Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 487

Woman, object, corpse: Killing women through media

Since Valentine’s Day everyone has been talking about the murder of Reeva Steenkamp, although rarely in those terms. We know that her boyfriend, Oscar Pistorius, shot her four times and killed her while she was behind a locked door in their bathroom in a gated estate. We know that he has a history of domestic violence, a penchant for shooting things. We know absolutely everything about his extensive sporting achievements. The main thing, however, that we know about Steenkamp is that she was a model, and that she was really hot. 

There are other pieces of information framing the dead woman, including that she had a Bachelor of Laws from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University and had briefly worked as a paralegal on graduation. However, almost every image of Steenkamp in the days following her murder featured her near-to-naked body, including the episode of a reality series aired in South Africa just after she died. This body was described in an article by a former editor of men’s magazine FHM as ‘tanned and taut’ — a (dead) body that appears to look exactly like (a) woman is supposed to.

Neelika Jayawardane and Sean Jacobs (in their recent blog post here) summarized the problematics of Steenkamp’s representation: “ … It did look unseemly that while we spoke blithely of the commodification of women’s bodies, and the relationship of such commodification to gender-based violence, we were simultaneously treated to images of Steenkamp’s  participation in the industry that commodifies women’s bodies.” The post also linked to the two Guardian op-ed pieces that deal specifically with the imaging of Steenkamp in tabloids and mainstream media: Marina Hyde’s piece pointed to the pornification of Steenkamp in British tabloids, noting that The Sun did not bother with a page 3 ‘girl’ on the day of Steenkamp’s death since this role had already been ascribed to her image. Another Guardian reporter, Paul Harris, discussed how this was replicated in the United States as well as in South Africa.

These articles proffer a disgust of a media industry that uses the image of a recently-dead woman dressed provocatively to sell the story of her death. Each article hints that these images enact a violence towards Steenkamp and to women generally. However, it has yet to be discussed exactly how this very particular objectification fits into a chain of subject to object, women to corpse (un)becomings in a horrifying set of assumed complicities, participations and consents. What is it in this case that Steenkamp’s bikini might be said to provoke? And what kind of object does her body become in this schema? A commodity, a fetish, certainly. However, Steenkamp and her womanness also retain the status of another very particular kind of object: a corpse.

In the same week that the image of Steenkamp’s body was all over our media, a billboard appeared in central Cape Town’s Kloof Street (in the photo at the top of this post). The billboard also featured the body of an abused woman or, here, a girl. It shows a young black girl curled up on her side on the floor clutching a sheet. Her underwear is above her head, her trousers are pulled down, exposing her buttocks and there is blood on her shirt. It is difficult to tell if she is dead or catatonic, but it is clear we should infer that she has been raped. Across this image are two yellow strips reminiscent of crime tape, one of which reads, ‘Underage drinking: is it worth it’. Below in bigger uppercase lettering, the text, ‘YOU DECIDE’.

The billboard is jointly sponsored by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), South African Breweries (SABMiller) and the National Youth Development Agency. The advertisement is straightforward in its logic that a) you, the woman-reader, decide whether to be raped and thus b) you are entirely culpable and responsible for any sexual violence to which you are subjected. At the very least, the billboard states a) and b) with the qualifier [if you are underage and have been drinking]. Thus, if you drink when you are under eighteen you are participating in your own rape, and any underage girl who has been raped, and who had been drinking at any point in the lead up to this violence, is to be considered entirely responsible for this event.

The image shows us a woman, a girl, made up to look exactly like a dead body.

The pictures of Steenkamp and the girl on the DTI billboard share a relation beyond the fact that they both image women who have been subjected to male violence. Rather, both representations enact a particular equivalence whereby a woman ceases to be a subject as she becomes a sex object (through her own volition, her ‘self-objectification’, her willful vulnerability) and then since she is already an object, slips easily into being dead, a corpse — that is the most real and fearful manifestation of objecthood: subject made thing.

In Steenkamp’s case it is permissible, the media tells us, to show readers her body because she was responsible in part for these images’ production. Since she worked as a model, we are meant to assume that she is responsible for framing herself as a commodity fetish, as a thing. These are not sneaky tabloid photographs of a woman at leisure, but rather they are taken with her consent — and I shudder at the term. Following the logic that these are ‘images of Steenkamp’s participation in the industry that commodifies women’s bodies’, we are assured that Steenkamp has objectified herself through modeling. So, now that she is really an object — a body proper, dead — the equivalence of sex object and corpse is made all the more insidious for the implication that she had autonomy in this decision. The violence of her killer, of the media, of the beauty industry is all hidden beneath her taut and toned blonde corpse. The images of Steenkamp in the media enact a far worse vehemence than ‘disrespect’ to the dead. Every image of the bikini-clad model shows us what this dead woman, Reeva Steenkamp, looks like. And, since we are so familiar with this particular representation of ‘Woman’, a woman, an image typified here by the objectified body of this dead woman, these images also infer that this is what a dead woman looks like. The equivalence of woman-object-corpse asserts to the reader that violence against women, the murder, rape, abuse of a women, is no different to the pushing around of a thing, the bruising of a blunt object.

