Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 478

Making “Man on Ground”

Here’s a short behind-the-scenes video piece for those who enjoyed Akin Omotoso’s well-received film “Man on Ground”. (We reviewed it here.) Snippets and anecdotes include those on: The Beginning / The Story / The Funding (crowd-funded initially) / The Shoot, The Cast, The Crew / “Trouble in Paradise” (or: when they feared the production would shut down; miraculously “saved by AK Tshabalala” and then some other institutions) / why everyone is dressed in black – concurrent with the “theme of the film” / and, finally, the Festival Reception (a runaway success).

When the Material Writes Itself: Jon Stewart, Bassem Youssef and the Muslim Brotherhood

When watching Bassem Youssef skillfully deliver satiric political commentary on “El-Bernameg” (The Program), it is impossible not to be almost startled by the resemblance to Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show”. The similar set and the fact that, let’s be honest, they kind of look the same, doesn’t help. Youssef’s recent legal trouble in Egypt – namely being charged with “insulting the president and Islam” – has received significant coverage. The back-story is worth getting caught up on, especially if you’re a fan of Jon Stewart, who had Youssef on his show last June, and also dedicated an impressively long portion of his show last Monday to protest the charges against his “brother” Bassem. The charges were dropped on Saturday, but beyond a minor diplomatic skirmish, this debacle has brought renewed attention – nationally and internationally – to the clumsy, yet alarming behaviour of President Mohammed Morsi, and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

Egyptians tend to be known for two things (no not that): a good sense of humor, and a seemingly insatiable desire to talk politics. Given this, it is little surprise Youssef’s show has proven so popular. As he put it to Stewart in June: “We broke ground in television programming because now people say, ‘He actually says what we want to say’.” It is also hardly surprising that Morsi feels threatened by the popular stylings of a political satirist, despite Stewart’s insistence that he should not. The great discomfort felt by the presidency toward the same powerful civil society that enabled his ascent, not to mention the very real social and economic problems he inherited, becomes increasingly evident with each clumsy, counterintuitive step he takes. For Egyptians, this latest high-profile move is just another misstep in a long string of bad decisions.

However, Youssef being charged does bring to light a larger problem that has reemerged, with a vengeance, in Morsi’s Egypt: Freedom of the press. Depending on their political leanings, Egyptians viewed Mubarak’s influence over the media on a broad spectrum, ranging from almost complete censorship to virtual freedom. As a colleague put it to me once: “Mubarak allowed the press to be relatively free, he knew the people needed an outlet to voice discontent, and this is the venue he allowed.” Whether this was the case, or Mubarak was simply more skilled at silencing dissent, is perhaps no longer relevant. However what has become apparent is the determination of the new leadership to control content.

In the 2011/2012 Reporters Without Borders (RSF) global press freedom index, Egypt fell 39 places from 127 to 166. This was partially the result of repression that occurred during the period of Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) rule prior to Morsi’s election; however things seem to have only worsened since then. As prominent rights lawyer Gamal Eid articulated recently “there have been four times as many lawsuits for “insulting the president” in Morsi’s first 200 days in office than during the entire 30 years that Mubarak ruled.”

As he pointed out last week, for eight years Stewart’s career revolved around mocking the president, and just like George W., Morsi’s material pretty much writes itself. So far, his threats seem only to be galvanizing his critics to become even louder. Let us just hope that in a few years, Egypt has the opportunity to “make fun of a president they actually like.”

How to Paint Ghosts: An Interview with Ivorian artist Aboudia

“Artists don’t create reality they make phantasms”, using a kind of “fantastical technique to produce an artificial dream for the waking world”. At least that’s what Plato thought. In the paintings of Aboudia, we cannot be sure if the figures are alive or dead, if the nightmare they inhabit is reality or fabrication. The figures are drawn in the brutal and naive style of a child, but they are not so easily identified: these are not the same photogenic children pictured on adverts for development funds and charities, inviting paternalistic investment, but sketchy, ghostly figures whose mouths are not prettily silent or widely smiling but cancelled out, eyes not vacant but withdrawn, their speech impossible and thoughts illegible, they are unavailable to the viewer, but their unknowability confronts us like a crisis.

Aboudia Abdoulaye Diarrassouba was born in Côte d’Ivoire in 1983, and studied in Bingerville before setting up his studio in Abidjan. He first reached an international audience during the siege of Abidjan in 2011, when the conflict came close to his studio. Two years later, his work has exhibited in Africa, Europe and America, and bought by influential contemporary art collectors including Charles Saatchi, Jean Pigozzi and Frank Cohen. This is no doubt a testament to growing market interests in under-developed regions of African contemporary art, an unsurprising taste in art’s witness to authentic conflicts, but also to Aboudia’s singular vision and vigorous work ethic, the apparent synthesis of American avant-garde traditions and the graffiti of youths in the communities where he lives.

