Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 479

Friday Jazz Breaks

I haven’t done this type of music break (i.e. all jazz) in a while. But before counting down some good music (basically stuff I’ve been listening to lately), first let me promote an event: Later this month, April 20th, the University of York in the UK, hosts a one-day “discussion” on “South African Jazz Cultures.” All the details are at the link, including the program which includes contributions from the musicians Emmanuel Abdul-Rahim, Darius Brubeck (son of Dave, who teaches music in Kwazulu-Natal), and famed drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo. Moholo-Moholo and Abdul-Rahim will talk about working with Johnny Dyani. Also on the program is film maker Aryan Kaganof, researcher Brett Pyper and Matt Temple of Matsuli Music. Hopefully they put the whole thing online for those who can’t be there. Now for this week’s Jazz Breaks.



A few weeks ago, Brooklyn-based piano player and lawyer Steve Jenkins introduced me to the music of another pianist, Jon Batiste. Louisiana-born, New York City-based Batiste, from a prominent musical family, who released his first record at 17 (Christian Scott is also on the album), is already a fixture on the American jazz scene (he is also an art director at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem) and takes over New York City streets with his band New Orleans style, so I was surprised that I had not heard about him or his music. I guess I’ve been too busy raising children. Anyway, it turns out he starred in the TV drama Treme (about New Orleans) and had an outsized, but small, role as a church organist in Red Hook Summer. Since then I have been catching up. Just google him. Here‘s an interview with him from 2012. Below are two videos of him playing; in the first he plays the melodica, both a mouth-blown reed instrument and a keyboard, on a Stevie Wonder cover with the Soul Rebel Brass Band:

In the second, he plays piano and sings accompanied by his band, The Stay Human Band:

Another piano player I’ve come to like is Guillermo Klein, who fuses the music of his native Argentina with contemporary jazz. He lives largely in Spain where he teaches jazz. Here’s a sample with his band, Los Guachos:

Here’s 8 minutes of playing from experimental composer and conductor Adam Rudolph and Go:Organic Orchestra (yes, this is way more experimental) recorded in Brooklyn:

Singer Madeleine Peyroux has a new album of standards; buy it here or just listen to it on soundcloud. Here’s the new video for one of the songs, the Buddy Holly song “Changing all these changes.”

Then there’s Secret Society, a 18-piece big-band brass band, led by composer Darcy James Argue (they also have a new album). Here’s an earlier sample of their sound:

The American guitarist Marc Ribot. Nice, recent review of his playing in The Financial Times. To get a sense of his sound, listen to him performing live last year with his trio on New Jersey public radio (for a 70-minute set!).

Then there’s the jazz inflected sounds of Moonchild, a South African band to watch:

Finally, Reginald Bowers is a sax player from Riverlea, a working class coloured township in Johannesburg. He is not famous. He studied music. Point is, I just love Reginald’s ambition (he wants to start a jazz school and premiere a Riverlea Jazz Band). The short film was made by Twenty Four Frames, which combines health politics with media. You can also follow them on Twitter.

Kenyan Neorealism

The American film critic J. Hoberman has said that Vittorio De Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves” is “the most universally praised movie produced anywhere on planet Earth.” The 1948 Italian neorealist film won an Oscar seven years before the Academy had a category for foreign language films. It has been called the apogee of the neorealist struggle for authenticity and political engagement in cinema. So, it takes a certain amount of ambition to adapt and respond to such a film. Enter David Tosh Gitonga, who co-wrote and directed the wildly successful “Nairobi Half Life”.

“Nairobi Half Life” tells the story of a young man who is inspired to leave his parents’ unhappy home in a village to make it big as an actor in Nairobi after he secures an interview with a national traveling theater troupe. But his big break becomes less certain when he is mugged on his way into the city. With no money and nowhere to go, Mwas is picked up by corrupt Nairobi police and held as a thief. His ambition as an actor and the ambitions of others twist around each other as he reaches deeper into the criminal economy of the city.

Here’s the trailer:

“Bicycle Thieves,” by the way, was never this complicated. A man who has been unemployed for a long time gets a job pasting movie posters on the streets of Rome. To get a job, he has to get a bike, which is promptly stolen. We follow this man and his young son in desperate pursuit across the city. De Sica said that he wanted to “reintroduce the dramatic into quotidian situations, the marvelous in a little news item… considered by most people throwaway material.”

Tailed by death as well as the increasingly absurdist stakes of the main protagonist’s double life, “Nairobi Half Life” discards the episodic distillation and emotional clarity of “Bicycle Thieves.” The bifurcated plots make us doubt the honesty and spontaneity of our character, and draw out our own ambivalence towards the theater of resistance, which peddles political awareness but studiously ignores the material conditions of the poor.

Hypocrisy and cynical excitement flourish where anything that can be moved can be stolen. But like “Bicycle Thieves,” “Nairobi Half Life” does more than respond to our economic conditions. From the much-discussed “gay kissing scene” to the underdeveloped, almost caricatured, poor-girl-prostitute who makes her own decisions while she is tied to a leash, there is a lot to unpack.

“Nairobi Half Life” is a smart, take-no-prisoners action movie that makes us wrestle with the neoliberal city. It played last night the New York African Film Festival and will be shown again on Sunday April 7th at 8 pm so that we can talk about it some more.

