Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 543
April 6, 2012
Friday Bonus Music Break
Mali's on our mind. Mostly because of the confusion. Reports from Bamako abound, while there's still very little information available from the north. Malian artists in the diaspora, it seems, are as confused. (Check Mokobe's site for example.) Earlier this week, Tuareg band Tamikrest gave a shoutout to "our friend" Ben Zabo. (Is it true what his European label says? Is this "the first album ever to be released by a Malian of Bo descent"?) His hommage to Dounaké Koïta:
While we're waiting for their new album to be released (later this year, if all goes well), South African Driemanskap made time to record another video, this time for 'Ivamna', still off their debut album:
Nomadic Wax keeps working hard to push hip hop from Zimbabwe. They'll even shoot a video in Washington DC for it. (And, for the record, in Harare.) Dumi RIGHT, Outspoken and MC Pep:
A week after first seeing this video (on This is Africa's page), I still think this is one of the wildest songs I've heard in a long time. I also believe we'll get to hear many more 'Facebook'-titled tracks in the future. Not just from Senegal. Eumeudi Badiane, Wally Seck and Abou Thioubalo:
And to slow things down, Guinean Ba Cissoko live in Paris. 'Politiki':
Good Friday
In the midst of so much global upheavals, it is good to know one can always count on religious and financial leaders to remind us of who the "good guys" are not. A recent Russian bruhaha over whether Russian Orthodox Church leader, Patriarch Kirill I, wore a $30,000 Breguet timepiece (watch) or not is causing an internet stir. For good reasons too. This is a story of a national religious institution and its leader lying publicly repeatedly and being incompetent enough to cover their tracks. If he was a US politician, he would be resigning now. It is sad and frustrating when an institution that claims to be a moral compass of a country often displays lavish wealth and power, dishonestly, when a majority of its congregation is suffering under economic repression. One wishes there had been the same viral passion by Nigerians when one of their wealthy mega-Pastors claimed to be starting his own airline, in addition to the four private jets he owns and allegedly barely uses. Jesus Inc. is a thriving and good business in Nigeria and other countries in Africa. Might it be time to start forcing these corporations and their CEOs to start sharing their wealth with their congregants (did I just hear someone say "taxes"?)? It is a pity that those with the power to best do this might be major shareholders in Jesus Inc.
Cape Town: Beautiful Ugly
By Olufemi Terry and Marco Lachi
In 2008, while living and studying in Cape Town, I heard, over and over, two observations about the city: it was a place of singular beauty, perhaps even the world's most captivating city. Visitor and local alike seemed incapable of seeing other landscapes than the physical one, and some claimed that the city's insularity was a result of the mystical, domineering influence of Table Mountain. The second perception, loosely related to the first, was that Cape Town was not an African city or, at least, not a "real African city."
I too once held these opinions, and had relocated to South Africa from Kenya drawn by the striking terrain, the possibility of anonymity, of going about on foot, and the allure of a Mediterranean sort of life. And yet, in one respect, Cape Town had seemed, even at the outset, an African, even a pan-African city; while walking along Long Street, the city center's main artery, I was liable to hear spoken Wolof, kiSwahili, Somali, Xhosa.
The city's beauty quickly became blurry because of the many proofs that Apartheid itself, rather than its legacy, remained in place. In restaurants and cafes, a three-tiered hierarchy endured: proprietors were white, the wait staff colored and the charwomen and busboys black. Over three and a half years, I vacillated between rejection of the words not an African city, and a sneaky sense that this summation was less glib than it sounded. And as I read Beautiful Ugly, South African academic Sarah Nuttall's critique of the West's fraught relationship to African art, I was struck by this title as a fitting description for Cape Town itself, a shorthand for its intricate, unsettling cultural aesthetics.
It wasn't long before I gave up insisting that Cape Town was an African city and instead argued that it was a Creole one, like Santa Domingo, Basse Terre or Rio de Janeiro. Later, I revised this opinion also; sixty percent of its population may be coloured, but Cape Town's past and its predilections render neat formulations like Creole city and European city equally hollow.
In Latin America and in the Antilles, the Creole was a social intermediary, an embodied middle ground and the object of both "European" and "African" fantasy and aspiration. Whereas Apartheid effectively decreolized South Africa's colored community, and it became just one among many tribes, useful primarily as a social and geographic buffer between blacks and whites. In Cape Town time and identity politics have further diminished the Creole's historic raison d'être, and he has been forcibly recast in the role of dacoit, of brute. As the Cape Town poet Rustum Kozain has said: to a large segment of the city, I am a thief; to another segment, I am a racist.