Jean-Michel Basquiat is often cited as an influence, which may seem an irritating and predictable way to establish the value of a young painter’s work, but here it seems necessary: Aboudia made a recent series of watercolours on pages torn out of a Warhol catalogue. If these American influences appear to be at the foundation of the work, they have been worked over and blotted out with, with playful antagonism towards these American authorities which have serious implications in the paintings’ subject matter: the occupation of Abidjan by UN peacekeepers. The question of influence reflects a social contradiction at the heart of Aboudia’s work, the productiveness of these foreign influences, and the work’s persistent naivity, locating its primary significance in local experience.

Aboudia’s London gallerist, Jack Bell describes Aboudia’s first trip to London, for the opening of his exhibition in 2011:

“We checked out the Tate Modern where we looked at huge canvases by Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly – Aboudia was impressed by the mural scale and the loose style. Aboudia picked up a lot of books on traditional African art. He was absolutely blown away by the warehouse scale art supply shops in Shoreditch and went bananas.”

His work – pictured here – was recently exhibited in his second solo show at Jack Bell’s gallery, and it exhibits a continuation of the same interest in social inequality but Aboudia’s style has developed. In the newer work figures are drawn over other figures, whose partly-obscured faces persist in a state of permanent surprise, to find themselves partly erased, the canvases full of noise and colour, the business of violence-as-usual.

Bell describes Aboudia’s work most recent work as such: “Imagery and collage been drawn from the Financial Times, traditional African art, pornography and the people that make up Aboudia’s local neighbourhoods. Works build up the same multi-media layering to which paint and crayon is then applied.”

Shortly before the end of his second solo show in London we emailed the artist with some questions about his work.

What are your first memories of painting? And who taught you to make art?

I always knew how to draw and when I grew up I went to the Centre Technique des Arts Appliqués de Bingerville to take courses in art and mural-painting.

I saw an image of one of your paintings called “Children Reading”, and I read that you think education is the thing which will most change your country – so how are children, the way they see the world – important to your work?

The place of children in my work is very important, in that it is these children I love the most, who inspire me, and who are at the foundation of what I create. Our vision of the world is positive: of a world without war, without children on the streets, without children orphaned by war, without children mistreated, a world for children who are happy, joyful, educated and in good health.

Your paintings are often drawn or written across the surface of the canvas, rather than creating an appearance of depth – is graffiti important to you?

Yes, graffiti is important for me, for it allows me to express myself through the youth.

Your work often uses collage, pieces of newspaper or magazines – could you tell us something about how you choose these materials? And, do you think the viewer will read the print?

I’ll say that all the paper I use as collage are educational materials, and when we talk about education in this job it’s important to find educational elements in the works we make, not so that the spectator reads it, but at the same time, if the viewer readers it all the better.

Your first exhibition at Jack Bell’s gallery had as its title Les Fantômes, and the bodies in your paintings often seem to be transparent, ghostly – are your paintings haunted?

Yes my works are haunted by the memory of all the children, whether they are red yellow black white, by their dreams, ambition etc…

Your work has been received with enthusiasm in England, and elsewhere internationally, but can you tell me about how it is received in the Côte d’Ivoire?

At the beginning my art wasn’t well received but now everyone is talking about my fortune and one thing is clear that I work to make no one happy, that I do what I’ve been doing recently to carry the thoughts and dreams of the children and childhood.

Has traveling outside the Côte d’Ivoire influenced your style of painting?

Yes for sure, but I’ve always tried to maintain the foundations, and tried to do more by adding to that what we see elsewhere, because art is the search for new sensations.

Are there living artists who have influenced you?

I don’t see any living artists who inspire me at the moment, except for the drawings of the youth of Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, make on the walls of [communities on the peripheries of Abidjan] Abobo, Yopougon, Threchville…

You often paint on large canvases – does painting on a large scale allow you to present images in a different way? Does it allow you to think about history or politics in a different way?

Large format paintings allow me to think of dreams in the largeness and in the same colours of those youth who roam the streets, painting on the large walls we find all around us.

Now that your work is being exhibited in London and New York, are there aspects which a non-Ivorian viewer will not understand?

I don’t think much aspects of my work will be missed by New Yorkers or Londoners since all courageous people, with large hearts, sensible to the cause of the youth will support us, just by coming to the exhibitions organized by Jack Bell and others. For us, it’s great, it’s enormous.

Aboudia lives and works in Abidjan, and also part-time in Brooklyn, New York. Future exhibitions include a solo show at Jack Bell Gallery, London, 2014.