That the girl in the DTI billboard is implicated as complicit in her own brutalization is much clearer. We see the image of an objected corpse or, at least, a traumatised object, a frozen woman, on the floor. She has been relegated to the realm of things, presumably through brutalization. A man has raped and/or killed her. But, like with Steenkamp, the billboard assures us that this anonymous girl has consented to her own objecthood, abjection. The text YOU DECIDE is addressed not to an audience encountering the (no doubt incredibly triggering) obscene image corpse, but to the subject we imagine to be the dead girl’s referent. She has decided, in this case, to drink illegally. She may be dead on the floor, an object but — like Steenkamp — she did this to herself. This is not, we are told, what a girl who has been drinking and who then is raped looks like, it is every girl who chooses to drink, since these choices are equivalent. And thus the rape and brutalization and even murder of a young drunk girl is outside of any kind of structure of blame beyond the victim herself, beyond outrage, since the crime is reduced to mere complicity with the girl who has made HER DECISION already. The violence enacted on her, the man who has raped her is conspicuously outside of the frame of this image, he is still an active, gazing subject, like the viewing public encountering this image. There is nothing acting upon her, nothing to get her here except herself. She is a woman, a girl, made up to look exactly like a corpse.

Though they share their status as corpse, woman, object, these two representations differ notably in the race and class dynamics each infers. Steenkamp’s corpse becomes an image of a white, blonde woman, which makes it easier for an audience to associate her body with a normative conception of beauty and of wealth, glamour and, again, her own participation in her objecthood.

The object of the DTI billboard is a young black girl, which makes it easier to consume her image as victim within the semantics of South African and, particularly, international media images of poverty, sickness, helplessness, however even pity is leeched from this image through its title.

Instead, as well as its affirmation of  misogyny, the YOU DECIDE billboard has worrying implications about blame and victimhood on a broader level in South Africa — the YOUR DECISION of the poster speaks not only to the particular circumstances in which a girl is victim of rape, but also more generally suggests an uncompromising meritocracy and victim blaming, so that brutality, be it physical, political, economic or structural is laid only at the feet of the one who is being abused, who has failed to make the right decision.

Prejudicial race relations help to instate the different, but here equally abject positions of both of these corpses.

I have been told that the billboard in Kloof Street has been removed to make way, I think, for this image of a dead boy in the gutter. There has been no apology from SAB or the DTI for this image; rather the You Decide campaign, which travels with this image as part of its educational model, is set to reach some 360 schools; targeting an estimated 400 000 learners this year alone, as well as increasing a billboard campaign throughout the country.

Steenkamp’s boyfriend has been photographed by a remarkable set of image-makers who have framed him as beautiful, sleek, downward-facing and painstakingly apologetic — he is an image of masculine vulnerability and poise. His image may be everywhere, now, but there is no danger of him losing his humanity. ‘Pistorius’s whole body shook and he wept uncontrollably, as if a chasm of grief threatened to swallow him,’ David Smith writes, helpfully, in The Guardian. ‘The magistrate halted proceedings for a few minutes, explaining: “My compassion as a human being does not allow me to just sit here.”‘ In the magistrate’s flagrant disregard for his own objectivity, he also assures that Pistorius will not become the object made of Steenkamp. The boyfriend who shot and killed her, remains in all senses alive, human, tragic, compassionate and overflowing with subjectivity. Granted bail, he is said to have returned to training this week.

The images of these dead women do more than encourage a sickly necrophilia, an ogling over feminine corpses (as if this were not bad enough). These pictures propose an existing equivalence between women and object so that the actual death of a woman/object is immaterial, tautological and inconsequential. These pictures of the corpses of women turn women into images, images into corpses, women into death. And since we are told that these image-women are already objects, dead things, of their own volition, violence against women is kept decidedly outside of the frame: invisible, permissible and nobody’s fault but our own.

* Linda Stupart is an artist, writer and educator from Cape Town, South Africa. She is currently at Goldsmiths College, London, where she is enrolled in an Art Ph.D which considers new questions of objectification. 

TIME magazine and the media’s culture of confirmation bias

Within hours of Adam Lanza shooting dead 20 Sandy Hook Elementary first-graders and seven adults, including his own mother, and taking his own life, media channels everywhere were festooned with analysis and opinion on what drove the 20-year-old to do it. Some blamed America’s gun culture and the free-availability of these weapons of mass massacre, while others attributed fault to mental illness, particularly (and incorrectly) autism. The violent video games Lanza played made him do it, some said. It’s the white male middle-class entitlement, I tell you, said others. Or maybe it was that Lanza was an ostracized victim of bullying. 

The explanations were compelling, logical-sounding and some had statistics and reports to back up the claims. Most of the perpetrators of mass shootings in the United States are white middle-class males. Undiagnosed mental illness is a quiet killer. Video games do contribute to normalizing violence (but no more than the news, Hollywood action flicks or real life, in some areas).

However the problem is that there was scant information to say for sure whether, or if at all, any of these explanations fit the Sandy Hook shooting. In fact, many factual errors were aired and published before accurate information came to light, so much of this early analysis was based on preconceived ideas into which the shooting was made to fit. That this early analysis was convincing and had references to back the claims was because it had been all but already written and the writers were on the prowl for circumstances to mold to fit the analysis. It was confirmation bias at its worst, or best, depending on whether you like new information fettled to affirm your beliefs.