5 Films to Watch at the Pan-African Film Festival of Cannes

The 10th edition of the International Pan-African film festival in Cannes, France goes from April 17-21. If you’re lucky enough to attend, here are five films on our radar. Dialemi – Elle s’amuse (My Love: She’s having fun) by Gabonese director Nadine Otsobogo is a bit of magic realism. A sculptor pounds away at a stone bust in his seaside home, where he lives alone. A mysterious woman appears, who the sculptor’s been waiting for. Excerpt above. Next, though 5 Egyptian Pounds is Egyptian director Mohammed Adeeb’s first film, it was chosen to be screened at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival’s Short Film Corner. A middle aged woman is being followed around Cairo by a somber, mysterious younger man. The climax of the film is revealed through his significance to her: 

Not much has been discussed about Rafael Padilla, a formerly enslaved Cuban man who became one of the first Black artists in France. Omar Sy is set to star as Padilla in an upcoming feature length film on his life. This documentary by directors Samia Chala and Thierry Leclère captures the stage production: Chocolat – Clown Nègre (“Chocolate, the black clown”). They hope to “interrogate our gaze, our confronting of the other, our construction of stereotypes and our discourse on xenophobia.” Here’s a fragment, and below’s a video with the makers of the film (in French):

Colored Confederates. A touchy subject in my own family (there are rumors that there was a Black Confederate soldier by choice), Ken Wyatt is hoping to shed some light on this much-debated topic and whether that “choice” ever truly existed. Anyone from the South in the United States is familiar with the arguments by mostly White southerners of the historical legacy surrounding the Confederacy and its flag.

And lastly, Tunisian filmmaker Mohamed Zran exposes a complete timeline of the Arab Spring in his documentary, Dégage, purportedly wholly from the perspective of everyday citizens. The trailer introduces an oft not heard perspective, from a child:

Chinua Achebe: A Poet of Global Encounters

The first time I met Chinua Achebe I had just started teaching at Bard College, where I had been hired as Director of Africana Studies. I saw Chinua one evening at a campus event and nervously approached to introduce myself. I did not expect his humor or his humility. Instead of exchanging a quick word or two, he engaged me in a long conversation about the state of Africana studies and my research in Ghana. I tentatively began to seek out his company and realized that, while he was one of the most important living writers in the world, he was also lonely living in upstate New York. Over the next six years I spent as much time as I could at the house on the Bard campus where Chinua and his wife Christie lived. Sometimes I was invited but eventually I just started showing up; for food and conversation, to watch the news or bits of recent Nigerian films. Christie would tease me that I had a knack for arriving when the food was ready. 

I was writing about West African theatre, music, and political transformation and after trips to Ghana, I would come to discuss with Chinua the latest developments in West African politics, media, and arts. Even if he did not identify with the new Nigerian and Ghana video films and Hip-Hop that had become so popular, he loved the creative energy of young West African popular artists. He told me how he saw innovative rappers and video directors as part of the legacy of older generations of African writers. With each conversation I felt I was getting a master-tutorial as he talked of Yeats, from whose poem, “The Second Coming,” he took the title of Things Fall Apart, or Fela Kuti, the Nigerian singer and activist, or Igbo language politics, or the origins of the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, or a dozen other topics.

In upstate New York some were in awe of him, some were ignorant of his importance, and still others who knew of his celebrity took a blasé New York attitude and left him alone. Most Americans do not welcome visitors, but in many parts of the world, including Nigeria, it is a sign of respect to visit someone. To be hospitable is normal. Chinua was grateful to Bard as an intellectual community and personally to its President Leon Botstein for supporting him after his 1990 road accident and he stayed there for almost two decades, perhaps because Bard’s culture of cosmopolitan and exiled intellectuals and artists from around the world suited his state of mind. After being confined to a wheelchair, going home to Nigeria posed problems because of his medical needs, but living in the US meant he was in a state of self-imposed exile and stasis. He was angry and disheartened at the structural condition of Nigerian and African politics in general, but was also deeply concerned with the addiction of the Western media to negative representations of Africa. He relished the privacy and the anonymity of his quiet house in Annandale, NY, but he was also saddened by it; he seemed unsure of where he might feel at home and so remained in limbo.

Since Chinua did not like email, people around him helped filter correspondence and mediate the constant offers to give talks, receive honorary degrees, and write pieces. Over time, I came to help with this task. He was generous with his time and considered all offers, though he always sought ways to stay focused on his writing and on building a vision of African literature’s place in the world. Some afternoons I accompanied him as he made his way from his house slowly across the ill-paved, often frozen parking lot to teach or hold office hours. Bard students revered him, though they often did not understand the depth of analysis or historical tales he gave them. He taught various courses on African literature including one on African Women Writers, still a rare course anywhere. As I taught courses on African and diasporic politics and arts we would also exchange class visits. There is nothing like teaching Things Fall Apart and Anthills of the Savannah with the author next to you in the classroom. Often, we talked about Africana studies, its history and how to solidify its position outside of token courses in the curriculum at Bard and around the world. We discussed how to teach about Africa and its diasporas, to demonstrate their centrality to philosophy and education in general, to link various historical, geographic, and cultural strands that are still often seen as separated. While many know Chinua as a foundational figure of Nigerian and African literature, his thinking was embedded in a strong Pan-Africanist political and artistic sensibility. Our conversations often drew upon W. E. B. Du Bois as an historian of Africana and we discussed how conflict, violence, inequality, and movement have shaped Africa and its linkages to multiple diasporas. Out of our conversation we shaped a two-course sequence called “African Encounters” that I taught as the core of our Africana curriculum.