How to Paint Ghosts: An Interview with Aboudia

Artists, Plato wrote, “create phantasms not reality” and practice a “fantastical technique” in order to produce “a sort of man-made dream created for those who are awake.” In Aboudia’s paintings, we cannot be sure if the figures are alive or dead, if the nightmare they inhabit is reality or fabrication. The figures are drawn in the brutal and naive style of a child, but they are not so easily identified: these are not the same photogenic children pictured on adverts for development funds and charities, inviting paternalistic investment, but sketchy, ghostly figures whose mouths are not prettily silent or widely smiling but cancelled out, eyes not vacant but withdrawn, their speech impossible and thoughts illegible, they are unavailable to the viewer, but their unknowability confronts us like a crisis.

Aboudia Abdoulaye Diarrassouba was born in Côte d’Ivoire in 1983, and studied in Bingerville before setting up his studio in Abidjan. He first reached an international audience during the siege of Abidjan in 2011, when the conflict came close to his studio. Two years later, his work has exhibited in Africa, Europe and America, and bought by influential contemporary art collectors including Charles Saatchi, Jean Pigozzi and Frank Cohen. This is no doubt a testament to growing market interests in under-developed regions of African contemporary art, an unsurprising taste in art’s witness to authentic conflicts, but also to Aboudia’s singular vision and vigorous work ethic, the apparent synthesis of American avant-garde traditions and the graffiti of youths in the communities where he lives.

Jean-Michel Basquiat is often cited as an influence, which may seem an irritating and predictable way to establish the value of a young painter’s work, but here it seems necessary: Aboudia made a recent series of watercolours on pages torn out of a Warhol catalogue. If these American influences appear to be at the foundation of the work, they have been worked over and blotted out with, with playful antagonism towards these American authorities which have serious implications in the paintings’ subject matter: the occupation of Abidjan by UN peacekeepers. The question of influence reflects a social contradiction at the heart of Aboudia’s work, the productiveness of these foreign influences, and the work’s persistent naivity, locating its primary significance in local experience.

Aboudia’s London gallerist, Jack Bell describes Aboudia’s first trip to London, for the opening of his exhibition in 2011:

“We checked out the Tate Modern where we looked at huge canvases by Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly – Aboudia was impressed by the mural scale and the loose style. Aboudia picked up a lot of books on traditional African art. He was absolutely blown away by the warehouse scale art supply shops in Shoreditch and went bananas.”

His work – pictured here – was recently exhibited in his second solo show at Jack Bell’s gallery, and it exhibits a continuation of the same interest in social inequality but Aboudia’s style has developed. In the newer work figures are drawn over other figures, whose partly-obscured faces persist in a state of permanent surprise, to find themselves partly erased, the canvases full of noise and colour, the business of violence-as-usual.

Bell describes Aboudia’s work most recent work as such: “Imagery and collage been drawn from the Financial Times, traditional African art, pornography and the people that make up Aboudia’s local neighbourhoods. Works build up the same multi-media layering to which paint and crayon is then applied.”

We emailed the artist about his work, and plans for the future.

What are your first memories of painting? And who taught you to make art?

I always knew how to draw and when I grew up I went to the Centre Technique des Arts Appliqués de Bingerville to take courses in art and mural-painting.

I saw an image of one of your paintings called “Children Reading”, and I read that you think education is the thing which will most change your country – so how are children, the way they see the world – important to your work?

The place of children in my work is very important, in that it is these children I love the most, who inspire me, and who are at the foundation of what I create. Our vision of the world is positive: of a world without war, without children on the streets, without children orphaned by war, without children mistreated, a world for children who are happy, joyful, educated and in good health.

Your paintings are often drawn or written across the surface of the canvas, rather than creating an appearance of depth – is graffiti important to you?

Yes, graffiti is important for me, for it allows me to express myself through the youth.

Your work often uses collage, pieces of newspaper or magazines – could you tell us something about how you choose these materials? And, do you think the viewer will read the print?

I’ll say that all the paper I use as collage are educational materials, and when we talk about education in this job it’s important to find educational elements in the works we make, not so that the spectator reads it, but at the same time, if the viewer readers it all the better.

Your first exhibition at Jack Bell’s gallery had as its title Les Fantômes, and the bodies in your paintings often seem to be transparent, ghostly – are your paintings haunted?

Yes my works are haunted by the memory of all the children, whether they are red yellow black white, by their dreams, ambition etc…

Your work has been received with enthusiasm in England, and elsewhere internationally, but can you tell me about how it is received in the Côte d’Ivoire?

At the beginning my art wasn’t well received but now everyone is talking about my fortune and one thing is clear that I work to make no one happy, that I do what I’ve been doing recently to carry the thoughts and dreams of the children and childhood.

Has traveling outside the Côte d’Ivoire influenced your style of painting?

Yes for sure, but I’ve always tried to maintain the foundations, and tried to do more by adding to that what we see elsewhere, because art is the search for new sensations.

Are there living artists who have influenced you?

I don’t see any living artists who inspire me at the moment, except for the drawings of the youth of Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, make on the walls of [communities on the peripheries of Abidjan] Abobo, Yopougon, Threchville…

You often paint on large canvases – does painting on a large scale allow you to present images in a different way? Does it allow you to think about history or politics in a different way?