And Kozain's eloquent claim does not even reckon with the status of blacks in the Western Cape. For a makwerekwere, a foreign black, Cape Town offers no natural constituency. I, on entering a restaurant, became invisible unless in the company of a white person. If, however, my companion happened to be white and female, I became not only visible, but a spectacle. The worst thus, of all worlds: utter oblivion or the stares of voyeurs.
"Reconciliation," if it even occurred in Cape Town, has failed. For the present, what prevails, in a sort of uneasy social consensus, is a privileging of natural beauty over man-made sorts. Capetonians have consented to revere the mountain but will long disagree on whether straight hair is superior to kinky, or if kwaito trumps techno.
And even as a Eurocentric aesthetic continues to predominate, a frantic, rearguard mood has become apparent among the city's whites. With every passing summer, Cape Town's non-whites become more and more visible, assertive and numerous. It's not difficult to envision the city as it appears through feverish eyes: a citadel under siege, a dwindling outpost of civilization. And there's no doubt where the ultimate stand in defense of the old life will—must—be made: the slopes of Table Mountain. As one local told a newspaper reporter, "People have come to accept that you can be mugged in town or on the road but the mountain is somehow seen as sacrosanct. For me as a Buddhist it's my temple, my soul food."
* Olufemi Terry has written most recently about Afrobeats artists P Square, Cape Verde and Stuttgart. His essays and fiction have been published in Chimurenga, Gutter and Cityscapes. He lives in Germany. Photographer Marco Lachi has shown his work at MAXXI, the Contemporary Art Museum in Rome and Caja Madrid in Barcelona. He's a participant in the "Documentary Platform" project, a visual archive of documentary photography focused on the Italian landscape. He lives in Italy. Terry and Lachi are working on the project "How does it feel…" (to be a book soon).
April 5, 2012
The Defiant One (in Morocco)
From Aman Sethi for The Hindu:
El Haked, the rapper, didn't go to college. He is one of eight children raised in a single income family; his father works in a textile factory. After school, he joined his father at the factory, working nine hour shifts for 2,500 dirhams [approximately Rs.15,000] a month, until he was fired last year after his arrest. "It takes two hours to travel from my house in Oukacha to the factory. I would leave the house at 6.30 in the morning, work through the day and travel two hours coming back," he said. His lyrics are inspired by his life in his working class locality: hashish, unemployment, kids on the streets, the police. One of his first songs was called "We are from Oukacha and not from Harlem." "We had never heard the music, but everybody [in Morocco] was talking about Harlem and all the rappers were trying to sound like Americans," he said with a smile.
The Defiant One
From Aman Sethi for The Hindu:
Government figures show that 18 per cent of urban Moroccans with advanced degrees and 8.1 per cent of those with no diplomas were unemployed in 2010; as were 31 per cent of urban youth aged between 15 and 24 years. Services and General Administration, in which the government and public sector play a significant role, account for 36 per cent of all urban jobs. The statistics suggest that the economy has room for unskilled labour employed in low-wage positions, but the private sector is unable to create new jobs for those with an education and aspirations.
In the early 1990s, Morocco embarked on a massive privatisation drive in which the distribution of essential services like electricity and water were handed over to private operators and tariffs rose significantly. This combination of unemployment and escalating costs is common to both urban and rural areas.
El Haked, the rapper, didn't go to college. He is one of eight children raised in a single income family; his father works in a textile factory. After school, he joined his father at the factory, working nine hour shifts for 2,500 dirhams [approximately Rs.15,000] a month, until he was fired last year after his arrest. "It takes two hours to travel from my house in Oukacha to the factory. I would leave the house at 6.30 in the morning, work through the day and travel two hours coming back," he said.
His lyrics are inspired by his life in his working class locality: hashish, unemployment, kids on the streets, the police. One of his first songs was called "We are from Oukacha and not from Harlem." "We had never heard the music, but everybody [in Morocco] was talking about Harlem and all the rappers were trying to sound like Americans," he said with a smile.
