – and ultimately reimagine his sense of self. A self that is not bound, tied and gagged by apartheid ideology.

Introducing K. Sello Duiker’s novel ‘Thirteen Cents’ to US audiences

K. Sello Duiker’s short novel, Thirteen Cents is simultaneously gruesome, violent, deeply disturbing, whimsical, and beautiful. Ohio University Press has just released the post-apartheid novelist’s debut book in the US as part of its Modern African Writing series. The book itself won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, Africa Region back in 2001, when it was first published in South Africa. K. Sello Duiker is one of a generation of the first predominantly urban and black novelists to churn out fiction dealing with realities of a newly post-apartheid South Africa. Of this generation, Duiker and Phaswane Mpe (whose short novel, Welcome To Our Hillbrow is now considered to be one of the great works of contemporary South African literature) are perhaps the most beloved and well known. The two iconic authors both published their celebrated novels within one year of each other and both died tragically within a month of one another. K. Sello Duiker took his own life in January of 2005 following a nervous breakdown.

Thirteen Cents is not a happy story, following the twelve-year-old Azure, a black boy with blue eyes (which are a source of constant trouble) who lives on the streets of Cape Town. Told from the Azure’s perspective, Duiker weaves a narrative that lays bare the violence, exploitation, racial and sexual politics found just under the surface of South African society. The boy harbors a profound distrust for all adults and for good reason, as every adult we encounter through Azure is ultimately only interested in exploiting him – for sex, for money, for power and ego. This is a story about and for a generation of South African youth struggling to make sense of a world that is supposed to hold new and boundless opportunities for them, when in reality the situation appears to be quite the opposite. It is meant to tear the blinders of the rhetoric of a ‘New South Africa’ and ‘Rainbow Nation’ from readers’ eyes. In a letter to his Dutch publishers, Duiker once wrote:

In a South African context I was writing for people between 23 and 30 years of age – people in my age group, because our generation is confronted with different changes happening around us, and I wanted to communicate something of the pressures and contradictions around us. I think the book is not politically correct although it is a sensitive account of what I think is happening in South Africa right now. It’s a young black man’s view of what is happening – it explores youth culture and what it means to be young.

Thirteen Cents is a graphic and tremendously difficult read, but an important one for those interested in contemporary South African literature. It is also a novel written by and for South Africans, so non-South African readers may struggle with parts of it, especially some of the language and cultural references used. Despite the fact that the book contains a glossary, Sello Duiker employs Afrikaans and vernacular phrases regularly, many of which are not translated in the glossary. Nonetheless, it is absolutely a worthwhile read and the same can be said for his second book, The Quiet Violence of Dreams.

 

Why didn’t the New York Times publish the exposé they commissioned of virulent racism against Africans in Israel?

We’ve written plenty on this blog about the worsening levels of violent racism against Africans in Israel. This time last year Olufemi Terry reflected on a comment by the Israeli immigration minister: “This country belongs to us, to the white man.” Last summer Miri Regev, an MP, told a rally “the Sudanese are like a cancer in our body.”

David Sheen and Max Blumenthal’s reporting has been vital in bringing the appalling situation to international attention, which is why it was great news when the New York Times commissioned a film from the pair on this topic for their well-known “Op-Doc” series. The film was made and then canned. For some reason, the New York Times wouldn’t publish it (it eventually wound up on The Nation).

Yesterday on Twitter we asked the curator of the “Op-Doc” series, Jason Spingarn-Koff, for an explanation. If he or Kathleen Lingo, the editor who solicited the video for NYT, ever gets back to us, we’ll publish their response below. When a commissioned piece gets “killed” it’s customary  for contributors to receive an explanation for this, but Max Blumenthal told us Spingarn-Koff refused to explain why he wouldn’t be carrying the exposé.

The film can still be seen, but of course it would have got far more viewers had it been carried on the NYT and the appalling treatment of Africans in Israel would have been far harder for the extreme right-wing Israeli government to brush off. (Incidentally, some of the most shocking scenes in Blumenthal and Sheen’s film had already appeared on AIAC in Talya Swissa’s post on Netanyahu’s re-election and the racist demonstrations that took place in Tel Aviv in December.) The NYT has a decidedly mixed record of reporting on this issue. In a 2011 article, their reporter Ethan Bronner twice used the term “infiltrators” in his own prose, without quotation marks — it’s now the official term used in Israel for African migrants.

Here’s Blumenthal’s explanation of what went down (via ElectronicIntifada):

I was asked to submit something by The New York Times op docs, a new section on the website that published short video documentaries. I am known for short video documentaries about the right wing in the US, and extremism in Israel. They solicited a video from me, and when I didn’t produce it in time, they called me for it, saying they wanted it. So I sent them a video I produced with my colleague, David Sheen, an Israeli journalist who is covering the situation of non-Jewish Africans in Israel more extensively than any journalist in the world.