Large format paintings allow me to think of dreams in the largeness and in the same colours of those youth who roam the streets, painting on the large walls we find all around us.

Now that your work is being exhibited in London and New York, are there aspects which a non-Ivorian viewer will not understand?

I don’t think much aspects of my work will be missed by New Yorkers or Londoners since all courageous people, with large hearts, sensible to the cause of the youth will support us, just by coming to the exhibitions organized by Jack Bell and others. For us, it’s great, it’s enormous.

Aboudia lives and works in Abidjan, and also part-time in Brooklyn, New York. Future exhibitions include a solo show at Jack Bell Gallery, London, 2014.

The Afronauts nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize

On April 19th, the Deutsche Börse photography prize will open at London’s Photographers’ Gallery. Awarded annually since 1996, the prize has an impressive list of recipients — Jeurgen Teller, Walid Raad, Paul Graham, John Stezaker, to name but a few. But it seems that, although the prize’s shortlist has always been international, the jury has shifted its focus ever so slightly to the ‘global south’ in recent years.

Last year’s shortlist featured Pieter Hugo, the South African photographer who was nominated for his publication Permanent Error (2011), which documented the sprawling e-waste sites that skirt Accra. The photographs were powerful for they revealed the fallacy of our naive thinking that digital technologies are somehow ethereal. Hugo’s images, cloaked in the thick smoke of burning rubber, immortalize chipped and sharp electronics boards, keyboards caked in dirt, and infinite wires connecting nothing to nowhere, embedded into the mud like electric earthworms. These images question the morality of our digital consumption, and firmly re-instate the material costs into our consciousness.

Jim Goldberg’s images won him the prize in 2011. In his Open See exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery in 2010 Goldberg documented the experiences of refugee, immigrant and trafficked populations across the world, creating an ephemeral installation essaying migration and escape.

And this year, perhaps following with the theme of a future gone to seed and of escape fantasies, the jury has shortlisted Cristina De Middel for her self-published book The Afronauts.

“In 1964, after gaining independence, Zambia started a space programme led by Edward Makuka Nkoloso, sole member of the unheard of National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy. The programme, whose aim was to send the first African astronauts to Mars, was soon cancelled, becoming no more than an amusing anecdote in the country’s history. In The Afronauts De Middel creates a subjective version of the story engaging with myths and truths. The book is comprised of a series of constructed colour photographs, sequenced alongside drawings and reproductions of letters, resulting in a fictional portrait of a national dream.” You can read more about Middel’s motivations for the project here.

The project reminds me of Kiluanji Kia Henda’s project Icarus 13, which treated photograph as ‘pliable fiction’ and invented a space mission which cleverly recasts our view of Angola, and Africa more generally, as a source of endless myths both fantastical and speculative. The hoax at the centre of the project (image below) – that Angola had a space mission and built a NASA-style mission complex – appropriates odd buildings in Luanda as the sites for Henda’s derelict future. A Luanda football stadium is the launch pad, an unfinished cinema plays the role of a space observatory, and the spaceship is Neto’s incomplete Russian-built mausoleum.

Middel’s beautifully produced book is a scrapbook of an imagined futurity, which doesn’t seem to inhabit any chronology. Partly staged, partly crudely doctored, partly observation, her photographs are playful and humorous, but introduce a set of imagined circumstances which elude clear categorisation. Part fashion shoot, part cliché? Someone’s flamboyantly dressed arm poses with an elephant. The astronauts are pretending, clearly, but the debris inexplicably piled in a rural setting might have fallen from the sky, or might be the remnants of a broken programme of industry. Space and time contract.

Watch this space for an exhibition review of Cristina De Middel’s photographs after April 18th.

The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2013 runs from April 19th to June 30th 2013. For more information visit their website www.thephotographersgallery.org.uk

No, Africans don’t remember Margaret Thatcher fondly

Margaret Thatcher died yesterday. Or the day before maybe, I don’t know. At any rate, Thatcher died, and now the hagiographers and the demonizers can have their day. All by herself, apparently, Thatcher “reforged Britain”, “transfixed the United States”, and was “a great leader, a great prime minister and a great Briton.” And how did England’s ‘Iron Lady’ engage with the African continent?

While much attention will be paid, rightly, on Thatcher’s involvements with southern Africa, and in particular with the independence and liberation movements of Zimbabwe and Namibia and the anti-apartheid movements of South Africa, it should be remembered that the country of Africa is more than its southern suburbs.

