Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 448

Ghana’s Independence Era Through the Lens of S.K. Pobee

The photos below (click to enlarge), offering a glimpse into the joy and optimism of the immediate post-Independence period in Accra, are from Samuel Kobian Pobee’s Modern Photo laboratory. They were acquired by Samy Ben Redjeb of the Analog Africa record label while he was during research for the liner notes for his latest release Afrobeat Airways 2 – Return Flight to Ghana 1974-1983.

Uhuru Dance Band, 1970

Tip Toe Dance Competition, 1971

Tip Toe Dance Competition Winners, 1971

Miss Tip Toe

Hedzolleh

Gyedu Blay Ambolley, 1975

Nana Ampedu

At Tip Toe

African Brothers at Accra Airport, circa 1976

Samy Ben Redjeb wrote a piece explaining how he came across the photos over at This is Africa. The post contains this interesting anecdote courtesy of S.K. Pobee’s son, who now runs Modern Photo:

When Modern Photo was created in 1955, the Tip Toe night club just opposite of our offices was already operating. The manager was Mr. Page, an American. My father S.K. Pobee, the founder of Modern Photo, wasn’t too much into music then; he was mainly taking pictures of political figures. It wasn’t until 1966, when he leased the Tip Toe, that his interest in all cultural things began to grow.

The first thing he did when he took over was to modernise and renovate the whole place. He bought new furniture, and ordered a new set of modern musical equipment. At that time every club had a residential band. For example The Lido night club, a few blocks away, had Broadway Show Band, Napoleon club had Basa-Basa and Bunzu Soundz. Tip Toe had the Uhuru Dance Band and the Blue Monks, a group my father had formed and sponsored.

To keep up with the demand, every club had to invite bands from other parts of Ghana and also from abroad to stand a chance of surviving the fierce competition. One of the first groups my dad invited to Ghana was Fela’s Koola Lobitos. They were followed by Victor Uwaifo, who had a big following here in Ghana, and then Ignace de Souza, a fantastic musician from Benin, just to name a few, but there were many. However, he was most impressed by a powerful band from Congo Brazzaville, Les Bantous de la Capitale, who stayed here for 6 months – by the time they left they were playing and singing Twi highlife perfectly. One of my dad’s main qualities was his sense of innovation; he started organising boogaloo competitions influenced by James Brown’s ‘mashed potato’ dance style. The people were dancing while the band were playing soul tunes, and we had bands who played that style incredibly well – especially P.P Dynamite and also the Hougas (with Gyedu-Blay Ambolley on bass). We also organised ‘Miss Tip Toe’ contests and the girls really looked nice in their mini skirts and their Afro hair. Today it’s all artificial.

Additionally to the highlife and big band concerts, my father introduced another event called ‘Jazz Night’, on which he would have two drummers competing against each other. The most memorable one was between Kofi Ghanaba (a.k.a. Guy Warren) and Uhuru’s percussionist, Max Amah. Oh, you would have loved it, I tell you. That day Kofi took a beating.

You know my father was also someone who was into advertising and promotion and he knew how to convince the musicians to be loyal to the Tip Toe night club. He would tell them “after the sound check come to the studio, I will make a picture of you and place an advert in the daily graphic to promote your next show”. This is what made Tip Toe stand above the other clubs, the fact that we had Modern Photo. The promotion tools we used worked so well that on Saturday afternoon, when we had what we called the ‘Afternoon Bump,’ starting at 6pm. If by 1pm you were not inside Tip Toe you wouldn’t come in – sold out. That’s the reason why so many bands and musicians wanted to work with my father and that’s what made our success.

My father left to the United States between 1973 and 1977 to improve his skills. When he returned, he found the place was going strong; I had perpetuated his work. But unfortunately my efforts would not be rewarded because in 1979 we were hit by a second curfew. It was serious. The first one, which took place in 1966, didn’t last too long. It didn’t hit us too hard, but it was the third that knocked us out. It killed social life and the music industry in this country. Everybody had to be home by 10pm: no parties, no concerts, no boogaloo, no Miss Tip Toe. When after two years that crazy curfew was over most of our musicians had already left the country and DJs had replaced the bands. Live music was dead.

These photos and more can be seen in the liner notes for the second Afrobeat Airways compilation. If you are interested in exhibiting any of the photos that Samy has collected please contact him at: info@analogafrica.com.