Which brings me to TIME magazine’s cover story this week, “Pistorius and South Africa’s culture of violence”. It is the finest example amid a bevy of  fine examples of confirmation bias in the analyses so far of why South African paralympian Oscar Pistorius shot dead his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, in the early hours of Valentine’s Day.

“Why?”, the article wails. “Why is gun violence so prevalent in South Africa? Why is violence against women so common? Why was this homicide? Why did Oscar kill Reeva?”

It then proceeds to answer why it was homicide (as opposed to premeditated murder, the actual charge Pistorius faces) by artlessly blending history, research, news reports and anecdote to conclude that Pistorius shooting Steenkamp dead was a logical conclusion of South Africa’s segregated past, its persisting racial inequalities and the failures of the post-apartheid government to provide effective, reliable policing to the middle class. It does this based on one of those pre-existing, gummed-together narratives about South Africa that, if you excise enough persnickety contradictory information and gloss over the finer details, can be used to explain just about any act of violence committed by rich and middle-class South Africans.

The narrative goes something like this: South Africa is steeped in a racially unequal and divided history and present. This makes the haves, especially the rich white ones, like Pistorius, bloody scared of the black male have-nots coming to pillage and rape their women and children, which is why the haves are armed to the teeth, have a private security force and mistrust the criminal justice system run by the country’s first post-colonial black-led government. It makes them so scared and irrational, in fact, that they might mistakenly shoot dead their loved ones three times through a locked bathroom door for fear of the poor, black bogeyman.

If you beat a police officer to death with your bare hands, for example—as rugby player Bees Roux did when a black officer, Johannes Mogale, tried to pull him over on suspicion of drunk driving—it was because you thought you were being hijacked. If you are a well-heeled tourist, like Shiren Dewani, looking to murder your wife while on holiday in South Africa, your story becomes more passable if you hire black gunmen from the township to stage the deed as robbery gone wrong.

“For all its defenses, it [the government] failed to keep violence at bay. By Pistorius’ account, his fear of an intruder, the fear that keeps the people of South Africa apart still, caused the man so many saw as a unifying figure to shoot his girlfriend dead,” the article’s author, TIME magazine Africa bureau chief Alex Perry, writes.

But there are a number of problems with this. The first is that, as with much of the analysis of the Sandy Hook shooting, there is little credible information to conclude definitively on Pistorius’ state of mind. All we have, all Perry relies on to hold his central thesis together, is an affidavit Pistorius’ lawyer, Barry Roux, read to the court during the bail hearing. That affidavit is the killer’s untested version of events that night. There was no cross-examination and it is yet to be seen whether Pistorius’ account will gel with the forensic evidence, once it that been finalized. Nowhere does the article as much as hint to the fact that it is founded on an untested version of events given by the man who stands to lose the most at this point in the saga.

There are also suggestions that Pistorius’ version may have factual defects, such as why his girlfriend locked herself in the bathroom, why she did not answer when, as he claims, he warned the supposed intruder to leave his house immediately, and when exactly he put on his prosthetic legs. On the last one, the police say it was before he shot Steenkamp. He says it was after. The forensic evidence confirming the angle of the shots will resolve this, but there is enough doubt that we ought to regard with suspicion a 3000-word article that takes Pistorius’ supposed fear of crime as not only the cause of Steenkamp’s death but as the confluence of South Africa’s post-apartheid dissolution.

In blind pursuit of its central thesis, the article also suffers from massive overreach and glosses over the very disparities it highlights.

“To understand Pistorius and Steenkamp, to understand South Africa,” Perry writes, “it helps to know the place where the couple chose to spend their holiday. Cape Town.”

So yes, of course, the socioeconomic circumstances of a city 1200 miles away give context to the mindset of a man who spent most of his life nowhere near Cape Town. Never mind that those circumstances aren’t necessarily extrapolateable to Pretoria, where Pistorius lived and attended school, or Johannesburg, where he was born.

In its submission to the commission of inquiry into allegations of ineffective policing in Khayelitsha, a township near Cape Town’s newly upgraded multi-million dollar international airport, the Civil Society Prison Reform initiative pointed out that violent crime in the city, and in South Africa in general, was not uniformly experienced. While the national crime rate has gone down in recent years, the submission said, “the crime rate in Khayelitsha (and many similarly situated areas) … has not only bucked the national trend and saw increased crime, particularly violent crime, but is also much higher than many other suburbs of Cape Town.”

So even if, somehow, Cape Town’s yawning inequalities increase potential for violent crime, that danger is concentrated to a few, mostly poor areas where policing, the criminal justice system, and general measures to deter crime, like street lights, have failed. The epicenters of violent crime in South Africa are far flung from the sandy-white beaches of Clifton or the high walls and electric fences of Pistorius’ Silver Lakes townhouse estate in Pretoria, the capital.

Finally, also glossed over in the article is that blended in the crime statistics referenced is a significant amount of acquaintance violence, which is committed by perpetrators known to the victims and not some unknown black bogeyman. In fact, most cases of murder, assault and sexual assault in South Africa are committed by family members or people known to each other, according to the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation. Thus the black bogeyman element the country’s apparent culture of violence is mostly a work of popular middle-class fiction and is worthy of critical deconstruction, not propagation as Perry does in his article.

