Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 550

Angolan politics online

It's been a busy week for Angolan politics. Elections are precisely six months away. On Wednesday, the long-time second-generation UNITA politician Abel Chivukuvuku officially split with his party to declare his candidacy for the presidency and his formation of CASA (meaning home in Portuguese) — short for 'Ample Convergence of Angolan Salvation'. That same day, investigative journalist Rafael Marques testified before Angola's Supreme Court in his case against seven Angolan generals for human rights crimes in the diamond mines in Angola's eastern region. On Monday, DNIC, the National Department for Criminal Investigation took computers from the offices of the independent paper Folha 8, whose editor has been in hot water for a mock-up photo of the president and two generals that circulated on the internet. Over the weekend, protests in Luanda and Benguela against the nomination of Suzana Inglês to head the National Electoral Commission (an issue which caused walk outs in Parliament earlier this year) were met with intimidation, violence and arrests. The Angolan police have decided to open an investigation into the violence against the protestors. The judgement of the Benguela protestors that was scheduled for Wednesday this week has been delayed until today, March 16th, and more protests are scheduled for Saturday. The levers of democracy are being pulled, sometimes that's a painful process. You won't read about this in The New York Times or the Washington Post but you can check out this article at Al Jazeera English for more details. It's clear from that piece that international human rights organizations have their ears pricked. Angolans are paying attention too.

The protesters call their movement 7311, the date of their first scheduled protest last year: 7 March 2011, when they used Facebook and sms messaging to spread the word. Only a small number of protesters showed up that day — seventeen arrests were made, a number of those were journalists. All were told they were being arrested for their own protection. But even if people are too intimidated to show up, care to manifest their politics in other ways, or support the ruling party, they know what is going on and they talk about it. There is debate and commentary on Facebook and among Angolan journalists. Two Angolan journalists were having an open debate on Facebook about the significance of the protest in which 'friends' commented/participated. One termed it a 'pseudo-event', small in meaning but enlarged by Facebook and cell phones. The other replied that it was small but significant in a place where fear keeps people from showing up and fear got the state to mobilize police and unarmed thugs. Media are just as likely to produce 'pseudo-events,' he argued, as are 'citizen-journalists.' And Facebook has its own silences. Things said and unsaid because one never knows who might be reading. One might like a Paulo Flores song but not a post about Folha 8 or 7311, even if one follows it.

#Kony2012 and British media

To British eyes the polished, high-gloss viral campaign of Invisible Children's 26 minute video–with its high-end production, fast paced edits and expensive motion graphics–clearly favors the grabby style of American political campaign imagery, a style that is increasingly adopted in the British party political broadcasts too. It's an immersive, yet distinctly oppressive style of polemic film making. Apart from Charlie Brooker's takedown on Channel 4′s "The 10 O'Clock News"  "10 O'Clock Live" show (where we learned of Jason Russell's extensive music video oeuvre), how are the rest of British media reporting and analyzing this #Kony2012 business?

According to YouTube analytics, Kony 2012 has been most popular among the 'Female 13-17′, 'Male 13-17′ and 'Male 18-24′ categories . John Vidal, The Guardian's environment editor, in a video on the Guardian's website commented: 'this video is aimed at children, narrated to children and even involves the children of the film maker'—he's unsurprised with the popularity amongst the younger generation of the world, who are at home with this MTV-crisis-issue kind of film making.

In a review of the video itself Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian writes; 'it can't be considered great documentary-making. But as a piece of digital polemic and digital activism, it is quite simply brilliant'.

Perhaps because of their glaring soft spots for all things digital and sentimental, the Guardian were caught flat-footed. From their man who is tasked with covering the whole of Africa, David Smith, there has been ne'er a murmur (perhaps he's been at the theater?).

While Bradshaw hummed and hawed about how "principled" the whole thing seemed, the Guardian's right-wing rival, the Daily Telegraph, immediately (right when 'Kony 2012′ went live) put out a zinger of a piece from Nairobi by Mike Pfanz, who described "growing outrage in Uganda" and canvassed a strong range of informed Ugandan opinion well before everybody else in the Western media decided to do the same. The fascist and celebrity obsessed Daily Mail, most read news site in the Western world, came late to the story. So far the Daily Mail's army of commenters (made famous at the end of last year in Esquire's feature on the Daily Mail, titled "Bullshit.com") have roundly denounced Kony2012 as a "scam" and "propaganda".