The political arrest of Bandile Mdlalose

“Normally it is seen that the poor are poor in mind and that everything needs to be thought for us. But poverty is not stupidity; it is a lack of money. And we always remind people that the same system that made the rich rich has made the poor poor. We are still fighting to insist that there should be nothing for us without us. No one has a right to make decisions for us while we still have a mouth and mind to use”–Bandile Mdlalose, General Secretary Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM).

Very slim and standing at under 1,50m tall, Bandile Mdlalose is one of the shack dwellers movement’s smallest members. She is modest and unassuming when you first meet her – not the person you’d ever think would be arrested for any sort of violence.

Bandile has three lovely children and lives with a supportive family. The Mdlalose household is the default community centre of the K Section township in KwaMashu (Durban) where AbM branch and community meetings are held, food cooked for events, and organising meetings are planned. Her mother, known by most as MaMdlalose, is a stalwart of the K Section community. When bad things are going down, people come to her for mediation and support.

Bandile is a giant of the Abahlali baseMjondolo social movement, a South African-based membership organisation of over 10,000 people. AbM emerged in 2005 out of a road blockade which was a response to the intended forced removal of Kennedy Road shack settlement residents to poor exurban areas of Durban. As the general secretary of the movement, it is not until you see her get up in front of a crowd of 500 mhlali (comrades) and speak, that you get a glimpse of her power.

It’s a power built upon a movement fighting for the dignity of those who live in shacks; the “Damned of the Earth” as anti-colonial revolutionary Frantz Fanon once said. In fighting with her fellow shackdwellers, Bandile is asserting her own fortitude as a black woman living in an oppressively patriarchal and racist society. Her power is not only her unwillingness to accept “her place” in society but also her commitment to band together with others on that same defiant basis. Her influence is based on the masses, not the other way around.

She is driven to challenge and transcend the discrimination she faces as a short and black and female mother who is also a shackdweller, and then link her own struggles with that of fellow mhlali – this is why Bandile has been targeted for political arrest by Durban police.

For the past 8 months, since shackdwellers were evicted from a housing development in the area of Cato Crest in Durban, they have been embroiled in a recurring struggle for a place to call home. Their occupation of vacant municipal land which they named “Marikana” (after the miners strike and subsequent massacre by police) merely to make sure they have a roof over their heads, has earned them the full violent response of the state: home demolitions, evictions, rubber bullets, tear gas and multiple murders.

Two Cato Crest housing activists, Nkululeko Gwala and Thembinkosi Qumelo, were assassinated this year – residents believe by armed criminals close to the local ANC councillor. Others have been shot by law enforcement officials during protests and lie in critical condition at local hospitals. On the 30th of September, 17 year old Nqobile Nzuza was shot and killed in the back by police who – as in the other more famous Marikana strike – cry self defense. Yet, as usual, no police were hurt during what by all local accounts was a peaceful protest.

There is a definite campaign by politically connected people in the local ANC government to squash the Marikana Land Occupation in Cato Crest (a former white middle-class area close to the city centre). Yet, despite the violence coming from the municipality, the political assassinations and the illegal home demolitions, the community of hundreds refuses to budge. After evictions, the community has just rebuilt their shacks. As a response to the state-sponsored violence, AbM have now begun a city-wide civil disobedience campaign where residents have marched without giving notice to authorities and engaged in road blockades.

The political forces, which seem connected as high up as eThekwini Mayor James Nxumalo, have now become desperate. In addition to targeting those involved in the occupation in Cato Crest, they have also taken to threatening Abahlali baseMjondolo’s central leadership with retribution. Bandile, as general secretary of the movement has been a prime target of these death threats. She has been in Cato Crest day-in and day-out helping coordinate support from AbM branches throughout the city and organising legal support during the illegal demolitions.

Her powerful oratory voice and organisational capability has now led the police themselves to target her for arrest. This, like most arrests against Abahlali members, is a political arrest. Bandile has not committed any act of brutality against anyone thereby making the police’s charge of “public violence” inappropriate. (This is the standard charge laid against activists falsely arrested by police in South Africa.) Investigators have no evidence against her and yet, like with the now vindicated Kennedy 13 (Abahlali members arrested for murder in 2009), she is being denied bail.