In the end, it may be that Pistorius, feeling vulnerable while hobbling around on his stumps and dogged by fears of crime, shot first and asked questions later, as South Africa’s erstwhile police commissioner Bheki Cele reportedly implored police to do in the face of increasingly violent criminals. It may even be that South Africa does indeed have a culture of violence, but there are important details and complexities to the situation and there is presently far too little credible information to make the leap from icon-shoots-cover-girl to a nation falling apart under the weight of crime and inequality. Those who’ve made the leap were likely mid-jump anyhow and Pistorius killing Steenkamp provided the perfect springboard to leap to ill-conceived conclusions.

Meet photographer and blogger… Mohamed Elshahed

Our weekly feature profiling African photo-blogs and/or tumblrs moves to Cairo this week, as we take a scroll through Picture Masr, a Tumblr created by Cairo resident and Phd student Mohamed Elshahed. The images of “Egypt (mostly Cairo) beyond your Google image search results. The beauty of everyday life and all that is ordinary,” were picked up by Africa is a Country last summer and we now have Ayobola Raji, a Fulbright Scholar with the Africana Study program at New York University, asking Mohamed about his page. 

What motivated you to start your blogspot page?

I had started a blog about Cairo’s architecture, urbanism and cultural heritage at Cairobserver.com in April 2011. Motivated by creating material for Cairobserver I went out more to explore the city and started to compile a collection of photos of urban scenes, surfaces, and objects. Egypt has a rich and long history of photography that goes back to the very beginning of the invention of the daguerreotype. But in more recent years photography on the streets of Egypt outside touristic areas was nearly forbidden before the revolts of 2011. During the last years of the Mubarak era if I stood and took a picture in a downtown street, within minutes a uniformed police officer or an plain clothed secret police would have come out of nowhere and asked me what I was doing and why I was taking a picture. It was a policy that no one seems to understand. I think it was to deny people from documenting their surroundings, the denial of creating a record of daily life, mundane objects, typical architecture, practices of daily life — these were all things off the record. Of course this wasn’t official policy and there was no law against photography in streets but the former regime  – and the current one it seems — didn’t need law to do what it wants to do. Walking around the city, there were so many moments, surfaces, buildings, places that I found to be pleasing to look at and even aesthetically pleasing and so I wanted to document them. Once the revolution started all this changed and suddenly everyone was taking pictures of everything all the time. In fact it was people taking pictures of protests and police brutality with their phones and simple cameras and sharing them which contributed to the spread of the movement and popular discontent. For me it was liberating to walk around the city and take pictures of spaces of everyday life, things that don’t end up in tourist brochures, or journalistic coverage of events, or artist galleries, just normal even boring things.

What does the word “Masr” mean? How do you decide on a photo for Picture Masr?

“Masr” means Egypt but in Egypt it is also the word for “Cairo” to those not from there. So it is both the country and the capital city which is why I say that the pictures on the blog are Egypt but mostly Cairo. I don’t have much of an editorial process in what I post, I simply upload random images from my collection, I try to do it daily to keep the blog fresh. I should make clear that I use a simply point and shoot, I am not a photographer and I don’t edit the photos, they really are pedestrian shots as seen by a resident of the city.

Are there any pages that you visit regularly for great content and inspiration?

There is a great tumblr I like to check out often called Archi/Maps which has a great collection of images, plans, maps of architecture and cities from around the world. I am also inspired by current events and following the plethora of videos, particularly citizen journalism, which have appeared over the past two years. The best, and most inspiring, source for this kind of media is the Mosireen Collective (you can find their work here). Also Facebook has been used in Egypt as a platform to create online galleries of historic photographs, I think in the absence of an institution that handles and publishes historical photographs while at the same time Egypt has had a rich and productive photographic past, so there are a lot of photographs out there, mostly in personal collections, documenting cities and social life. These pages have become very popular and they often show inspiring and surprising evidence of Egypt’s modernity. I am not a nostalgist, but I still enjoy these photos and pages as documents that inspire for future creations and productions rather than melancholic left overs from by-gone better times.

Who is your favorite photographer or photo blog on the continent and diaspora right now?

For contemporary photography I follow Kim Badawi, an Egyptian photographer with a portfolio covering subjects from around the world. One of his latest series was documenting Chinese immigrants in Egypt, a beautiful and fascinating series of black and white photos. You can check his website here.

Another photographer I follow, who is also my neighbor, is Randa Shath. Randa is the photo editor at the newspaper Al Shorouk. She has traveled around Egypt and has taken incredible warm and sincere portraits of Egyptians in cities, towns and villages in their own context. Randa also produced several books. To my knowledge she doesn’t have a photo blog but you can read an interview with her here.

Personally, I don’t take many portraits and I almost exclusively photograph in the street but almost all my favorite historic photographers mostly photographed people in studios, such as Seydou Keita from Mali, Van Leo from Egypt and Hashem El Madani from Lebanon. Their photographs are endlessly inspiring.

What to you makes your page unique among others that feature African photography?