Paris is a Continent N°11
Sage poet Zoxea & Busta Flex battle it out in 'C'est nous les reustas':
Youssoupha (a name you must be familiar with by now), Indila and Skalpovich Dreamin':
1995 recorded a clever video for 'La suite'. You recognize la ville:
Vide returns with a video for 'Je m'en bats' (shot in Swiss Geneva) :
And in 'Frère Soeur' Soraya (as the 'sister') and Leck (as the 'brother') are trying hard to get into each other's head:
The Jacob Zuma Era
Coming on June 1 is Northwestern University journalist professor Doug Foster's new book, After Mandela: The Struggle for Freedom in Postapartheid South Africa. The book is published by WW Norton in New York City. The title is unoriginal (Financial Times's Alec Russell had the same title) but should not take away from what I think will be an excellent first take on Jacob Zuma's presidency. Norton is marketing it as "the most important historical and journalistic portrait to date of a teetering nation whose destiny will determine the fate of a continent." They promise that Doug has had "early, unprecedented access" to President Zuma as well as to "the next generation in the Mandela family." The book is based on six years worth of interviews. I am looking forward to reading it. Here to remind you of Doug's style are excerpts from a 2009 profile of Jacob Zuma in The Atlantic Monthly.
Zuma is a large-boned man with a shaved, bullet-shaped head. He carries himself in the loose-limbed manner of a natural politician, and the edges of his mouth regularly turn up in a Mona Lisa smile, as if he's just remembered an old joke. His cheeks are full and his skin unlined; he looks far younger than his 67 years. Tinted wire-rimmed glasses shade his heavy-lidded eyes, so it's hard to know when he's pulling your leg, or getting angry at the drift of your questions. He's famously even-keeled—or chill, as his children say; they've never seen him lose his temper.
Zuma's home in Johannesburg lies in the middle of the block on a dead-end street in a comfortable suburb of the city. It's a two-story house, like others on the street, surrounded by high security walls. The walls are topped with electric sensors to warn of intruders. Inside them, highly trained agents keep watch from the driveway and the garden. Zuma's closest supporters, justifiably or not, fear his assassination. His food is prepared only by people he has reason to trust.
On the day I first visited [his house], two of his children—a 14-year-old son by his second wife, who committed suicide in 2000, and a 17-year-old daughter by his third wife, from whom he is now divorced—were doing homework at the long table. They seemed rather blasé about the recent dramatic developments in their father's life. "It's only politics," his daughter told me, echoing a refrain she hears regularly from him.
[At Zuma's home in Nkandla in rural Kwazulu Natal province we] sat in plastic chairs on the porch, looking out over the valley shrouded in mist. While he was talking, a young daughter—one of about 20 children Zuma has fathered with an assortment of wives and mistresses—was brought over to sit on his lap by one of his junior wives; the mother and daughter both live in a rondavel downhill from the main house, which is presided over by Zuma's first wife, Sizakele Khumalo, a formidable, sharp-tongued woman in her 60s whom Zuma courted when they were teenagers. Polygamy is accepted in Zulu culture and legal in the new South Africa, and Zuma makes no apologies for his full love life. Still, when I asked about his relationship with Khumalo, his eyes welled up. "Do you see this woman? This is my wife—my first wife," he said. "People look at me, how much I sacrificed. They don't look at her. She represents women who sacrificed but who are not known. They are in the quiet."
He sketched the "emotional tale" of their separations—she'd waited for him for the 10 years he spent in prison, and then for 14 more years while he was in exile. She'd suffered a miscarriage shortly after he fled the country, he said, adding: "My heart was bleeding then." When the police came to harass her during the years of Zuma's absence, they brought along dogs to threaten her. Yet in all those years they were apart, she never considered breaking up. "My heart wouldn't allow me to be negative," Khumalo told me. "I just focused on the fact that he was coming back someday."
These days, being at his ranch with Khumalo, his brothers and cousins, his children, and other family members helps Zuma "reconnect," he said. He offered his daughter a slice of grilled beef, pulling it away when she lunged for it until she remembered to hold out both hands politely. "If I can't identify with this area where I come from, and begin to be too high-flying … I'm like a South African who's floating in the air."
… [I]t struck me that periodic recklessness, reined in by the collective leadership of the ANC, has traced the narrative of Zuma's life.
… A cell mate [of Zuma on Robben Island], Ebrahim Ebrahim … described Zuma during his prison years as a world-class listener with a canny understanding of human behavior—and a good leader, because he knew how to assuage hard feelings arising from political arguments.