Instead of working for justice, the courts are refusing to allow Bandile to go back to her children and family – this, on no basis except to fulfil the wishes of those who want to destroy Abahlali baseMjondolo. And it’s no coincidence that these attacks are happening exactly a year before the national elections. It seems, right now, these forces are pinning their hopes of destroying the largest independent movement of organised poor people in South Africa squarely on 150 centimetre tall Bandile Mdlalose.

 

Who hasn’t lip synced to Toto’s “Africa”? Latest: crew of oil supply ship off Equatorial Guinea coast

At last count there were about 140,000 covers of the 1980s American rock band Toto’s song “Africa” on Youtube.  And then there’s all the remixes or samples by more recognized performers.  Just as a sample: R&B crooner Jason Derulo acted out the “rain down in Africa” line in a shower and for Canadian singer Karl Wolf (he was famous in Germany or somewhere like that) “Africa” is a sexy woman in a bikini. Some of your favorite rappers also covered “Africa”: On Madlib‘s “Medicine Show #13: Black Tapes,” GZA of the Wu Tang Clan raps over the beat. So has Wiz Khalifa. Other alumni: Indie band Low and  the massive Slovenian a capella choir Perpetuum Jazzile–their video of making rain sounds have been viewed 15 million plus times on Youtube (and that’s just the video they uploaded.)  The readers of musicologist and blogger Wayne & Wax (Wayne Marshall) dug up a Senegalese rap cover, a Ghostface vs Toto remix and a rap over the credits of American TV show, “Community,” by Donald Glover and Betty White.  But fans also get their turn: think of the guy with the Dutch street organ , this German trio, or the Serbian fans who decided to subtitle the original. Just type “Toto + Africa” into Youtube or your video player.  Which brings us to the latest version that is sure to go viral: the crew of an oil supply ship off the coast of Equatorial Guinea in West Africa (there’s a lot of oil there), decided to lip synch over the original record while tapping out the rhythm with their tools (oil cannisters, bug spray, spanners), while one of them filmed and edited a video of the performance over a few weeks.  Since the song “Africa” has also been subjected to serious analysis already–humorist Steve Almond have broken down the lyrics and blogger and musicologist Wayne & Wax (Wayne Marshall) felt inspired to write a long post about the “Africanness” of the actual tune–we’ll pretend to just enjoy the latest in attempts  by all kinds of people (including Africans) to cover the song.

 

 

Weekend Music Break 56

Three South African videos to start with. Cape Town rapper Youngsta moves between the city’s neigbourhoods of Wynberg and the CBD:

…while fellow Cape artist HemelBesem went for a stroll in Utrecht, Netherlands earlier this year. EJ von LYRIK who was on tour with him gets a cameo:

Mafikizolo seem to find a lot of fun in creating retro-styled videos lately:

A Nomadic Wax production for Diamondog, an MC from Angola, currently based in Berlin, Germany:

From Jumanne’s archives: Kali Kwa Wote Unit from Zanzibar, ‘Tatizo Coins’ (an older song):

Baloji (who no longer needs an introduction) has two songs on the latest (and great) Red Hot compilation, both Fela interpretations. Here’s one of them:

Dinozord — from Kinshasa — could be seen dancing in a KVS-sponsored production recently but rapping is still what he does best:

A new album and a sweet video for guitarist Hervé Samb:

Rap from Québec, Canada: Webster (real name Ali Ndiaye — he has a Senegalese dad):

And another one from Angola: Puto Português and ‘Minha Passada’:

What the Italian press said about Lampedusa

After the death of at least 130 Somalian and Eritrean migrants off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa, the Italian (and European) press is once again filled with words of pathos: the human tragedy, the pictures of lined body bags and the tears of Lampedusans for those who never reached them.

There is the Espresso magazine, who wants to nominate the small island of Lampedusa for the Nobel prize. And there are those who can’t wait to see the end of the rescue operations to start a debate about the role of the new Minister of integration Cécile Kyenge and Laura Boldrini, president of the Chamber of Deputies. According to Gianluca Pini, “the two women have on their conscience all the illegal immigrants who died during these months because of their goody two-shoes declarations of support for ‘third world countries’.”

“I want the prime minister Enrico Letta to count the corpses here with me,” wrote Giusy Nicolini, mayor of Lampedusa, in a telegram sent to Rome yesterday. “The sea is filled with dead bodies. It’s an infinite horror. This is enough, how much longer should we wait after this?”, she told journalists while assisting to the recovery of the bodies from the sea.