On one hand, as noted by Onyango Oloo, National Coordinator for the Kenyan Social Forum 2006 and member of the Nairobi Organizing Council for the World Social Forum Nairobi 2007, Thatcher was known as a strong woman who “had, at most, two women ministers appointed and who passed some of the most sexist policies which impacted the movement.” Her commitments, both domestically and globally, were to free market and security, not to women or any other popular, much less disenfranchised or struggling, group. As R. W. Connell commented, “Public politics on almost any definition is men’s politics… Leaders are recruited to office through men’s networks. The few women who do break through, such as Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher, do so by their exceptional use of men’s networks, not women’s.” The same is true for Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, “Africa’s Iron Lady”: “It’s interesting how many commentators remark of Johnson-Sirleaf — and it’s meant as a compliment — that the future president is ‘not really a woman’. Or, as her supporters shouted, “Ellen, she’s our man.”

Other than the considerable accomplishment of breaking through a glass ceiling, Thatcher’s ascendancy didn’t mean a whole lot for women on the continent. Except in South Africa and the frontline states. There the story is worse.

In South Africa, the response, such as it is, to Thatcher’s  death is “mixed”. On one side (predictably), de Klerk, the DA, and the Freedom Front Plus are glowing in their tributes.

Lesiba Seshoka, of the National Union of Mineworkers, has a different view: “She will be remembered as one of the harshest leaders the trade unions in Britain had to face, and many more in the formal colonial countries faced the wrath of her reign of terror.”

Pallo Jordan, who remembers the days when Thatcher insisted that the ANC was a terrorist organization, “I say good riddance. She was a staunch supporter of the apartheid regime. She was part of the rightwing alliance with Ronald Reagan that led to a lot of avoidable deaths. In the end I sat with her in her office with Nelson Mandela in 1991. She knew she had no choice. Although she called us a terrorist organization, she had to shake hands with a terrorist and sit down with a terrorist. So who won?”

And Dali Tambo (son of late ANC leader, Oliver) remembers the “terrorism”-charge as well: “My gut reaction now is what it was at the time when she said my father was the leader of a terrorist organisation. I don’t think she ever got it that every day she opposed sanctions, more people were dying, and that the best thing for the assets she wanted to protect was democracy.”

Some have ‘credited’ Thatcher’s neoliberal policies, and policing, with contributing to the HIV-pandemic in Swaziland and elsewhere, in particular by forcing “cutting government spending on social services (such as public healthcare)”. Others note that Thatcher’s energetic opposition to sanctions and support for right wing forces in what became Zimbabwe and Namibia prolonged the state of violence across the breadth of southern Africa.

Who then was Margaret Thatcher? Ask Fela Kuti. Consider the above cover of his album, “Beasts of No Nation” (1989). It featured a horrific tableau of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, P.W. Botha, and Mobutu Sese Seko, all with bloody rat’s teeth, dwarfed by Fela’s huge head. In the corner was a quote from Botha, the inspiration for the title track: “This uprising will bring out the beast in us!”

Or consider the lyrics to “Beasts of No Nation”, first released in 1978:

Dem call the place, the “United Nations”

Hear-oh another animal talk

Wetin united inside “United Nations”?

Who & who unite, for “United Nations”?

No be there Thatcher & Argentina dey

No be there Reagan & Lib-i-ya dey

Is-i-rael versus Lebanon

Iran-i-oh versus Iraq-i

East West Block versus West Block East

No be there dem dey oh- United Nations

Dis “united” United Nations

One veto vote is equal to 92 [...or more or more]

What kind sense be dat, na animal sense

What kind sense be dat? Dat be Thatcher sense, and it’s still very much alive. So, if you can, take a second and catch up with Fela Kuti … in honor of Margaret Thatcher.

Margaret Thatcher est morte

If you wonder what we make of he legacy of Lady Thatcher (as Fox and Russ Limbaugh and every TV anchor in the United States can’t stop saying), this will suffice: In 1984, she invited South African dictator PW Botha on a state visit to No.10 Downing Street. With this Botha became the first leader of the Apartheid regime accorded the privilege of a state visit to UK since 1961–the year South Africa left the Commonwealth over their refusal to end white minority rule. That same Margaret Thatcher called Nelson Mandela and the opposition to white minority rule in South Africa “terrorists.” In other news, the last Apartheid leader FW de Klerk (still a defender of Apartheid as late as May 2012) defended “his friend” Margaret Thatcher. That’s just South Africa. Colm Tobin, from Ireland, tweeted: “Not a lot of love for #Thatcher in Ireland. As an enemy of the state she sits somewhere between Cromwell & Thierry Henry.” Even Manchester United agreed: The club is not having any minute of silence for Mrs Thatcher this weekend. The last word goes to the American writer and journalist, Barbara Ehrenreich, who said: “I thank Margaret Thatcher for putting to rest the essentialist fallacy that women are inherently more moral than men.”