Some days Chinua was tired and did not want to do his exercise routine. He hated having to use a special van to accommodate his wheelchair. He wanted to feel free and autonomous and instead was trapped and grounded. But he never showed his frustration or let it affect how he related to people he met. He was genuinely interested in talking and listening to people. But his daily routine was punctuated with grander and more joyous events. His engagements ranged from speaking at the United Nations to meeting with members of a visiting Ghanaian theatre troupe. It was amazing to watch how people of all sorts revered him and felt an intimate connection to him through his work and how genuinely he responded to the personal stories people would tell him.

Sitting at the Achebes’ dining table one afternoon I listened as he explained his decision to reject a Nigerian national honor in 2004, a consequence of his ethical concerns with the state of Nigeria. Reading his same words in the international press a few days later I was struck by how he was the same person sitting in private as on the global stage; the scalar shift of fame and celebrity must have been strange to live with: his words and choices, his winks and nods, carried a global weight.

One day I raised my concern that there were few institutions that reflected his vision of history, Africa, and African arts. I thought we should formalize his legacy at the college that was his home and asked him what he thought of starting an institute that would ground Africana Studies by fostering young artists working in and around Africa. He liked the idea so we began to conceive of what became the Chinua Achebe Institute of Global Africana Arts. With Chinua’s guidance I wrote the institutional guidelines and funding proposals. Leon Botstein supported us and helped organize Ford Foundation support. Chinua was excited about the Achebe Institute and we set about arranging a series of events and residencies that would foster work by artists and intellectuals stemming in a broad way from Chinua’s vision. As an executive committee of two, we discussed the latest novelists and filmmakers and settled on Helon Habila as the first year-long residential Achebe Fellow. Though Chinua was most concerned with writers, he was also adamant that we include artists in other media as he recognized that the new directions of the younger generations were part of the same artistic-political continuum.

One of the most energetic events we held in the early days of the Achebe Institute was a reading by Ama Ata Aidoo. The two writers were so pleased to see each other. After not meeting for many years, Ama Ata Aidoo was effusive in alternately teasing and praising Chinua. Strangely, just before her talk, the power went out in the auditorium so we held her reading in the glass lobby with the capacity crowd squeezed onto the floor and steps. Chinua introduced Aidoo by pointing to her strength and her incisive voice, joking that when members of the African writers association had a problem they called on her to take care of it for them. She prefaced her reading of a selection from her unpublished post-apocalyptic Afro-futurist novel, by telling us about being a young writer traveling from Ghana to Nigeria many decades ago to meet Chinua. She reminded us how generations of African youth have gained inspiration from him.

In 2005 I organized the first major panel sponsored by the Achebe Institute, “Writing Africa: Politics and Dialogues around the African Continent.” The event was meant to present our vision for the Insitute. The discussion revolved around the changing artistic influences and political connections between Africa and its diasporas. After my introductory comments there were papers by Caryl Phillips, Emmanuel Dongala, Kofi Anyidoho, and Helon Habila. Chinua was the final speaker of the evening.

He began by saying “let me tell you about the first time I met James Baldwin.” The capacity crowd of hundreds leaned in to listen to Chinua’s soft, commanding voice. He described how after several missed meetings the two of them were finally to share the stage in a public conversation as the inaugural event for the 1980 African Literature Association conference, in Gainsville, Florida. Chinua recalled thinking hard about what to say at their auspicious introduction. Finally, as they were introduced on stage, Chinua turned to his fellow author and said “Mr. Baldwin, I presume.” The Gainville audience reverberated with excitement and then fell quiet to hear Baldwin’s response: “This is a brother I have not seen in four hundred years.” After pausing for exclamations from the audience he continued, “it was never intended that we should meet.” In this introduction both writers invoked the possibilities and traumas of the complex global history of African peoples that frame their achievements as literary pioneers. Habila had noted on the 2005 panel African writers of his generation sometimes take for granted the existence of modern African genres which Chinua’s generation called into existence. Two generations on, Chinua’s work has allowed modern African writers to work without having to constantly justify their existence. While Phillips’s paper had described a fictional meeting of Francophone African thinkers in pre-War Paris as a space of political and artistic blossoming, Habila argued that most young writers do not have the same idealistic hopes for the potential of literature as mid-century African artists and thinkers did. Overall, the panel brought to the fore various types of encounter, both creative and destructive, that surround Chinua’s work.

After our panel discussion at Bard I asked Chinua to tell me more about his meeting with Baldwin. He showed me a video of the conversation between them, explaining it had taken a very strange and sinister turn. As Baldwin was speaking, a haunting voice could be heard on the P.A. system, insulting Baldwin in explicit racial terms. Members of the audience rushed to the doors to guard the group against possible attack. Baldwin replied calmly to the anonymous voice, saying “excuse me but your time has long past… white supremacy had its hour… it’s over. It is now our time. I am going to finish my remarks.” Chinua recalls Baldwin’s strenght and calm. Apparently, the authorities could not find the culprit but the voice disappeared and the writers were able to finish their conversation. I asked Chinua why he had not invoked the second part of this event at the panel discussion. He smiled and said, “the storyteller shapes his stories for a purpose.” Historical traumas remain close at hand but in the retelling of stories artists and intellectuals invoke new ways to live in the world and transform violence and distance into collaboration.