According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, there were around 500 passengers from Eritrea and Somalia on the boat that left from Libya.

The Italian press mostly used the expression barcone di immigrati (pontoon of immigrants) or the word ecatombe to underline the number of deaths, one of the highest in recent years.

Gabriele del Grande, freelance journalist and author of the blog Fortress Europe in which he counts the number of deaths in the European Union’s “border war”, claims the responsibility of the tragedy lies with the Bossi-Fini legislation and blames the process of visa permits that are very difficult to obtain. This situation leads to refugees traveling for months in the Saharan desert, arriving in Libya and then paying for a very risky cross over the Mediterranean Sea.

Father Virginio Colmegna, president of the charity foundation “Angelo Abriani” in Milan, writes on his blog hosted by the Repubblica:

What happened today in Lampedusa has become a chilling normality. Wrong laws, repressive measures against migration and lack of interest from European countries that are not directly affected by the daily arrival of migrants, haven’t dampened the power of criminal organizations that transport without any scruples those who dream of Europe.

“Let’s stop calling it ‘a tragedy’,” say the NGOs and the charities who work to support the migrants after their arrival in Italy. Savino Pezzotta, president of the Italian Council for Refugees, accuses of demagoguery those politicians who proclaim that we need to think of our “personal problems” first. “The slogan ‘don’t let them enter Italy’ won’t solve problems,” he says, “we need to accompany them as refugees from their country of origin.”

Just three days ago, Italian theater actor Ascanio Celestini was in Lampedusa from where he wrote a diary piece for Il Fatto Quotidiano:

In Lampedusa there are two graves. In one there are the dead, in the other you find the living. They have one thing in common: they are both nameless. Those two graves lie outside the small towns of Contrada Cala Pisana and Contrada Imbriacola. They are respectively the cemetery and the reception center for foreigners … According to data of the Ministry of the Interior it can accommodate 381 people, but the mayor Giusi Nicolini says that there are currently more than 1000, of which 100 are children.

Yesterday’s loss is hardly an isolated incident however: according to NGOs monitoring the situation, more than 13,000 have died at the maritime borders of the European Union between 1988 and 2012, among which 6,000 in the Sicily Channel alone. And the numbers of dead have being going up. Just in 2011, UNHCR estimated that 1,500 asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants have died trying to reach European shores.

Italian politicians are playing the usual blaming game: calling for more involvement of the European Union, while turning a blind eye to the fact that the militarization of the Mediterranean via its FRONTEX agency contributes to traffickers taking more risks and making the crossing less safe. And promises of investigating fishermen for defaulting on their obligations of assistance conveniently ignores that Italy has prosecuted fishermen in the past, accusing them of ‘facilitating illegal immigration’ as Lampedusa’s mayor pointed out yesterday. The truth is, the legal means to reach the European Union for protection reasons are shrinking and now almost non-existent while lending a helping hand is fast becoming a crime. The Italian government went as far as announcing a national day of mourning and a minute of silence has been observed in every school in Italy today. As if to better hide that those are not just “unfortunate deaths”, they are deaths by policy.

* Jacques Enaudeau contributed to this post. Photo from Mashid Mohadjerin’s series “Boat Migrants”.

Routes of irregular migrants from Africa to Europe (click to enlarge). Source: Hein de Haas, The Myth of Invasion (2007):

The Jews of Africa

Last Sunday at Cooper Union’s Great Hall on Manhattan’s Lower West Side, hundreds of people–who paid between $20 and $10–gathered to watch a discussion by Elie Wiesel and the President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, that was titled: “Genocide: Do the strong have an obligation to protect the weak?”

The organizers of the event were an organization called This World along with The Jewish Values Network and New York University’s branch of Hillel (the Jewish student organization). The conversation, says the flyer, is related to the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide and the world’s focus on the Syrian gas attack.

Also sharing the stage was Sheldon Adelson, Las Vegas casino billionaire, who made some opening remarks, and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who acted as moderator.