I can not claim that it is unique. My personal interest is to capture things in the city that grab my attention as I am walking around. I’m not trying to be artsy nor do I look for anything in particular to photograph. I think photography from the region, especially that which makes it to the international press, fits within very clear categories: photojournalism typically depicting tragedies and despair, documentary often seeking exceptional or “untold stories,” the romanticized landscape/idealized touristic object type of photography which is also promoted by our governments to make themselves look good and to promote a particular but often reductive image of our countries — and then there is the orientalist category which never goes away. I think my page shows things that fall between the cracks, they aren’t photographed by locals either because they are so mundane and part of daily life.

Do you feel Picture Masr embodies contemporary Egypt, or the authentic part of Egypt tourists are not shown?

Authenticity is a word/concept I’d rather not discuss. I think so much of the debate in countries such as Egypt for the past several decades has been centered around ideas of authenticity which has wasted time and energy and we’re running around in circles and getting nowhere. So I am not trying to argue that the images I take are “more authentic” than touristic or journalistic images. Picture Masr is how I see my surroundings. That’s all.

I am curious to know how you get your pictures since some of them were dated as recent as yesterday and all attributed to you. 

I live in Cairo. I take the pictures on walks around the city or other cities in Egypt during weekend trips. I then upload them one at a time in no particular order and without any editorial constraints. Some of the pictures are from five years ago while others are uploaded the same day they are taken. I am not trying to tell a story or present a narrative, instead I hope to convey a particular feeling of Egypt which isn’t about chronology or time. It is very much about place, its features, qualities and sensibility.

How do you feel regarding the social revolts directed towards the government in Egypt?

The revolution was long overdue. It has real, legitimate reasons which have to do with economy, policies, and politics. Regimes in Africa and the Middle East with very warm and friendly relations with western governments have been easing exploitation of resources, suppressing political activity, and controlling social mobility. Egypt was no different.

Picture Masr describes itself as Egypt beyond google search. Do you think this beauty of everyday life depicts gradual decay through architecture? I shouldn’t presume to speak for you so please correct me if am wrong.

Not sure I understand what you mean or how the first part relates to the second part of the question. I’ll try to answer them separately:

There is a risk of reproducing reductive imagery of places even today when all one has to do is enter a word into a search engine. A place like Egypt today with all its complexity is reduced to a few images that top the search results: pyramids, mosques, protests. Because our governments have failed to support various creative industries in Egypt, and have suppressed them, while dominating the state’s massive culture ministry and directing tourism to a few easy to manage sites that can generate some businessmen tied to the government with some income without the prerequisite of government investment into great infrastructure or simply improving quality of life to the average person, the image that was exported of Egypt was tightly controlled (average citizens were not ambassadors to their country) and it was highly reductive. That’s why I saw Picture Masr as a counterpoint, it is everything that doesn’t make it on a postcard, advertisement, or comes up in a basic google search.

Architecture needs maintenance, and when buildings are not maintained they decay and sometimes there is beauty to that process. I have to be careful not to romanticize decay although I also refuse to see decay in architecture as only negative. But in any case, this isn’t a theme I am after.

Finally, tell us about your experiences with subjects. Is there a particular reason that Picture Masr photographs structures and not people? Do you make an effort to retain this theme or are you looking to explore a different angle?

There is no theme that I go after. I do take pictures of people but I am generally not comfortable taking pictures of strangers, it makes me feel invasive and even objectifying them. I am an architect by training but that isn’t why I pay close attention to buildings. In fact I went to study architecture because growing up in Egypt the buildings always captured my imagination and my attention. I found architecture as a profession to be ethically problematic and boring in practice, at least today, but my love for architecture and the built environment as a viewer and a critic is stronger than ever. What I find most interesting in Egypt is how there are so many layers to everything, there is no obsession with pure form, or “original” condition, when it comes to buildings, which means that there are constantly pieces and layers added to the built environment by different user so that they create a constantly changing environment in all of its details. I find this to be exciting and interesting.

* You’ll find more of Mohamed Elshahed’s work on his Picture Masr Tumblr. Here.

Ayobola Raji is a Fulbright Scholar with the Africana Study program at New York University, helping undergraduate students learn about the Yoruba language and culture from Nigeria,West Africa. She is interested in writing poems, short stories, feminist articles and presenting Nigeria from a contemporary angle. For background and to see who we’ve featured before, see here.

There’s more to Angolan music than Kuduro

Angola has an underappreciated independent music scene. It’s no worth denying that kuduro is our biggest export, and when you mention Angola to most savvy music fans they will instantly identify it with Cabo Snoop and perhaps Buraka Som Sistema, although the latter is more easily recognized as a Portuguese act. For all of kuduro’s perceived qualities, it’s a bit underwhelming to note that a country with such a rich musical tradition, a tradition that in the late 60s and early 70s gave birth to such acclaimed musicians as David Zé, Elias dia Kimuezo, Duo Ouro Negro, Artur Nunes, and several others, is now mostly known for a genre that roughly translates to ‘hard ass’. 