Chinua told me several times that he saw himself as a poet who also wrote other things. Perhaps this was a feeling that grew in his later years with his renewed reflections on Biafra; but knowing he read politics and wrote novels as a poet, changed how I read his work. Nonetheless, he was proud of the role of Things Fall Apart in opening up the publishing of African writing and in his role in editing the first 100 Heinemann books in its groundbreaking African writers series. In 2008 around the 50th anniversary of the publication of Things Fall Apart there were numerous events, panels, and lectures, some big, some small. Chinua often joked privately and at talks about being known as a one book writer. To start off readings he would quip with a smile: you know I have written other books, don’t you? This jab was a way to gently provoke an audience to think more incisively about literature and politics rather than simply celebrating the work. Backstage after one of the panels I teased him if he wasn’t tired of talking about the same book for 50 years. He said: Well, yes and no, he always learned something new from how people read the book, how they talked to him about it and interpreted the characters. He recalled receiving a stack of letters from Korean school children and seeing that Okonkwo’s life, death, and choices resonated with them in ways he could never have imagined. He spent more than 50 years in dialogue with characters he created as a young man that remained imminent, complex, and relevant across the globe.

The most common misreading of his first novel, as Chinua explained to me, was to understand it as an idealized recollection of precolonial African life. This was exacerbated by the fact it was often included in American and European syllabi as a representation or token of Africa or non-Western expression, a sign of Africa for outsiders to imagine an authentic vision of its peoples and cultures. But if you listen to Chinua this simplistic nostalgia dissipates. He recalled that he was writing Things Fall Apart as Ghana became independent from British rule in 1957. The Pan-Africanism of Ghana’s first leader Kwame Nkrumah was especially influential on Chinua: “They were ahead of us [in Nigeria] so we were looking to Ghana to see the path to independence. It was an inspiring moment.” This novel and his other tales are stories of multiple encounters of loss and impossibility, humor and survival that point to the future; they are meditations on the experience of time. Things Fall Apart presents Ibgo life from multiple angles simultaneously forcing consideration of the question of cultural stability and its representation; it is a reflexive mediation on the possibility of storytelling itself to encapsulate history, memory, and new ways of life; it is an extended proverb in content and form. Chinua is the poet of encounter, a primary trope of 20th century life.

I have been thinking about the sparkle in Chinua’s eye and the subtle ways he used his hands when he talked. One of the brilliant things about Chinua was how he used silence both in writing and in person. He was a master of the pause and the unexpected proverb, of multiple meanings, of putting stories to good use while enjoying the process of the telling. His work was deceptively minimalist and immensely complex. He had brilliant comic timing; he could read a room and command it from the first words out of his mouth. He taught me that you can be fierce and respectful. You can talk softly while compelling people to listen to ideas and stories. He must have been a wise elder even as a young man, but as he grew older he never lost the mischievous dry wit of youth and the belief in redemption even for the most corrupt and lost. Chinua’s legacy is not fixed but rather about responding to change with energy and wit.

After I left the Directorship of the Achebe Institute and then Chinua went to Brown University, Binyavanga Wainaina took up the post, renaming it the Chinua Achebe Center for African Writers and Artists and transforming it in ways befitting Chinua’s legacy, through his own expansive, creative vision of African cosmopolitanism and cutting-edge media and literature.

At my wedding Chinua’s gift was to read a poem. In a tent overlooking a hilltop farm in upstate New York, Chinua, removing the beret he usually wore, faced the congregation. Holding his book open ready to read, he looked at me out of the corner of his eye. He explained, deadpan, that he was only loaning me the poem he was about to read and that he expected something in return. Within a year, he said, I should write one myself and return this one to him. After the reading, as the ceremony ended, a huge thunderstorm filled the sky and almost demolished the tent. To my embarrassment, I have not repaid my debt to Chinua Achebe. But it is a small part of the far larger debt that so many writers and intellectuals owe him, that we can only repay by offering our best work in his memory.

Tendai Maraire: “Boom is me throwing a punch at those that still disrespect Zimbabwean music”

Tendai Maraire: “I remember when Zimbabwe gained independence. My mother had a big party at the house in Seattle — with all her friends, Zimbabwean and American. My uncle, who fought in the guerrilla war against the white Rhodesian state, flew in weeks later. She started celebrating every year and even would get together with friends to sponsor groups from Zimbabwe to come and perform. Years later she focused more on performing, and non-Zimbabweans took over. They called it a Marimba festival and later transitioned it to Zimfest, which still exists. One year, my brothers and I went when my father was still alive living in Zimbabwe. After we came back, we saw that it had not represented our culture, history or the people indigenous to Zimbabwe. So we started flipping tables etcetera. The festival was stopped and dialogue started on how things needed to change. I promised that day to everyone that I would change it. See, Zimbabwean music has a rich story-telling history. Some songs have messages that are inappropriate for those of European descent to sing. But yet they still feel comfortable doing so even though Shona people feel this way. So ‘Boom’ is me throwing my first punch at those that still disrespect the music. While I touch on some subjects that personally affect me when they do it. Boom!”*

* When Tendai Maraire broke down his Pungwe mixtape for us last year. Above is the video for the mixtape’s second track, “Boom”.