Weisel is of course the most decorated and well-known of the speakers; a former prisoner of Nazi death camps and Holocaust survivor he also won a Nobel Peace Prize in the late 1980s. More recently, Weisel has insisted on the Jewish-only character of Jerusalem for which he has been criticized. Kagame has been in power since 2000 and was recently described as “the global elite’s favorite strongman” by The New York Times. The same paper has referred to Adelson, who bankrolled Mitt Romney’s failed US presidential candidacy, as a Zionist. But Shmuley Boteach, from New Jersey, was the most colorful of those on the stage. A former spiritual advisor to Michael Jackson, he also hosted a reality show where he gave weekly relationship advice to couples from a trailer parked outside their homes.

After discussing at length with Weisel the question of whether former President Roosevelt did enough to stop the Nazi genocide of Jews, Boteach turned to Kagame and asked him if he was angry at the United States for not doing enough to stop the Rwandan genocide. The answer was pretty much no. Rwanda, says its president, learned to take responsibly and not to blame the international community for what happened. The audience applauded. Kagame then stressed the importance of the conclusion that Rwanda came to: that it needs to protect itself and not to rely on the world to come to rescue.

In that sense, analyzed Rabbi Boteach, Israel and Rwanda are very much alike. Later in the discussion, Boteach went further to define Rwandans as “The Jews of Africa” (that the majority of Rwandans actually belong to the Hutu group, many of whom where implicated in the genocide, couldn’t interfere with Boteach comparison, as did many other facts).

The Rabbi says Israel and Rwanda have genocides in common. He adds that they both also suffer from harsh criticism coming from the US. Given this trauma, the Rabbi continues, Israel and Rwanda decided to take their defenses into their own hands and were thus rightly immune to criticisms of their measures and methods.

What Boteach forget to tell his audience is that the state of Israel couldn’t experience the Holocaust as a state since it came into being only later.

When someone from the audience interrupts Wiesel, shouting something about Rwanda’s involvement in the war in Eastern Congo, Kagame’s guards are quick to aggressively escort him out. The rabbi is furious: “How dare you?” he says in the direction of the protester, “the man [Weisel] has his birthday tomorrow.”

Talking about Israel’s defense measures is obviously a good opportunity to bring up Iran and its nuclear plans that are, to the Rabbi, “genocide threats”. Boteach reminded Wiesel that he has responsibility in this matter because of his “close relationship” with President Obama. Unfortunately for the moderator, who is also behind the organization of the event, Wiesel actually thinks that the U.S. should negotiate with Iran.

He wants to know from Kagame why don’t you open the Rwandan embassy in Jerusalem and not in Tel Aviv? As an act of solidarity. (BTW, Boteach has a habit of asking Rwandan government officials this question.) In return, says the self-styled Israeli diplomat, you should have been the ones to sit in the front row at Shimon Peres’ birthday extravaganza.

What the Rabbi or none of the other participants on the state doesn’t say is that the official Israel, as well as Israeli arms dealers, actually contribute quite a few to the armed conflict in Rwanda. An article that was published by the Israeli newspaper Maariv (which Adelson has tried to buy) last year collected many testimonies and revealed new information about arms shipments from Israel to Rwanda during the genocide.

“We feel very strongly about relating to the Jewish people and Israel,” responds Kagame (who is also mentioned in the Maariv’s article as someone who had his fair share of using Israeli arms), “but I prefer to move step by step, we don’t want make it too much of a hot subject.”

The evening ends with Michael Steinhardt, hedge fund manager and co-founder of the Birthright project (which takes young Jews from around the world to Israel), giving the concluding remarks. He announces that we’ll celebrate Ellie Wiesel birthday now. Sheldon Adelson turned 80 years old two months ago, but he received a gift as well.

In Sudan, “freedom for my mum”

In Sudan, the numbers of women political prisoners are rising, largely because the numbers of women protesting the government and the state are rising. Last week, in response to both economic difficulties stemming from South Sudan’s independence (and loss of oil revenues) and World Bank ‘advice’, the government of Sudan ended gas subsidies. Good ‘economic’ sense? Doubtful. A hardship for working households, and in particular for women? Definitely, thanks to the impact on both transportation and household goods.

So, again, the women of Sudan took to the streets. Last year, around this time, women university students protested the astronomical rise in meal and transportation costs. The protests spread like wildfire, and the government remained in place. The struggle continued. Women’s groups and others have continued to organize in the intervening period.