This is not a knock on kuduro, by any means, but rather a tribute to our greatest generation of musicians. That these musicians were recently ‘rediscovered’ by such labels as Samy Ben Redjeb’s Analog Africa is a testament to their timelessness, as is the fact that they continue to serve as inspiration for Angola’s emerging generation of young talent. Two weekends ago, those lucky enough to have gotten a seat in front of Espaço Bahía’s intimate stage in downtown Luanda witnessed something special: four talented musicians of my generation, namely Aline Frazão, Toty Sa’med, Irina Vasconcelos, and Gari Sinedima, reinterpreting our parents’ classics. They called their concert Tributos às vozes de Angola, or a ‘Tribute to Angola’s Voices’.

Espaço Bahía has long been one of my favorite concert venues in Luanda. In a rapidly changing city, whose philistine administrators have demonstrated no regard for preserving its cultural and architectural heritage (see Elinga), it’s a miracle that Espaço Bahía has been able to thrive in its privileged location. Bahía, which houses a bar, a restaurant, and a lounge, is an intimate space, decorated in tasteful Angolan and other African motifs; it’s located right on Luanda’s iconic Marginal avenue, has a beautiful view of the bay and lets in the most welcome Atlantic breeze; best of all, it’s the main venue to catch live performances from Angola’s gifted independent, alternative musicians, the ones that are constantly breaking the mold and fusing rhythms from near and far.

Irina Vasconcelos, for example, is the front-woman of Angola’s most popular rock outfit, Café Negro; one of their standout songs, Kilapanga do Orfão, fuses the traditional kilapanga rhythm from Angola’s Northern provinces with rock. A few months ago Irina was rocking out with the Bahía faithful as she presented her band’s new album, A Safra; you can see them in this video playing Incerto, one of my favorite songs on that album. The Irina Vasconcelos we see in the video below, filmed during the Tributo concert, features a much more subdued songstress beautifully singing Monami (which means ‘My Son’ in the native kimbundu language), a well-known traditional tune:

Toty Sa’medo and Gari Sinedima are two young and bright musicians who are also in the ascendancy in Luanda. Toty is usually on the guitar and accompanies his counterparts on the majority of their songs; in Luanda he frequently plays in Bahía and Miami Beach, another venue in the city popular with new artists. Gari Sinedima on the other hand might better known for his collaborations with DJ Djeff, a well-known and well-traveled Angolan Afro-house DJ who frequently nods to traditional Angolan music in his electronic compositions. Vanda Kupala, a traditional song from Angola’s south, is Gari’s music of choice for his solo act below.

Lastly there is Aline Frazão, the current darling of Angola’s alternative music scene and a chanteuse who is at home singing bossa nova, fado, Galician music, or old-school Angolan ballads. She has been extensively covered here on the blog before, but it’s great to know that this singer who now makes her home in Portugal is going more frequently to Luanda. After the performance she gave in last year’s Luanda Jazz Festival, the city’s musical landscape could definitely use more of her. Below, the group bids us farewell with Palamé, another Angolan traditional tune.

* Image and video by Mário Bastos / Geração 80.

Zina Saro-Wiwa’s ‘Phyllis’ and the subversion of Nollywood cinema

Zina Saro-Wiwa’s “alt-Nollywood” short film, Phyllis, is one of the weirder fifteen minutes of film I’ve seen in some time. “Using Nollywood to subvert Nollywood,” it is an atmospheric, impressionistic, and haunting film, chronicling Phyllis’s emotional states as she takes the wigs that form such a huge part of her identity on and off. 

A surname like Saro-Wiwa brings a certain set of expectations which Zina wisely avoids throughout her work. And while I originally thought she might be benefiting from her name, this is a unique and engaging film that’ll throw you for a loop as you watch. Experimental and unrelenting, it relies heavily on its soundtrack, juxtaposing empty space and powerful heartbeat thumps against popular songs from both the West and Nigeria. When Phyllis puts her wig on, everything is cool, and we’re eased into a more typically Nollywood film vibe. But when she takes her wigs off, her eyes roll back into her head, and as viewers, we’re reeling along with Phyllis as she descends into the emptiness of her wiglessness.

As Saro-Wiwa explained in an interview with Christian Niedan over at Camera in the Sun, there’s a “syntheticness of Nollywood that I’m appalled by, but also attracted to. I want to represent that, so I invented this character through which I could express my love and hate and fear and loathing of the syntheticness of Nigeria and this practice of wig-wearing… ultimately, Phyllis represents the gap between our true essence and the plasticity… she is ultimately doomed to a cycle of longing and short-term satisfaction. But people read all sorts of things into Phyllis, and she means different things to different people. I am totally open to interpretation of what this film means. I’m not even sure I know what the film fully means. And I made it…”

The film closes with a particularly unsettling gothic image that reaffirms the fact that this is not your typical Nollywood film — not by a long shot. And though Zina approaches Nollywood from the perspective of an insider-outsider, having lived in the UK and worked for the BBC, that’s a welcome development that more homegrown Nollywood filmmakers would do well to emulate.

The film was originally part of the “Sharon Stone in Abuja” exhibit that went up at Location One Gallery in Manhattan in November 2010. It is now being shown as part of Video Slink Uganda, an exhibition in New York City of a run of experimental films on video culture.

Watch it here.

Classic Jukebox N°1: Nigerian Highlife

They just don’t make ‘em like they used to, at least when it comes to Nigerian highlife. Whether that’s good or bad is up for debate. Whatever the case, people get riled up when they’re talking about the issue. As for me, give me Victor Uwaifo or give me Wizkid – I dig them both. 