The debate was presented initially interchangeably throughout the UK media, who were merely detailing information of Invisible Children, the viral and it's ensuing 'outrage'. Most of these media reserved their online platform to publish more outspoken opinions.

The Guardian utilized their site to call for open collaboration, running a feed that gathered a myriad of perspectives from academics, charity workers, journalists and blogs. In addition, providing a selection of old articles their reporters had written on Uganda to provide breadth and depth to the issues raised.

An article published by the American publication, Foreign Affairs, in November 2011 resurfaced and offered the most comprehensive record of the U.S.'s intervention in Uganda. One of the authors of the piece Mareike Schomerus, at the London School of Economics, told a Channel 4 news reporter that Invisible Children's primary ambition of forcing the arrest of Kony was 'naive and one dimensional'. The reaction and its call for transparency led Invisible Children to respond, which they did, but it did little to calm the fiercest reactions that were the most deeply felt.

A blog post by poet and writer, Musa Okwonga (his family is from Northern Uganda), who had been one of the first in the UK to write about Kony2012 on The Independent's blog pages (Elliot commented on Okwonga's critique of Kony2012 on this blog) was also later interviewed on Channel 4 News. Okwonga said that the viral depicted a 'painfully familiar tale' which 'has unpleasant echoes of colonialism'. A 'paternalism' that seems to have dominated the Western methods of presenting the 'African story'.  But he stated that, 'on the other hand, I am very happy – relieved more than anything – that Invisible Children have raised worldwide wariness of this issue'.

There was a clamor to include "authentic African voices."  The same set of people on Twitter and African bloggers, mostly based in the West, listed by American publications like The New York Times and The Atlantic, were listed here. The Youtube video response by Ugandan journalist Rosebell Kagumire, to Kony2012, was widely referenced.

If there is one clear aim that has been achieved by Invisible Children's viral is that it has brought Joseph Kony into the minds of many. Unfortunately, to achieve this, the responsibility to impart a historically, contemporary and factually accurate picture of Uganda has been abused and floridly edited. Sanitising a complex, multifaceted story down to clear divisions of good vs evil and raising Joseph Kony to the source and solution of all Uganda's struggles.

* Jonathan Duncan is a writer and designer living in London/Dorset. You can follow him on @Tobe_averb

Music Break. Rocket Juice and the Moon

Via OkayAfrica

… Another tune off the Tony Allen—Damon Albarn—Flea conglomerate project Rocket Juice & The Moon. "Follow-Fashion" plays like a horn-flanked afrobeat progression, featuring heavy slap bass from Flea, Damon on the vertical piano, sensuous croons from Mali's Fatoumata Diawara and verses from Accra MC M.anifest. The performance was recorded at La Fiesta des Suds in Marseille, France last October. Watch it above and look out for the Rocket Juice & The Moon LP out 3/26 on Honest Jon's.

A fast train from Dakar

Young Philippe Ndour is the nephew of Senegalese pop star Youssou Ndour. And just like his uncle and his mother he wants to be a pop singer (see his Justin Bieber impression here). And like his uncle, Philippe dabbles in politics, though Philippe is starting young. The second round of presidential elections between President Abdoulaye Wade (he might lose his title as Life President) and opposition challenger Macky Sal is scheduled for March 25. In the video above, made before the first round of voting, Philippe has some words for the candidates. Singing in Wolof (subtitles in French) over a too-sweet rhythm, Philippe demands good schools, housing, roads, jobs, clean water, no more electricity blackouts, and a fast train from Dakar. We should have a Senegal elections primer soon.