When the news of the new price hikes hit, women hit the streets. This time the protests started in rural areas and cities other than Khartoum, places like Madani, where novelist Rania Mamoun engaged in peaceful protest. She, her sister and brother, along with others, were hauled off, beaten, threatened, intimidated.

Then the protests moved to the capital. Again, women set the spark. Some ask if the current wave of protests is another ‘Arab spring.’ Perhaps. But they are also and more importantly the newest chapter in the continent’s IMF Riots.

On Monday, social media activist, and ironically World Bank employee, Dalia El Roubi, was arrested … or at least taken away. Apparently, she had participated in a funeral procession for Salah Sanhouri, gunned down in last week’s protests. And now … she is in the hands of the National Intelligence and Security Services, NISS, which means she could be anywhere.

None of this is new. Sudanese women have been organizing and struggling for both their own autonomy and power, and for a progressive nation-State, for decades. In the 1950s, the Sudanese Women’s Union formed and organized publicly through the 1960s. In the 1970s it had to go underground, and continued to organize. From 1985 to 1989, it organized, once again, out in the open, until the Bashir coup, when it was once again relegated to the underground. At the same time, the Republic Brothers was persecuted for their progressive positions on women’s equality and personal status laws.

Sudanese women have been organizing for a long time. They have organized against the public order police, women like Amira Osman, Sara, Halima, Amena and others currently on trial, awaiting and contesting punishment. They have organized against various kinds of austerity measures. Dalia El Roubi protested against austerity last year, and again this year. And now, her family, friends, and others wonder where she is.

On Monday, students at al-Ahfad women’s university demonstrated, and were assaulted by police. Yesterday, Thursday, women and children protested, outside the NISS offices. Their message was simple: “Freedom for my mum.”

Their message is simple. Freedom.

Presidents for Life

African print fabrics are a hot commodity in mainstream fashion these days. This is polarizing since their use by Western designers eclipses the use by African brands which are rarely in the mainstream spotlight because of such forceful cultural appropriation. Enter President For Life, a brand that does not ignore, obscure, or varnish its origins, pitching luxury in, of all things that one could imagine, men’s underwear. These are definitely not FEED bags nor Tom Shoes that will save the Continent though their products claim to empower African artisans through fair trade. No fast fashion here. Their boxer shorts are limited editions handmade in Ghana by old-school tailors who are masters of their craft. The brand is owned by a Brooklyn-based Ghanaian, Egya Appiah, and sources its high quality cotton fabric from one of Ghana’s oldest and most renowned textile companies.

The whole concept is a statement about the representation of Africans in fashion, art, and politics. Ironic and slyly subversive, the brand name attempts to reclaim the honorific seized upon by tinpot dictators (or more complex visionaries who became dictatorial like Kwame Nkrumah who features prominently on the website) that are caricatured in still persisting popular notions of what a typical African leader looks like: a bloodthirsty kleptocrat like Mobutu, Bokassa or Mugabe.

The brand uses imagery by Brooklyn based photographer J. Quazi King (above and below).

The story of Chima Okorie, the Nigerian architecture student who became the hero of Indian football

He never played for the Super Eagles, but in India there’s only one Nigerian footballer everybody knows: Chima Okorie.

Here are some excerpts from a new piece by Kanishk Tharoor (some readers may also know his brother Ishaan Tharoor) on football in India. He reflects on the lure of glitzy Champions League footballers to Indian fans, in particular the extraordinary appeal of Lionel Messi, who came with Argentina to play a meaningless but nonetheless “prestigious” international friendly in 2011, and the wider question of what all this means for the domestic game in India.

The whole piece is well worth reading, but here are some juicy extracts on Chima Okorie.

There was a time when India’s domestic game kept international stars of its own. Indian leagues have long boasted a smattering of foreign players, mostly from the Middle East, Africa and, unsurprisingly, Brazil, which exports its surplus of talent to the remotest provinces of the game. Most of these players lead itinerant careers, drifting from club to club, country to country, rarely putting down roots in India. Some, however, do manage to form closer bonds with Indian football. I fondly remember a Kolkata talisman from an earlier period, the muscular Nigerian forward Chima Okorie. An architecture student turned bulldozing striker, he made a name for himself in the 1980s and 1990s, winning titles with a number of clubs across the country. Okorie rose to prominence at a time when the lights of the outside football world did not burn so brightly in India, when the local game was not so obscured by their glare.