A few months before [the 2009 presidential elections], the ANC had convened a series of focus groups of likely voters. Party strategists had listened as anger poured forth, directed toward both the ANC and the government, for the failure to turn lofty plans—for a better education system, the fight against crime, and economic uplift—into reality. "It was scary," said one of the listeners. But the ANC's historic role still bound most participants to the party; few planned to vote against it. Regarding Zuma, a racial split was clear: "White people think he's guilty" of the corruption charges that have dogged him over the years, one of those who observed the focus groups said. "Blacks don't think so."
April 4, 2012
'Africa's first* transgender music star'
African governments don't want us thinking that "homosexuality" is within the realm of their "traditional values". So these leaders, even Nobel Peace Prize winning ones, use that as an excuse to justify the persecution and lack of protection for some of their most vulnerable citizens. Well, it seems that the Angolan government who currently seem to have their hands full (of money?) can't be bothered to check whether or not popular Kudurista*, Titica, fits within that value system… and we're glad for that! Now, I don't know the frame through which Angolans are seeing Titica. A little forum and youtube scrolling reveals a divided public (as always). Since I'm not there, I'm not going to write a drawn out post on LGBT issues in Angola. I do have to say that Titica may just be as much of a "challenge" for some New York audiences as ones in Africa, so I'm proud to say that she will be visiting us next Monday night at Bembe in Brooklyn for the iBomba party! New Yorkers, come say hi and give your support.
Everyone else look out for more content and coverage of her visit soon.
*Sidenote: It seems Hip Hop is the realm for political protest in Angola, while interestingly, previously marginal Kuduro seems to be turning into a sort of symbol of national pride. Whether or not that translates into better living and working conditions for the scene's artists and producers remains to be seen. But apparently Angola has seen this kind of thing before.
*Update: Not the first, as commenter Chika notes. And, we hear there is precedent in Angola with Carnaval. Follow up post with some perspective from Titica soon!
'Africa's first** transgender music star'
African governments don't want us thinking that "homosexuality" is within the realm of their "traditional values". So these leaders, even Nobel Peace Prize winning ones, use that as an excuse to justify the persecution and lack of protection for some of their most vulnerable citizens. Well, it seems that the Angolan government who currently seem to have their hands full (of money?) can't be bothered to check whether or not popular Kudurista, Titica, fits within that value system… and we're glad for that! Now, I don't know the frame through which Angolans are seeing Titica. A little forum and youtube scrolling reveals a divided public (as always). Since I'm not there, I'm not going to write a drawn out post on LGBT issues in Angola. I do have to say that Titica may just be as much of a "challenge" for some New York audiences as ones in Africa, so I'm proud to say that she will be visiting us next Monday night at Bembe in Brooklyn for the iBomba party! New Yorkers, come say hi and give your support.
*Sidenote: It seems Hip Hop is the realm for political protest in Angola, while interestingly, previously marginal Kuduro seems to be turning into a sort of symbol of national pride. Whether or not that translates into better living and working conditions for the scene's artists and producers remains to be seen. But apparently Angola has seen this kind of thing before.
**Update: Okay not the first, as commenter Chika notes. And, we hear there is precedent in Angola with Carnaval. Follow up post with some perspective from Titica soon!
Everyone else look out for more content and coverage of her visit soon.
'Africa's first transgender music star'
African governments don't want us thinking that "homosexuality" is within the realm of their "traditional values". So these leaders, even Nobel Peace Prize winning ones, use that as an excuse to justify the persecution and lack of protection for some of their most vulnerable citizens. Well, it seems that the Angolan government who currently seem to have their hands full (of money?) can't be bothered to check whether or not popular Kudurista, Titica, fits within that value system… and we're glad for that! Now, I don't know the frame through which Angolans are seeing Titica. A little forum and youtube scrolling reveals a divided public (as always). Since I'm not there, I'm not going to write a drawn out post on LGBT issues in Angola. I do have to say that Titica may just be as much of a "challenge" for some New York audiences as ones in Africa, so I'm proud to say that she will be visiting us next Monday night at Bembe in Brooklyn for the iBomba party! New Yorkers, come say hi and give your support.
*Sidenote: It seems Hip Hop is the realm for political protest in Angola, while interestingly, previously marginal Kuduro seems to be turning into a sort of symbol of national pride. Whether or not that translates into better living and working conditions for the scene's artists and producers remains to be seen. But apparently Angola has seen this kind of thing before.
Everyone else look out for more content and coverage of her visit soon.
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