Wogdog Blues for Burkina Faso: An Interview with Art Melody

Art Melody, the Burkina Faso-based gruff-voiced emcee who also completes the high-octane duo Waga3000, came to my attention through the group’s 2012 song entitled “Dal fo yikin bao”, which translates to “remain strong and feisty”. Their furious spit-fire flow, reminiscent of what had attracted me to Senegalese emcees, invited me into their world. Then a bit over a month ago, I received a copy of Art Melody’s Wogdog Blues, his third since his breakthrough debut in 2009. He was taken off of Ouaga’s taxi ranks, where he used to work and would kick the odd rhyme every now and then, into Europe, the continent that once landed him in prison attempting to reach it.

“I left Burkina Faso in 1998,” he shot back in an e-mail conversation. His intention was to go to Côte d’Ivoire, perhaps even settle there. Two years down the line, and after he had already written his first raps, Art Melody had a change of heart. “I left Côte d’Ivoire for Mali, then Gambia, Senegal, Mauritania…”, he says of the  journey which saw him end up in an Algerian prison for weeks. He was shuttered! He admits to being bitter  because of the experience. He does, however, have what he refers to as “inspiring memories”.

Art Melody returned to Burkina Faso with a strong resolve. “I made the decision to fully concentrate on rap, and now I can come to France in the ‘right’ way,” he says of his life at this point in time.

“Wogdog Blues” is a sonic trip, a design process made manifest before the listener’s audio nexus, an expertly-crafted minimalist artwork which should be hung on the Internet’s walls, exhibited for technophobes and cell-phone freaks across the continent to experience. At its core, the album has producer Redrum holding it together. Art Melody narrates how their meeting came about:

“It wasn’t easy since he was in France and I was in Burkina Faso. Everything happened via email. That said, I don’t think the ‘easy  projects’ are as much appreciated as the complicated ones – when one always gets to make something good. We’re as much a family as we are a team.”

I am yet to hear the first album, “Giling Duni Kanga”, but “Wogdog Blues” (a metaphor for “Dreaming up a Ouaga Blues with Hip-Hop that’s been influenced for a long time by ancestral music” according to the rapper) is, sonically, more mature than “Zound Zandè”,  his 2011 release. Waga 3000′s self-titled project emerged in April 2012. But how did he and Joey le Soldat meet?

“Waga 3000 was born when Joey and I met each other during a radio show, some four years ago, in Ouagadougou.” Both emcees  understood their power as a collective. “Waga 2000 is the name of Ouagadougou’s rich quarter, while all other poor neighbourhoods around it – to us – are named Waga 3000,” he offers, shedding light on the origins of the name.

Burkina Faso, land of the upright people, Sankara’s land. Alas, just as Sankara’s ideals led to his ultimate betrayal, so has the  government continued to fail its citizens. Art Melody recalls: “I was born here and I live here among my people – often without any  education or nutritions…that’s the kind of place I come from.” Sadly, Burkina Faso is not solitary in its social predicaments; he could be in Lesotho, Kenya, Ghana, or Madagascar, and the statement would hold.

Erstwhile Black Uhuru vocalist Michael Rose once crooned about the whole world being Africa, about how it has been ‘divided into  continent states’; about the soul-stripped concrete jungles that we increasingly find ourselves having to navigate – cities without pity. “It’s the same flesh and bone,” adds Rose, as if to ensure that his point is drilled into our consciousness. If Black Uhuru’s observation was accurate, then why are we still so segregated? Why is Melody’s fan base stronger overseas than at home? Is it always necessary to be around for as long as Awadi or Smockey have for him to move within the continent? Anyway, I digress.

Art Melody grew up on the fodder of late-eighties and early-to-mid nineties rap music. He lists among his influences the likes of Public Enemy, Nas, and IAM. His flow, however, has hints of an old RZA. He is unrelenting, fuelled by the rage sparked by his people’s travails.

His given name is Mamadou Konkobo. He grew up in a rough environment with parents who were peasants, “a few terminals away from Bobo Dioulasso” he recalls. This is where Burkina Faso’s economic capital is located. Despite the challenges his family faced, he managed to go to school. Like many thinkers across the African continent and abroad, Art Melody is aware of Thomas Sankara. But he has a deeper connection to his story, and shares his memories of the people’s president:

“I hold good memories of Sankara. He was murdered one day while I was leaving for school.” Melody was still a wee lad then, yet  recalls the day vividly. He tells of the impact of Sankara’s philosophies: “they marked me big time. His discourse, his Pan-African actions, his ideology inspire me a lot and influence my music heavily. It’s by living as Africans that we will become free and independent.”

Art Melody name-checks the likes of Ben Sharpa and Spoek Mathambo, and still counts IAM in his list of influences. He also possesses an immense awareness of his culture outside of rap, embracing and engaging with it expertly in his songs. When he’s not spitting strident raps harkening back to the raw, 90s-era sound of rap music, he’s paying homage to a style of singing his mother passed onto him. “Yes, my flow’s ancestral; I owe it to my mother, a singer of rituals, so I was initiated, and that’s that,” he says.