Watching Messi scamper about the artificial pitch of Salt Like Stadium, I found myself thinking of my first visit to the hulking arena in the late 1990s, a time when India’s pretensions of grandeur were far more circumspect and the summer rains still made puddles out of the center circle. Despite the mud, there was something utterly glorious about the place. A full house of 120,000 people (far more than the number that came to watch Leo Messi) crammed its three tiers of terraces. Most of them had come down the jangling airport road that binds Kolkata to its eastern outskirts, packed in buses and the backs of trucks, clinging to the rumps of motorcycles, all the while flying their colors—the vegetal green and aubergine of Mohun Bagan, and the yellow and red of archrivals East Bengal. The colors streamed across the stadium in the thickening din. Men sat squeezed together on the terrace steps, hugging their knees, chatting and laughing, passing around cigarettes and bidis, occasionally catapulting great bursts of betel leaf juice against the pillars, their bases stained red by years of spitting.

I stood with the supporters in green and maroon, those of Mohun Bagan, the traditional team of Kolkata and of my family, followed by my grandfather since the 1930s. For decades, their clashes with East Bengal (founded by men from the eponymous region, now known as the country of Bangladesh) have been the biggest fixtures on Kolkata’s and India’s footballing calendar. Rather than in the team’s rickety ground inside the city, these matches are played in the giant Salt Lake Stadium, a colossal venue appropriate for the occasion. By any measure, the Kolkata derby is a big deal. It has been the subject of numerous books, films and plays. It divides families, friends and neighbourhoods. And it even helps determine the local prices of seafood, with each team’s fans spending prodigiously on rival species of fish should they win. Here, footballing faultlines run deep as the sea.

As the teams came out, the roar of the crowd rolled back and forth across the stadium. I have no idea what the other half chanted, but the Mohun Bagan end was swallowed in the repetition of a single name, over and over again, rising in pitch and fervor as a tall dark man waved in our direction. “Chima, Chima, Chima, Cheeeeeeeema,” we yelled.

Chima Okorie was one of Kolkata’s original international football icons. Like many of India’s conquerors, his path to greatness was accidental. He arrived from Nigeria in 1984 not as an athlete but as an architecture student. Success with his university team somehow magicked him into the chaotic realm of Indian professional football. A burly striker with a powerful shot, Okorie spent most of the next ten years with Kolkata’s three biggest teams. His last move within the city saw him swap East Bengal for Mohun Bagan (the first transfer in the Indian game to surpass Rs. 500,000), where for many years he continued to top the scoring charts and pile up the trophies. Those were his glory days.

Greatness in Kolkata convinced Okorie that Europe beckoned, a silly idea in retrospect. Failed trials at Leeds and Notts County were followed by desultory spells with Peterborough, Grimsby and Torquay, and two bumbling seasons in Scandinavian football. In the end, Okorie packed his bags and returned to where he was loved. He rejoined Mohun Bagan in 1997, very much in the dusk of his career.

That day was the first and last time I saw Okorie play (he would eventually be suspended in 1999 for two years for assaulting a referee, a ban that effectively ushered him into retirement). But even then, when visibly labored and clumsy in his passing, his every touch drew cheers from the crowd. A blistering free kick, invariably over the bar, still won applause. The fans weren’t stupid; they cheered for their memory of him as much as for the creaking man before them. Thousands of better footballers scratch about the low and high leagues of the world, never knowing a fraction of this adoration, nor hearing their names intoned by so many in the fleeting, magical chorus of real faith.

* Full disclosure: several AIAC contributors are involved in some way with the series that Kanishk’s piece appeared in, The Far Post, a co-production of Roads and Kingdoms and Sports Illustrated.

“Democracy is the Best Form of Democracy”

Let’s say you’re a pirate and you want to design an embassy, which you would use to:

a) reproduce the symbols of national sovereignty;

b) while challenging ideas about public authority and the normal jurisdiction of the state;

c) preen, strut, store expensive things, and maybe do a little spying with CCTV cameras…

…you’d want talk to Kiluanji Kia Henda and Paulo Moreira, because they’ve just built something similar in The Nation Room – Embassy of No Land. As their title suggests, these guys have constructed a diplomatic office that doesn’t claim allegiance to a particular time or place. Instead, their embassy is offered as a rehearsal space, where the postures of governing authorities can be studied, debated, and perverted. The fact that it’s installed in a Portuguese palace from the 18th century just makes it more fun, and a bit more pointed.