Celestine Ukwu — Ilu Abu Chi (1974). Nominally highlife, but Celestine Ukwu’s 1974 album with his Philosophers Band Ilu Abu Chi deserves its own analytic category. Rarely, if ever, has more spiritual guitar music been made.

Tunde Nightingale — Unknown (Early 1970s). With one of the highest registers you’ll ever hear, Tunde Nightingale, the “man with the golden voice,” made some of the most sublime highlife of the early independence era. Supposedly he kept a Nightingale in his home. This cut is from the early 1970s – let us know if you have any more info on it.

Rex Lawson — Sawale (late 1960s). Socially engaged highlife from one of the Igboland’s fiercest advocates. Upon being detained by the Nigerian military during the Biafra War, he defended the politics of his music, saying he wrote his songs to “uplift the rebels.” No doubt about that — one of his albums was titled “Hail Biafra.”

Dr. Orlando Owoh & His Omimah Band — Yabomisa Jawale/Wa Jo (1970). Originally a carpenter, Orlando Owoh thankfully decided to pick up a guitar at some point. This side, with its gradual inclusion of Yoruba talking drums, feels like a bridge between highlife and juju, but with a raucousness that sometimes gets lost in even the best juju. For those of you in the middle of the winter blues, let these harmonies ease your soul.

Fela Kuti — Just Like That (1989). Okay, this ain’t highlife, and it ain’t from the early independence era, but too often our Fela worship is limited to his high-period output from Shakara (1972) to Zombie (1977). This, one of his last releases, makes it clear his genius never waned even as his output slowed.

* This post is the first in what will be a series of nostalgia trips through West Africa. Next time we’ll run through some Ga cultural highlife from southern Ghana.

Dreaming of an African Pope

Gather round children and hear “[all] Africans seem naturally networked to religion.” Bow thy heads in shame yea northern heathens for the “Catholic Church, the largest Christian denomination, is part of the fabric of all African societies.” Heaven forbid you should get on your high horse and talk of gross generalizations swathed in the tropes of noble savagery and whatnot, for the Lord hath spoken, and he sayeth unto thee “Over the decades that I have travelled in Africa I have met only four African atheists”; “[In Africa] God is invoked on every occasion, private or public”; and, in a critical new development, this news just in: “[the cause of] wars… in Africa… is usually a dispute over land rights involving two communities that happen to be of different faiths.” 

Facts I tell you! You can keep your wretched first world godlessness and evil; just give us your Pope.

In a compelling blog post to African Arguments (arguments about Africa, generally not by Africans – to dispense with any ambiguity), Richard Dowden, director of that anachronism of Africa watchers ‘The Royal African Society’ (royal as in Liz II, not Goodwill Zwelethini), gets it spot on: “the next Pope should come from Africa.”

Indeed, as Dowden’s analysis suggests “[an African Pope] could restore the Church’s universal vision by moving out of the Vatican and bequeath its magnificent — but almost exclusively European Renaissance — treasures to the world.” Without a hint of incoherence, Dowden seals the deal with “He could then rebase the spiritual, emotional and geographical centre of the Church somewhere closer to a crossroads of modern humanity, a region where Judaism, Christianity and Islam began, a place where religion is most intensely felt, where the destiny of humanity itself may be forged: Jerusalem.”

Quite.

The Music of Bell Atlas

One of my current favorite bands–haven’t seen them play live yet; they’re out West–is Bell Atlas. That the lead singer Sandra Lawson is a distant relative of late Nigerian legend Rex Lawson (he is a distant cousin of her mother) and of another highlife legend, Erasmus Jenewari, may be part of it. But Sandra’s talent speaks for itself. The other band members are Derek Barber, Geneva Harrison and Doug Stuart. Things are moving fast for them. They’ve been releasing new songs online for a bit now and have a new album coming out on Bandcamp on March 11. Meanwhile, here’s a sample of their sound, self-described as an “Afro-Indie-Soul sound … incorporating an eclectic range of influences including Highlife, Hip-Hop, Samba, R&B, Post Rock, and Indie Pop”:

Another video:

And a soundcloud of their latest, and second, single from their debut EP, “Loving You Down.” It’s about “the weight of attachment that is involved in a relationship. It’s about a woman near the end of her life, revisiting some painful memories and deciding to re-craft the telling of her life story”:

* Photo Credit: Bells Atlas

The enduring controversy around Egyptian-American activist Mona Eltahawy

Post by Sarah El-Shaarawi

A week ago the Huffington Post published an article written by Melissa Jeltsen on an increasingly familiar name in women’s activism in the Arab world. The article, entitled “Mona Eltahawy, Egyptian-American Activist, On the Power of Protest,” has a rather misleading title. The focus of the article was not really Ms. Eltahawy’s thoughts on protest in the context of the Arab uprisings, nor the struggles faced by many women. Instead, the article is about Ms. Eltahawy; her history, her supporters, her detractors, and the controversy that surrounds her and her actions. 

Eltahawy’s now infamous Foreign Policy article from the May/June 2012 “Sex Issue”, “Why Do They Hate Us”, is a large component of what transformed the Egyptian-American journalist from outspoken pundit into controversial activist. The article encompassed harsh criticisms of multiple cases of female oppression, perpetrated within a bevy of different Arab countries. The tough words were accompanied by provocative images of a naked woman in a body-paint “niqab.”