Success, that elusive thread which tickles our fancy as human beings. Ambition. Art Melody has paid for his ambitious exploits in the past, but his situation is different now: “I discovered the world ‘en route’. I worked with some really great musicians in France. I live, I produce, I have a family that is proud, which is reassuring, but I have not reached my objectives yet. Time and again it feels good and new to them, to see what they have in Europe. To live in Europe is part of my project – the problem is not to leave Africa but to build it.” He argues that every person “should be free everywhere and should live anywhere they want to.” This, he proposes, will possibly foster freer minds and spirits among African youths. But would he consider relocating to Europe? “If my work demands me to live in Europe and to help my country, I would.”

Redrum’s production is hard to pin down. He samples in the Hip-Hop tradition, favouring sparse samples and big drums to achieve a bare-bones song structure which fits the artist’s voice. Says Art Melody: “I have the sound a beat maker needs. Over time one gets closer and closer to ancestral sounds while keeping it Hip-Hop, but also adding blues and even jazz – while still staying real to Hip-Hop.”

Back in Ouaga, the voiceless and downtrodden continue to live without access to basic health and education. “Portrait de Art Melody”, a film by Nicolas Guibert, is just about the realest portrayal of a rapper’s life I’ve ever seen:

I tell him this and ask him about what his intentions were during that period, and his reply – that he did it to “have fun” – reveals vestiges of a rapper who does not necessarily take himself too seriously. He does continue, though, by saying that it was also to be discovered by someone, anyone. And he was. Now his fortunes have turned around for the better, and he is able to provide better for his family. (For another video portrait, by Droit Libre TV, see here.)

Concluding our exchange, I ask him about the state of rap music globally. Does he deem it important for artists to be honest in their exchange with the listeners of their music?

“I think we should reflect the image of where we come from in our music, not to pretend as if all is well in Burkina Faso while the people are struggling. Today’s young people want music that makes them dance, and drink but not to think. Young people need education, and a real integration – not false promises; and that is the mission of today’s artists. The fans are our mirrors.”

“Wogdog Blues” is out on Tentacule Records. Listen to the record over at Akwaaba Music. Art Melody has two gigs coming up in France this week (11 April in Beauvais – L’Ouvre Boîte + Gael Faye, and on the 12th in Paris at La Péniche Antipode). He will be back in France in June this year.

Al Jazeera Goes French

Once again, the Qatari media company, Al Jazeera has announced it is in the advanced stages of launching a French-language news network. It has already confirmed a 5-hour news block to be aired on its English language network aimed at the UK. In the US, the Qatari media company has also bought Current TV, and is setting to officially launch in the United States in April with the slogan, “Inspire, inform, and entertain.” During a press conference held recently in Doha, Al Jazeera’s Director General, Sheikh Ahmed bin Jassim Al-Thani, said that the plans for the potential French network would “build bridges with other cultures and people.” This bridge may not sit well with French media heads, and could be bad news for France 24, the government funded French 24-hour network currently broadcasting worldwide in English, French and Arabic and a channel very popular in North Africa and French speaking countries south of the Sahara.

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy fought hard to keep Al Jazeera from being able to launch a news channel in France. This was definitely aimed at preventing any conflict with the publicly funded France 24, but also to serve as a barrier of competition to other French networks. However, he wholeheartedly supported their purchase of the Ligue 1 football league TV rights.

In 2011, it was reported that Al Jazeera Sport would be launching a French channel after having purchased French domestic audiovisual rights for Ligue 1. They scooped up one of five rights packages to be able to show two live games a week from the French for a cool 90 million Euros. Soon after, they launched BeIn Sport, a global network of sports channels (btw, they have the contract to show matches of the US men’s national team live). This purchase served as a blow for Canal +, the major French network for sports.

Now, France 24 will be in direct competition with Al Jazeera for viewership in Africa, and certainly in France itself. (Full disclosure: I have freelanced largely with France 24, and once for Al Jazeera.) France 24 has a huge viewership in Africa and used that advantage to good effect. On the ground, correspondents were in Mali during the recent occupation of the country’s north by Islamists followed by the French invasion. Shortly after the killing of the US ambassador in Libya, France 24 reported around the clock on developments inside the country using their extensive database of local activists and “Observers.”

Despite Al Jazeera’s association with the “Arab Spring,” France 24 Arabic has been more popular than Al Jazeera in certain Maghreb countries.

South of the Sahara, Al Jazeera has had to deal with censorship in Ethiopia. The network claims that Ethiopian authorities have declined to comment on the possible censorship. An anonymous blogger is reported as saying that the authorities blocked the sites after Al Jazeera aired coverage of protests against how spiritual leaders were elected in Ethiopia.