Henda is an Angolan visual artist­ — we wrote about the way he uses photographs as “pliable fictions” when he turned Luanda into the launch center for Angola’s mission to the sun (here and here). Moreira is a Portuguese architect who studies urban regeneration in Luanda — his interview with the curators of the Angolan pavilion in Venice is here. Their collaboration at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale goes a long way in an otherwise largely Eurocentric meeting of the minds (full disclosure: I’m also a participant).

Within the room, a few permanent props encourage participants to consider the shortcomings of established forms of popular rule. A voting booth asks visitors to tick a box for or against democracy (and runs all the answers through a shredder); a black and white collage documents an impossible rally­­­­­­, which references fascist protagonists and post-colonial state at the same time. Beyond these props, the embassy is an assembly hall designed to give activists of varying political persuasions a new audience. Optimistically this is a public audience, but it’s also a time for activists to look at themselves.

The Nation Room conceives of the relationship between public space and positions of power as a hall of mirrors. Covered in reflective surfaces, the voting booth, high chair, and negotiating table invite monitoring, surveillance, and certain spectacles. For example, participants can only see themselves in an executive-style portrait if they stand up on the table or chair (positions which, given the context, signal great charisma, vanity, or desperation). And those that choose to sit on the table for a more friendly chat can’t see themselves as the head of a spidery mass of legs. During the opening week, when an international NGO ignored the design of the room and instead plastered the mirrored table with pamphlets on how you, a visitor to an art show, could sponsor African children and pay for their private schools, it was an instant parody of participation and engagement. Of course other residents at the embassy have been more intentional. Candidato Vieira (aka Portugal’s Stephen Colbert and wannabe frontrunner in the country’s 2011 presidential elections) reminded his audience that Democracy is the best form of Democracy, before his speech devolved into a maddening audio feedback loop.

Regardless of the participants’ behavior, the embassy passively interrogates the roles material, corporeal, psychic, and aesthetic concerns play in the political process. Some questions should be asked directly though. For example, if The Nation Room is a political act, who or what does it threaten? We’re glad that the embassy has a wing online, so that questions about representation and authority can be engaged after the performances.

I’m also interested to see what will be done about the space between audio-visual experiences in the palace, and their transition to mediated online forms. On that note, it’s worth remembering that evangelical communities have been some of the most successful adopters of digital communication technologies. Consider for example, the massively successfully Brazilian and Nigerian televangelist networks, which talk politics as they offer to heal the terminally ill through prayer. Certainly, these leaders are controversial, and their “miracles” are often described as clever editing. Yet, someone like TB Joshua is said to have more power with African leaders and publics than the President of the African Union. How would The Embassy of No Land change if religious activists were participating? And where do we have a critical conversation about the role of religion in government?

Images of the installation below; click to enlarge. The Nation Room – Embassy of No Land is part of The Real And Other Fictions, Close, Closer – 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale (curated by Mariana Pestana) which runs at Palacio Pombal until 15 December 2013.

Electronic Display for a New Order (Code of Conduct) – welcoming piece at The Nation Room – Embassy of No Land.
Photo: Paulo Moreira & Kiluanji Kia Henda.

Elements of power: throne, flags, portrait. Photo: Luke Hayes.

Pirate flags…

…or neutral insignia of a fictional Nation? Images: Paulo Moreira & Kiluanji Kia Henda.

Raquel Varela and Rui Zink giving the opening talk: “A Modest Proposal to Pull the Country Out of the Crisis”.
Photo: Valter Vinagre.

The Nation Room in action: the Urban Boundaries Project bringing together academics and the Cape-Verdian community of Terras da Costa, Southern Lisbon (mirrored urn in the background). Photo: Renan Laporta.

A sea of people as leaders…

…or a leader in a desert? Images: Paulo Moreira & Kiluanji Kia Henda.

Candidato Vieira giving his maddening, repetitive speech: “Democracy is as natural as cold water. / Democracy is the best form of Democracy. / Democracy is controlling thinking. / Democracy is voting always in the same democrats.” CCTV still.

Kiluanji Kia Henda and Paulo Moreira in the The Nation Room – Embassy of No Land.
Photo: Luke Hayes.