We put together some shocking footage of pogroms against African communities in Tel Aviv, and interviews with human rights activists. I thought it was a well-done documentary about a situation very few Americans were familiar with. We included analysis. We tailored it to their style, and of course it was rejected without an explanation after being solicited. I sent it to some other major websites and they have not even responded to me, when they had often solicited articles from me in the past.

Here is the video:

Exporting Homophobia from Kansas to Kampala

A few years ago, the documentary film Darwin’s Nightmare, told the chilling story of the social and environmental destruction wrought in Central Africa as cargo planes from Europe delivered load after load of arms to the region, before heading home filled with the choicest fillets of Nile perch. But there’s another destructive cargo that regularly gets carried to Africa from the US. I witness it every time I fly from New York to Johannesburg, Nairobi or Entebbe: the group of missionaries that’s always on the plane. Young adults, bright eyed and rosy cheeked, bubbling with excitement as they prepare to bring Africa the good news — the good news that is very bad news for gays and lesbians, transgender people, and anyone else who doesn’t conform to their strict brand of sexual morality.

God Loves Uganda, which opened in New York this week, tells the story of this plague of evangelical Christianity and its role in fuelling homophobia and inspiring the Anti-Homosexuality Bill that if passed, will impose the death penalty on gays and lesbians in that country. Here’s the trailer:

The film starts out in Kansas, at the International House of Prayer (IHOP), an enormous hall of worship where bands play and people sing and clap and praise the Lord, and plan to take over the world for Jesus. For some reason, they have made Uganda the epicenter of their ambitions. According to head pastor Lou Engle, as the ‘Pearl of Africa’, Uganda has somehow been selected by God as the place where great things will happen. Engle is a frightening character, eyes blazing with fanaticism as he gushes about his calling. We also get to see a clip of the promo video for an initiative he leads, called The Call–which is a truly frightening piece of fascist propaganda:

The film then follows a group of young missionaries from IHOP as they head to Uganda to begin evangelizing. Once there, they travel the countryside, accosting anyone and everyone with their carefully selected Bible verses, and insisting people accept Jesus “as Lord and Savior.”

It’s a bit puzzling as to why Uganda needs more Western missionaries. The film makes very clear there are plenty of local ones – dozens of lowly street-side preachers declaiming the gospel in the middle of traffic, and a handful of very rich ones who preach in their church-palaces, and divide their time between mansions in Las Vegas and Kampala, funded with American money and the tithes of their congregations.

American or Ugandan, they’re all obsessed with homosexuality. They denounce it at every turn. And none is more outspoken than Scott Lively, who has made it his life’s mission to fight the ‘homosexual agenda’ (nothing less than the destruction of society as we know it), and who works audiences up into a fury by exhibiting stills from hardcore fetish porn as examples of what gays are up to everywhere, all the time.

The missionaries, all very affable and friendly, claim to be motivated by love for Ugandans. It’s interesting though that their language is the language of war. They are an army for God, equipped with spiritual weapons. They even engage in what they call ‘rapid-fire’ prayer. They want to make converts to save souls from hell. It seems illogical then, that they would advocate a law that would send so-called sinners to their deaths, unsaved. But then again, rationality is not a strong point. There is scene after scene of people (in Kansas and Kampala) blabbering in ‘tongues’, falling over, lying on the ground shaking and crying uncontrollably. Truth is not found through reason, but is revealed as God speaks to individuals directly. One American woman, a long-term missionary in Uganda, says one day she received a message from God, via a friend, that she was supposed to marry a black man. She interpreted that to mean that she’s married to the entire nation of Uganda. (We later learn the reason she may not have wanted to marry an actual man – she confesses to having been ‘saved’ from her own lesbian tendencies. We also learn why she may not have wanted to marry an actual black man – her racism slips out as she describes the Ugandans as children, who will face her anger should they fail to take her lessons to heart.)

When asked directly how they feel about the anti-homosexuality Bill, the missionaries are wide-eyed, claiming ignorance of the details. All they are doing is bringing God’s message, and God is happy that Uganda is taking a stand. They haven’t read the Bill, but they believe all the fuss is just a storm in a teacup stirred up by the Western media. The irony is sickening.

The film contrasts these evangelicals with two very different religious figures. There’s the voice of reason in the form of Zambian Kapya Kaoma, an Anglican priest who lives in the US after he had to flee Uganda while researching the inhumane treatment of LGBT people. Kaoma’s hidden-camera footage exposes the origins of the anti-homosexuality Bill, in a meeting between Scott Lively and a number of Ugandan MPs.

The voice of compassion is Bishop Christopher Senyonjo, who was excommunicated from the Anglican Church of Uganda for his affiliation with LGBT groups. Senyonjo comes across almost as Uganda’s Desmond Tutu, the elder-statesman clergyman who does not use war-talk, but keeps asking, ‘what is the most loving response?’ Senyonjo’s humility and modest means stand as silent rebuke to the strutting celebrity preachers, one of whom is the 5th richest man in the country.

The film doesn’t really offer any new information to anyone who has been following this issue, but it does a great job of showing just how crazed these evangelists are. This is the same bunch that denies climate change and evolution, and just managed to shut down the US government –  because God is also against giving people health care they can afford.