The visibility of contemporary women artists in Africa

Nancy Mteki, from the series “Pimp My Kombi” (2011)

Guest Post by Grace Benton

There has been much written recently about the proliferation of the ‘Africa Issue’ amongst many contemporary art publications and journals. So, true to form, last week saw the launch of the latest volume of feminist art journal n.paradoxa at London gallery Tiwani Contemporary. And the volume’s theme? “Africa and its Diasporas.” 

n.paradoxa editor Katy Deepwell is not unaware of the problems with a regional issue. She pre-empted criticism in her opening remarks which were disparaging of ‘token’ Africa issues followed by a closure of the debate. She published this volume despite misgivings, she said, because there is ‘too much good work being done’ by doubly-underrepresented female African artists. Volume 31 of n.paradoxa sets out to bring the practices of these women artists into the critical discourse, and to kick-start further discussion in the publication and elsewhere.

It remains to be seen if Deepwell and her contributors will succeed in that aim. This volume is certainly an ambitious start, ranging across media and regions, if a little heavy on the diaspora. Bisi Silva, Director of the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, writes the guest editorial. She asks whether the proliferation of independent art organisations spearheaded by women (like Nubuke Foundation, Ker Thiossane, Raw Material, Nike Art Gallery, Terra Kulture, Doual’Art and Silva’s CCA) has ‘impacted significantly on the presentation, documentation and the visibility of women’s artistic practice on the continent’. The answer seems to be — not really. Running through the articles, though, is an exploration of how women artists are organizing and representing themselves to change that.

One of the stand-out artists at the London launch event was Zimbabwean photographer Nancy Mteki (whose work AIAC featured here). In 2011 Mteki co-founded the Zimbabwe Association of Female Photographers to support women artists and photojournalists to work, train and exhibit. When asked about the motivations behind the project, she said simply: “If we don’t stand up for ourselves, no one else is going to do it.”

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Wura Natasha Ogunji, “He visioned songbirds” (2007)

A piece by Peju Layiwola (Department of Creative Arts, University of Lagos) surveys local initiatives that are redressing the dearth of critical engagement with Nigerian women artists. There are collaborations with diasporic Nigerians like the show All We Ever Wanted or the projects of Wura Natasha Ogunji, and Silva supports female artists in her curation at CCA. Most interesting, though, is how “a few have ruptured the highly hierarchical and patriarchal space of the Nigerian art world by having their work displayed in public spaces.” The few include sculptor Chris Funke Ifeta whose works were mounted in the town centre of Benin City.

Ato Malinda, “Is Free Dumb” (2010) Photograph James Muriuki

One of the most powerful ways that the women showcased here are making themselves visible in the public sphere is through performance. Kenyan Ato Malinda’s performance Is Free Dumb saw her sat in a cage outside the National Archives in Nairobi reading aloud from DRUM, True Love, and African Woman. Within half an hour she was attracting attention from security guards and was subsequently arrested for ‘conducting a business without a permit.’ She writes: “Women do not claim space on the streets of Nairobi and when this is attempted, it is thwarted, often through violence…the ironic revocation of my own freedom accentuates the conservative nature of female liberties in Kenya.”

South African Donna Kukuma uses performance as an explicitly feminist strategy in her work; she tells curator Nontobeko Ntombela: “I use performance as a medium of resistance against already established ‘ways of doing’…as a strategy for inserting a foreign ‘other’ voice and presence into various territories of the republic.”

The site of performance is significant. In The Swing (After After Fragonard) (2009) Kukama, dressed in white, sits on a swing suspended from the overpass above Mai Mai Market, Johannesburg.

“The value of the space is because not so far from there is the Maboneng precinct which is the new developed bush for the arts, that is insanely removed from its surrounding…A women entering this space in a mini skirt would be violently harassed, yet not so far from that space in Maboneng people are walking around those streets freely in their miniskirts…unaware of the realities of a space not so far from there.”

In the UK, the vexed questions of categorisation and the relationship of ‘African’ artists to the international scene are talking points once more as the Tate launches its new Africa programme. Collier, of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has mixed feelings about the initiative; she speaks for many when she says: “The really exciting work going on in Africa does not give itself over to commodification easily.” If nothing else, this particular ‘Africa Issue’ shows that is certainly true of some of the continent’s most innovative female artists.

n.paradoxa is available in print and electronic format from KT Press.

* Grace Benton is completing her MA at SOAS, University of London, with an interest in Nigerian online political space.

The story of Happy Sindane puts the lie to South Africa’s rainbow shibboleths

A short South African Press Association bulletin on Monday announced the death of one Happy Sindane. If you don’t remember him (and South Africans are notorious for their short memories), he “made headlines in late May 2003 when he alleged that he was a white boy who had been kidnapped by black people.” Sindane had grown up in Mpumalanga, a South African province on the border with Mozambique and Swaziland. Four months later a judge ruled that Sindane’s real name was Abbey Mziyaye, the son of a black domestic worker and her white employer, who had both abandoned Sindane after he was born in 1984. It was Apartheid after all. Sindane was raised by a black woman in a black township until the day he walk into a police station to announce that he had been abducted and that he was white. Sindane, not surprisingly, dominated the headlines in South Africa for a few months. As New York Times correspondent Lydia Polgreen reported at the time, Sindane came “to symbolize the intensity with which South Africans still scrutinize matters of race — years after apartheid’s demise and despite real progress toward building an integrated society.” An advertising agency (and a paint company) made some money at his expense (because everything is apparently up for grabs in the “new South Africa”) and then he vanished from the media view, except when he was arrested once for some minor crime. The news this Monday was that he had been stoned to death. But to go back to when the story of the lost white boy first “broke.” At that time my friend Herman Wasserman and I co-wrote an op-ed on the Sindane case for South Africa’s Sunday Times (published on June 1, 2003) which is worth revisiting today:

***

What’s next, a pencil test? The story of Happy Sindane is putting the lie to some of our rainbow shibboleths. From the start, this has not been the story of a lost boy but of a lost white boy who, as Mail & Guardian columnist John Matshikiza has pointed out, like Tarzan walked out of the jungle of a black village. It has also been about what he is not. About race-marking.

The initial story was given front-page headlines and first place on radio and television news bulletins, and occasioned much speculation and public curiosity.

Then came what was presented as deflating news. E.tv reported earlier this week: “Happy Sindane is not white.” That he has lost his parents, that he might be reunited with relatives, is of secondary importance. Happy is a problem to be solved. He must have an identity and the first component of identity, it seems, is still some 19th-century, apartheid-era or primordial sense of “race”.

From the way we are talking and writing about him, it seems more important what Happy is not. That is, not white. And chances are now he will become “coloured”.

We still expect black people to stay in townships and whites in suburbs; we still consider whites who speak an African language to be some sort of freaks; we are still obsessed with bio logical explanations of identity.

It seems that we are still disciples of social Darwinism in that it seems natural to us when people belonging to different “races” and cultures “fit” into an entrenched social hierarchy. When they step out of this hierarchy, they earn society’s admiration for having “made it”. Or they earn society’s sympathy when, being white, they make it back to whence they came and where they, naturally, “belong”.

The way Happy’s story was told by the media (and discussed in our living rooms, on our shopfloors and in bars) is proof that although we have witnessed the legal change from apartheid to liberal democracy, the passage from old to new is not finished.

True, we have experienced a period in which the social order has shifted, identities are renegotiated and cultural borders have been transgressed, as difficult-sounding academics want us to believe.

But although we do not speak of ourselves and others in the way we did under apartheid, the power relations and material constraints of the past have not disappeared.

On one level, the attempts to construct identities that break with apartheid do challenge the fixed categories and enforced ethnicity of apartheid. It would seem that identities are indeed fluid, changing with the social context. So, for example, 5fm plays Mandoza and Gcobani Bobo is definitely not a “development rugby player” who came to the sport late (he went to Rondebosch Boys’ High in Cape Town). One shebeen in Soweto plays only Afrikaans music.

However, it would be foolish to overstate the extent to which such identities and change are generalised. Overwhelmingly, exclusion and hardship are still based largely on race and ethnicity, and these exclusions operate among the previously disadvantaged as well as the previously advantaged.

Race and ethnicity still hold political currency, on both sides of the former divide. Significantly, the story of Happy Sindane reminds us that material factors and power relations still have a determining impact on the definition of identity.

It also shows up the perspective from which the mass media witness identity in a post-apartheid society – perhaps not so much white (since the faces in media boardrooms have changed hue) but elitist and class-based.

Recently the Cape Argus ran a front-page lead story about a white man from a posh Cape Town suburb engaging in the so-called “liberating” act of going to stay in Guguletu township. Why should that be seen as so brave, given that hundreds of thousands of people live there day in and day out, without having a similar choice of where they want to stay?

Nowhere did the article ask his new (black) neighbours what they thought of moving out of Guguletu. (Even though it was clear that this was nothing but a cheap stunt by an average pop singer to gain media attention, the reporter failed to say so outright).

It’s also a case in which our interactions are mixed with the newly acquired values of individual responsibility and private initiative that are permeating our society – but within well-defined market segments.

So, for example, the SABC’s TV news recently reported on the “kindness” of a white housewife in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs who trekked south to pay the electricity arrears of a pensioner. Her behaviour was juxtaposed with that of protesting residents who wanted a more systematic response by the Johannesburg Metro Council and Eskom to their plight. That was shown to the coveted SABC3 audience, while earlier in the evening the Xhosa news provided a more nuanced account of these happenings.

Why all the sympathy for the lost Happy Sindane (who, granted, must be quite confused at this stage in his young life) when the lives of hundreds of thousands of township children go by largely unnoticed by the mass media, unless they are the occasional beneficiaries of some visiting celebrity’s kindness or an international company’s sponsorship?

To think creatively about those new formations that have come and are still coming into being, we must take into account the effects that material factors, political struggles and the inequalities of the past have on the construction of post-apartheid identities.

But it is also necessary to try to establish what new formations have come, and are still coming, into being. That means breaking with the simple binaries of black/white and bourgeois/ working class to explore new schisms and new loyalties.

And it also means not making sloppy arguments when race, while far from irrelevant, is not the sole overriding issue any more, but has taken new forms and mutations, or its old fault lines operate under different conditions.

Seemingly, however, unchanged race (and class) distinctions remain our master narratives. That says a lot about our society. Happy Sindane does not need to tell us that.