Eltahawy has since expressed it was her intention to spark a conversation. And spark she did. Unfortunately, it seems the conversation has been less about the issues faced by Egyptian and Arab women, and more about Ms. Eltahawy herself.

When asked by Jeltsen about the article that made her famous, Eltahawy explains that she “wrote the piece very angrily because it was the first one [she] wrote with all 10 fingers and it hurt like hell.” In her defense, Ms. Eltahawy had suffered two broken arms and sexual assault while protesting at Tahrir Square in Cairo months before. What happened to Ms. Eltahawy, along with countless other Egyptians – both women and men – is terrible and deserves recognition. But at what point does the message become about the individual and not about the cause?

Last week’s piece mentions a tweet by journalist Jeremy Scahill from last September. Scahill wrote: “I think Mandela talked less about his 27 years in prison than @monaeltahawy has about her 22 hours in a holding cell.” Despite the mixed replies sparked by this little jab, Scahill does seem to have a point. This appears to be her way.

Jeltsen’s article also talks about Eltahawy’s most recent controversy: her arrest for spray-painting a blatantly discriminatory, anti-Islamic subway sign. Eltahawy’s response when asked about the incident: Why is the left debating vandalism when hate crimes against Muslims have soared since 2010? Yet again, the message got lost in the method.

However on top of all this noise, the message itself appears, in many ways, to be flawed. In her piece, Jeltsen acknowledges Eltahawy’s critics, but really only focuses on one: Moroccan-American writer Samia Errazzouki. The list of Eltahawy’s most outspoken and prominent critics is long, and a significant proportion of them share one very critical thing in common: they are Arab women.

For those who are interested, here’s a few: Leila Ahmed, Samia Errazzouki, Nasrine Malik, Mona Kareem, Dima Khatib and Nahed Eltantawy.

Clearly there is a disconnect. It is critical that issues of female oppression, gender-based violence, and discrimination in the Arab world are talked about. However, as many have stated before, it is also critical that the cultural, religious, political and socioeconomic complexities associated with these issues are put in context.

Having the loudest voice does not necessarily equate to having the soundest argument; it can in fact create more harm than good, particularly if those being discussed do not feel represented. Jeltsen’s article, while interesting to read, is just further proof that in terms of the scope of Ms. Eltahawy’s work, the big story that emerges is not a solution to real problems facing women in the Arab world, it’s Mona.

* Sarah El-Shaarawi is an Egyptian-Canadian living in New York City. She is currently completing a MA in International Affairs at The New School with a focus on Media & Culture in the context of the Arab World.

Do filmmakers still care for FESPACO?

FESPACO, or as it known as by its full name, the Festival of Pan African Cinema in Ouagadougou, opened its 23rd annual edition Sunday. The theme: “African Cinema and Public Policy in Africa.” Created in 1969, it has become the largest film festival on the continent devoted to providing the space for African cinema and attracts film industry professionals from around the world, boosting the international attention afforded to African filmmakers. Held biennially, major hitters in African film have won its top award, the Golden Stallion, in the past several years. Ethiopian filmmaker, Haile Gerima, won in 2009 for his film, “Teza.” Mohamed Mouftakir won in 2011 for his film, “Pegasus.” This year’s FESPACO is supposed to also be the year of the woman.

All of the juries will be headed by women. Algerian director Djamila Sahraoui’s “Yema” opened this year’s competition. Ouardia (played by Sahraoui) is a woman who, suspecting jihadism in her family, has to bury her murdered son. Ouardia struggles to find normalcy, finally concentrating her efforts on reviving a garden.

Here’s the trailer:

Gabon is the “guest of honor” at the festival, and will feature seven films in this year’s competition. Feature film “Le Collier du Makoko,” by Gabonese director Henri Joseph Koumba-Bididi, has reportedly broken records due to its high budget.

With neighboring Mali embroiled in conflict, this year’s competition is held with some tension. Michel Ouedraogo, the festival’s delegate general, has emphasized the security of the event. There is one Malian feature length film featured in this year’s competition, “Toiles d’araignées” (Cobwebs) by Ibrahima Toure. Toure’s first feature length, this tells the story of Mariama, a young woman forced to marry an elderly man whom she subsequently rejects, and is consequently imprisoned and tortured.

These highlights are just some of the 169 films (101 feature length) from 35 countries that will be screened over the next week. For the first time this year, an award of 3000 euros will be provided from the Secretariat of the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group (the ACP countries) to the film that best fits with the ideals of the program. The growing prestige surrounding the prize has been the main reason festival organizers have not budged from their requirement of only accepting films shot on 35mm, something not all are impressed with.

Nigeria, home to the world’s second largest film industry, has only one director featured in this year’s competition, Paris-based Newton Aduaka. Some have grown disgruntled with the notion that the only Nigerians featured are those based in Europe. Since most Nollywood films are in digital format, not celluloid, they aren’t eligible for entry into FESPACO. Cinematographer Tunde Kelani said that though he respects FESPACO’s position on accepting only celluloid films, he hoped that they will soon consider the modern trend of using digital.