That said, France 24 Arabic is now experiencing a depreciation of viewership in some regions, according to Slate Afrique. Much for the same reasons as Al Jazeera’s run with unpopularity, France 24 Arabic has been accused of spreading a French agenda in its broadcasts. France 24 Francais has continued to do very well on the continent, but well-funded Al Jazeera could seriously hamper their efforts. (France 24 has an English channel too.)

The larger theme of Al Jazeera launching a French channel is not a conflict with just France 24. French channels will also be competing with Al Jazeera on their home turf. Non-Arabic or English speaking French citizens, whether Black, Arab or White, seeking a different vantage point would be interested in an alternative outlet coming from outside of France itself. This is a bit unprecedented in a country like France, where le français (the language) has its own institution, La Francophonie. Qatar is a fairly new (“associate”) member to the institution and with a first major French language news network from outside France, is truly expanding its influence in the country and abroad.

A critical look into Mozambique’s past: Licínio Azevedo’s “Virgin Margarida”

In Frelimo’s (Mozambique’s party in power since independence) official story of its liberation struggle and its socialist project after independence, many aspects get silenced. One among these are the re-education centers to “purify” the “compromised” that had not yet adhered to the values of the “new man” that Frelimo intended to create. Alleged criminals, traitors, reactionaries, sex workers, alcoholics, vagrants, and religious fanatics were sent to camps in the countryside for an extended period of time, often without trial. The 20th New York African Film Festival at the Lincoln Center is featuring a film about Frelimo’s re-education centers, “Virgin Margarida” made by Licínio Azevedo (screening today at at 3:30 pm and on Monday, April 8, 8:30 pm). Licínio Azevedo is a veteran film maker, originally from Brazil, but has lived in Mozambique for a long time. We held a short Q&A, below, but first the trailer: 

You grew up in Brazil. What sparked your interest in Mozambique and what made you go to Mozambique to work there?

In Brazil, I was a journalist working on a newspaper in opposition to the military dictatorship. There was censorship and we were prevented from publishing information about the wars for independence of Portuguese colonies in Africa: Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau. But we journalists were following the development of these struggles through information from international news agencies. Because I already knew all Latin America countries doing news stories, after independence, I wanted to know personally the reality of these African countries, our brothers. Initially, I was in Guinea-Bissau in 1976, for almost a year, then went to Mozambique, invited by film director  (born in Mozambique, and living in Brazil) to work with the National Institute of Cinema in Mozambique, in whose creation he was involved. My task was to gather and write stories about the anti-colonial war that could be used for future film projects. This was in 1978 and I ended up staying in Mozambique where the transition from journalism to film happened.

Your first book on Mozambique was a collection of stories from liberation war veterans. Your new film is about the re-education centers after independence. How has your view of Mozambican politics changed over time?

My first book on Mozambique, Reports of Armed People, was just the result of this work at the National Institute of Cinema. When I first came to the country I was sent to the zone where the war had begun and was more intense — in the north of the country, close to Tanzania. I spent three months interviewing former soldiers, peasants… It was a great experience for me, a Latin American, living this time in the heart of the first liberated zones by separatists. The re-education centers, created after Independence, were an attempt to transfer experiences of these areas to the rest of the country but the context was different and a process like this, however well intentioned, did not work as had been envisioned.

You dealt with the topic of re-education centers before, in your documentary “The last Prostitute.” What is the relation between the documentary and your new feature film?

Many years ago the great Mozambican photographer Ricardo Rangel, my friend, now deceased, showed me a picture taken by him, made ​soon after the Independence, which he gave an ironic title, “The Last Prostitute.” It was a picture of a lady in a mini skirt, escorted by two soldiers to be sent to a rehabilitation center for prostitutes. Inspired by this picture I did a documentary, some 15 years ago with the same title, based on interviews with women who were in these centers: reeducandas and their reeducadoras, military women, ex-combatants. They told me the story of Margarida, a peasant girl, a teenager, who had come to town for the first time to buy her wedding trousseau. Because she didn’t have an identity document she was taken by mistake to one of the centers amid hundreds of women coming from a world that she was completely unaware of.

What do you think is the legacy of the re-education centers for politics in Mozambique?

The re-education centers have not worked at all the way it was intended: to be a training site for the “new woman,” “free from the vices of colonialism.” These centers were located in places that were completely isolated, in the jungle, without communications, and in such situations the individual who holds the power, acts like a little king.

Could you tell us a little bit about the filming of your new film? What was the greatest challenge? What did you enjoy most about making the film?

The footage was shot in an environment which imposed many difficulties. A very isolated location, at 1300 km from the capital, far from any town, because nature had to correspond to reality. With the limited means at our disposal, it was always an adventure. But the film crew was very competent and had an excellent cinematographer who likes challenges.

What do you think about Mozambican cinema, where is it and where will it go?

Mozambican cinema is undergoing a very creative phase but, on the other hand, is in the midst of a major crisis of resources. In Mozambique there are currently no funds for film production; it lacks a cultural policy that allows for the future of cinema.