***

It is worth adding here what another friend and AIAC blogger Jonathan Faull told me after I had already published this post:

Happy Sindane, from the perspective of a child seeking identity and acceptance, slipped between the lines of South Africa’s perverse racial understanding of itself. By seeking a place in his society he was met with an obsessional confusion, initially swathed in the trope of a “fallen” white child, then as the “bastardly” outcome of miscegenation. In all of this his humanity was rarely acknowledged, and then he was forgotten.

However his life and death were ultimately shaped by the hallmarks of (black) poverty. He was raised in penury as an orphan, struggled for dignified work, and suffered a violent and premature death. His body abandoned at a roadside for posterity. These are the markers of democracy for South Africa’s rural poor.

My 5 Favorite Designs: Olalekan Jeyifous

True, true, that title sounds familiar. Consider it a variation on a successful theme. After coming across the work Olalekan Jeyifous did for “menswear brand” creator Ikiré Jones, we wanted to know more and asked Olalekan to share his 5 favorite designs which — not surprisingly — included one of his sci-fi inspired West African scenes called “Escape to New Lagos”. But that’s for later. Where and how did you start designing, Olalekan? 

Olalekan Jeyifous: I graduated with a degree in Architecture from Cornell University In May of 2000. This image above is from my thesis which utilized the inadequacies of various 3d software programs as a means of examining notions of intentional mis-representation and re-appropriation within specific Nigerian political and mytho-cultural phenomena. That’s a very academic way of saying that from the outset my work has been driven by complex political and mythical narratives, rendered simply.

As the first image in my selection of five of my favorite works, its significance to my aesthetic language as well as artistic trajectory is immeasurable. It was both a catalyst for my creative process which often involves blending hand-drawn sketches with digital computer models, and my career as an emerging artist. In the absence of a fine arts degree and portfolio, I submitted this image and others from my architectural thesis in order to land an Artist Residency with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. This residency with the LMCC allowed me to further develop my artistic language and was essential in providing me with the opportunity to exhibit my artwork in some rather notable venues.

This next image is of four architectural models I created for the “Flow” exhibit at the Studio Museum in Harlem and that were also shown at La BANK in Paris as part of the S.P.A.C.E.R. exhibit. They translated many of the ideas explored in my prior works such as confronting the tension between the given, experienced and imagined aspects of “place”, while marking a significant formal departure from the detailed and narrative two-dimensional collage-like images I produced during my LMCC residency. They are also prime examples of my tendency to remix and resample my own work as each of the four models started out as digital renderings created for various architectural housing competitions. Barring a series of small-scale “shanties” I designed and built for another exhibit, these are the only physical models I have created and they serve as a persistent reminder of my desire to set aside time to return to the built medium. For that alone they are definitely among my favorite works to date.

As for the exhibit itself, “Flow” was a survey of new work by twenty emerging artists that reside and work across Africa, Europe and North America, and that were either born in Africa or born to African parents. The show was ground-breaking in that it challenged the idea of “African” art as a fixed or clearly defined aesthetic typically perceived or understood from a Western perspective. Personally, it marked an important milestone in my career and I was tremendously proud to have been included amongst such diverse and talented artists.

This next image was part of my Settlements and City Strategies series exhibited at Skoto Gallery in New York and Blanc Gallery in Chicago. It is a dense and labyrinthine, yet eerily-serene cityscape. The series it belongs to represents an idea of a degenerate futurism, yet one might find similar typologies and scenes in places such as the urban settlements of North Africa, and in overpopulated mega-cities such as Lagos, Mexico City, and Mumbai. Though outputted digitally, the drawing possesses a textured and painterly quality as a result of combining hand-drawn sketches, industrial textures, surfaces of deteriorated paper, and architectural models.

I particularly love this work because, similar to the built models I created for “Flow” it marked a notable departure from the abstracted, diagrammatic drawings and collages that defined my earlier work. Much of the imagery that I created until this point involved a haberdashery of small vignettes, varied iconography and meticulous notes and it was refreshing to create a straight-forward, pastoral scene. Consequently, my personal artwork has become much more about creating imagined and speculative dystopian landscapes, cityscapes and other architectural artifices.

I have always enjoyed textile design and pattern-making although I am rarely afforded the opportunity to explore it in my personal and commercial work so you can only imagine my excitement when I was approached by the owner of the independent menswear brand: Ikiré Jones to design several pocket-squares that would accompany his line of ready-to-wear sport jackets. Since the brand is one that combines functional, high-fashion garments with an “African” aesthetic (however that might manifest), I set out to do the same with the pocket-squares. The result was an intentionally kitschy yet well-executed “African” parody on the hand-rolled silk pocket-squares, depicting scenes of fox-hunting and greyhound races, that one might find being worn by English dandies. This is one of those purely enjoyable design exercises that have much more to do with organizing color, composition, and pattern than with examining social, political, or historical narratives…although some of that might still be present in the finished designs.

And this last image below, which is from a series of sci-fi inspired West African scenes called “Escape to New Lagos”, was created as part of the promotional/marketing campaign for Ikiré Jones. Out of the four images in this series this particular image: “New Makoko Village [Lagos 2081 A.D.]” is my favorite. It is a blend of photographs of various signages my mother took in Ile-Ife in the late 1970’s, cobbled-together photographs of Makoko Fishing village shortly before it was tragically demolished, and of course my computer-generated architectural interventions.