It also focuses a much needed spotlight on the pernicious influence of American church money in Uganda (and by extension in many other countries). I hope it will also inspire horrified Americans to advocate for greater scrutiny and legislative oversight over all this cash. What I would have liked to know, though, is how much are we talking about? The folks at IHOP are shown praying to raise a trillion dollars, but there’s no indication of how much they really have. It would also have been useful to hear some reflection on why there seems to be such obsession with Uganda in particular.

The other thing is that the voices of Ugandan gays and lesbians are mostly absent from the film. That’s probably because they are the focus of ‘Call Me Kuchu’, released in 2012. These two films are probably best viewed together – even though there is some overlap of characters (Bishop Senyonjo in particular) and footage (such as TV news coverage of the heartbreaking funeral of gay activist David Kato, where the officiating minister starts a rant against sodomy, followed by incredibly moving scenes as Bishop Senyonjo steps in and buries Kato with blessings and the dignity he deserves).

Call Me Kuchu follows David Kato and several of his fellow activists as they organize, socialize, and attempt to live their lives in the wake of the anti-homosexuality Bill, persecution by the church, and the publication of many of their faces, names and addresses in the local tabloid newspaper Rolling Stone. Or fail to live their lives – as the warm, courageous and beloved Kato is killed partway through the filming, and then his funeral is hijacked by bible-thumping homophobes.

While there is no shortage of homosexual-obsessed evangelists in Call Me Kuchu, the real villain here is the editor of Rolling Stone, Giles Muhame. He smiles and laughs as he talks blithely about violating the privacy and endangering the lives of people in the so-called ‘public interest’. Like the responsible citizen he is, he opposes vigilante violence against gays. In his view it is the government that must hunt them down and kill them.

It is in Call Me Kuchu, though it was made first, that we see the ultimate consequence of the IHOP’s mission and the money that comes with it. As the formidable Dr Sylvia Tamale points out in the film, it is not homosexuality that is un-African – but rather the virulent homophobia that continues to be imported from the West.

Here’s the trailer of Call me Kuchu:

When marketing men make films about football

I finally got around to watching “Thierry Henry 1:1″ on iTunes. The promo material is written in breathless prose: “Who is the personality hidden in this dream career? … What are his ideals? What goals does he want to reach? … Thierry Henry is a world star torn between past and present.” This is all false advertising as nothing is really at stake in this film.

What is marketed as a film about the career of Henry—the highest scorer in the history of Arsenal, before he joined the New York Red Bulls in 2010—is really a 52-minute PR video made for the benefit of the Red Bulls, the MLS and their sponsors; the film is produced by Red Bull Media House.

Stock images of the tourist parts of Manhattan, central Paris and London are intercut with Henry prepping for two meaningless matches—the 2011 MLS All Star Game (the best of the MLS vs Manchester United’s summer team in New Jersey) and the “Emirates Cup” (Red Bulls vs Arsenal). In the Emirates Cup game, a draw means Red Bulls win and Henry will receive a meaningless trophy. The filmmakers act like these matches mean something. They even rope in Hans Backe (former Red Bulls coach) to speak about tactics while riding on the team bus.

Henry mostly comes across as bored. One of the few times he shows real interest is when asked about whether he would like to visit Highbury (Arsenal’s old stadium). Here Henry seems genuinely emotional speaking about the stadium where he played 7 of his 8 years with Arsenal while scoring 288 goals for the club. But then the directors move on to other stock themes. While the film discusses Henry’s upbringing (he talks about his dad as a major influence) and the beginnings of his career (Monaco where he met Arsene Wenger and Juventus, where he did not do so well), this is done with no actual footage, except a few still photographs. Oh, and I don’t remember any reference to that handball goal that assured France’s qualification to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. This all adds up to an unsatisfying viewing experience which actually does a disservice to Henry’s legacy.

Unfortunately “Thierry Henry 1:1” is proof of what happens when the marketing men make films about football. Sadly most football “documentaries” nowadays look like this.

Here’s the trailer:

* This is an edited version of a post that first appeared on our futbol tumblr, Football is a Country.

Aimé Césaire is a country

Aimé Césaire was one of the greatest poets of the last century. His writing was so good that the person who did the illustrations published alongside his poems was Pablo Picasso. Césaire’s best-known works are Cahier d’un retour au pays natal  (1939) and Discours sur le colonialisme (1955), both of which are available in strong translations.

Césaire (born in Martinique in the French Caribbean in 1913) was interviewed by the radical Haitian poet René Depestre in Havana, Cuba, in 1967. Here is one of his remarks:

I have always recognized that what was happening to my brothers in Algeria and the United States had its repercussions in me. I understood that I could not be indifferent to what was happening in Haiti or Africa. Then, in a way, we slowly came to the idea of a sort of black civilization spread throughout the world. And I have come to the realization that there was a “Negro situation” that existed in different geographical areas, that Africa was also my country.