I wanted to resurrect this remarkably self-organized community in a commercially-technocratic future where improvised settlements containing crowded and chaotic knots of human resilience coexist alongside imposing futuristic super-structures. I feel that this image achieves the aforementioned in how it combines the past, present, and future in a way that hints at a politicized social infrastructure while completely re-imagining Africa in a way that hasn’t been seen before.

We might as well turn this into a new regular feature. To be continued.

Can African Heads of State Speak?

These days, well-behaved African heads of state are rewarded by Barack Obama with the chance to meet with him in groups of four and have their picture taken with him. It’s like meeting Beyonce, but you get to call it a state visit. That’s what happened on Friday when Malawi’s Joyce Banda, Senegal’s Macky Sall, Cape Verde’s José Maria Neves and Sierra Leone’s Ernest Bai Koroma were paraded before the White House press corps, sitting in star-struck silence as Barack reeled off a kind of wikipedia-level roll-call of their accomplishments. They beamed like competition winners. It was all very feudal.

You get the sense that they were given a nice White House tote bag, perhaps a signed copy of Dreams from my Father, and were then patted on the head and sent off to inconsequential NGO-led roundtables. Presumably the thinking is that being thus sprinkled with all-American stardust plays well back home. (Joyce Banda has already boasted of being the first Malawian president invited to the White House, perhaps forgetting that Kamuzu was a master of political theater and would never have allowed himself to be wheeled out as somebody else’s prop.)

The wider symbolism is unmistakeable: These guys, Obama is saying, work for me. African visitors (unlike all other heads of state) can be received in groups, and, as they’re all Africans, don’t need to be spoken to individually. Politics? Negotiations? They’re just happy to be here.

The East African called it as they saw it: “The meeting was to reward them for their support for US interests in Africa.” Though some others wanted to be there. In Uganda, some sites were wringing their hands over why Museveni hadn’t been invited.

Of course, in the past, Barack and Michelle have been happy to be snapped with any old African leader, so it seems the realization that these photocalls can themselves be a kind of diplomatic prize has been relatively recent. Here are some of our favorite meet-the-president moments. We don’t need to remind some of you, but the first three were from Obama’s first term when he went to address the United Nations (they are: Paul and Chantal Biya; Joyce Banda’s predecessor Bingu wa Mutharika; the Musevenis and, finally, King Mswati III) while the final one was his meeting with Hosni Mubarak, before that Life President was dispatched by his people.

On Chinua Achebe’s Left Foot

Guest Post by Percy Zvomuya

Hatred came first; love much later. It always seemed to me that the left-legged player got a place in the football team for no other reason other than that he was left-legged. Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño (right-handed but left-legged, a condition known as laterality or cross-dominance) bears witness to this said bias for lefties. In a lecture titled “Caracas Address”, published in his book of essays Between Parentheses, Bolaño said: “When I was little I played soccer. My number was 11, the same number as Pepe and Zagallo in the Sweden World Cup, and I was an enthusiastic but pretty bad player, though my shooting foot was my left foot and the conventional wisdom is that lefties are always useful to have in a match.”

It doesn’t help matters much that the leftie’s right leg is usually dead (a young Robin van Persie used to joke about his “chocolate leg” up until it became almost as much of a wand as his left). So you can imagine the typical combination: a so and so left foot coupled with a comatose right one.

This problem aside, the left-sided player has other problems, directional. Let’s turn to Bolaño again: “For example, when the coach said ‘Pass to the right, Bolaño’, I didn’t know where I was supposed to pass the ball. And sometimes, playing on the left side of the field, at the coach’s hoarse voice, I even had to stop and think: left, right. Right was the soccer field, to shoot left was to kick the ball out of bounds towards the few spectators.” Try it with lefties: tell them abruptly to “turn right” and see how long it takes them to work out which side is their right side.

And yet it is the left foot which is fetishized. The clichés congregate around the left foot, garlands that reach waist high. The first time I saw the cliché “cultured left foot” was in a piece about Uruguayan genius Alvaro Recoba. Or trusty left foot, or this somewhat over-the-top praise poem in the Guardian rumour column about which-player-is-going-where: “Arsenal are looking at…Uruguay striker Alvaro Recoba, whose left foot is currently writing a thesis on humour as subversion in the oeuvres of Hungarian émigré poet George Faludy, just to prove exactly how cultured it is.”

Perhaps despite our veneer of acceptance (it’s not too long ago since left-handed people were forced to use the right hand), we are still primitive and to hide our prejudice against the lefties, only couching that prejudice as praise.

The last word should be uttered by the late African novelist Chinua Achebe (no, not Nigerian, Achebe belongs to all of Africa).

I am reminded of a passage in Achebe’s magnificent novel, Arrow of God, on mastering something so much you can even do it with your left hand. The priest Ezeulu has been summoned to the offices of the white administrator in colonial Nigeria. In one of the offices, a white man held a pen, “writing, but with his left hand. The first thought that came to Ezeulu on seeing him was to wonder whether any black man could ever achieve the same mastery over book as to write it with the left hand.”

When Ezeulu is able to go home after a few weeks in detention, he instructs his son Oduche to go to the white man’s school:

When I was in Okperi I saw a young white man who was able to write his book with the left hand. From his actions I could see that he had little sense. But he had power; he could shout in my face; he could do what he liked. Why? Because he could write with his left hand. That is why I have called you. I want you to learn and master this man’s knowledge so much that if you are suddenly woken up from sleep and asked what it is you will reply. You must learn it until you can write it with your left hand.

So there.