#Kony2012 the musical

We want to step off #Kony2012 (we promise to lay off them by this weekend), but we could not let this one pass. We know that Jason wants a career in musical theater. The writers of British broadcaster and satirist Charlie Brooker's nightlyweekly commentary on Channel 4′s weekly satire show '10 O'Clock Live' spent some time looking at Invisible Children's videos on Vimeo and Youtube and found plenty musical theater among the 274 videos (at last count) the group has posted online.

The first video, 2006′s "Global Night Commute: A Musical to Believe" shows Jason (described by Brooker as "a clean-cut Abercrombie and Finch version of Jesus Christ") and company "dancing around Glee-like in a high school like a boy band." Brooker adds that the video "must have cost what even the Bible would describe as a bumload of cash." Watch from the 1:40 mark:

[image error]

Then there's the 2007 "World Tour Blazing Trials Again" showing actors riding around on a minivan miming to pop lyrics "without a single mention of Africa the entire four minutes."

Next up is "Jump First, Fear Later" from 2009, "a cult like video" with their followers leaping "like a lemming pack" off a cliff, which, "once again cleverly raises awareness of Uganda, by never once mentioning Uganda."

And finally, "at least Invisible Children doesn't also organise vaguely ominous youth camp events for its followers which hint at them all — I don't know — rising up to usher in some kind of New World Order, all topped off with a sinister logo." Uh-oh. This is Invisible Children's "Fourth Estate", complete with some kind of bizarre Australian-cum-English-cum-Californian accent doing the voiceover. (Is it Russell Crowe?) Help!

Watch Charlie Brooker's full #Kony2012 commentary here.

H/T: Mikko Kapanen; Neelika Jayawardane and Elliot Ross contributed to this post.

Malawians are fed up with Madonna

Malawi is fed up with Madonna and her school daze, with the singer's refusal to consult and her autocratic ways. Given the autocratic politics of the Mutharika regime, that's both quite a statement and none at all. Madonna's foundation, Raising Malawi (a telling name), has reportedly spent $3.8 million on a state-of-the-art school for girls outside of the Lilongwe. What's there to show for that? Nothing.

But the bigger picture is that Malawi is fed up, and not only the Mutharika government with Madonna.

Women are fed up with the ways in which the State has failed to respond to HIV and AIDS, and in particular to the ways in which HIV+ women live. For example, Bhatupe Mhango, gospel singer, activist, Malawian, is fed up with the injunction to keep silent about her HIV+ status. She is fed up with being fed up as well. Along with so many others, she is fed up with being told that she must not even whisper about her 'condition'. She is fed up with State blaming everyone, including 'the Chinese', while the illness spreads. And so she is singing out, speaking out, writing out, and organizing.

It's what women organizing do every day, in Malawi as everywhere. As Hope Chigudu, Ugandan-born Zimbabwe-based feminist organizer in Malawi has explained the process, women gather together, speak, listen, tell stories, listen, share, create and support safe spaces for sharing, demystify the body, attend to new and older forms of leadership, attend to new and older leaders, work at keeping the processes open and sustaining, generate knowledge, cross the line.

Women cross the line all the time. What does that mean?

It means that when discussions of girls' education in Malawi must be conducted by Malawian women and girls. What comes first? Is it private, safe, secure and clean toilets? Is it daycare for girl students' children? Questions that cannot be asked or answered from London or Tokyo or Washington, DC.

And so, the women of Malawi are fed up. Over the weekend, the government held a Women of Distinction ceremony, at the 'magnificent' State House. Only problem was too many women showed up. So, when the women retired to the restrooms and found that the women's toilets was actually the woman's toilet, they 'invaded' the men's restrooms. More like … occupied, liberated, socialized and demystified.

The distinctive and distinguished women of Malawi said no to the architecture of patriarchy and yes to themselves. They said, "Yes, yes we can go in there, for we are many." And they did.

My favorite photographs N°1: Zachary Rosen

Katse Kombi

We're starting a new weekly series today. We ask photographers who make portraits of African subjects to introduce us to their work. Basically they pick their five favorite photographs, describe the subject matter, what brought them to the image and what kind of mood they were trying to capture. Our first guest is Zachary Rosen, an American documentary photographer who has worked in The Gambia and Lesotho as a Peace Corps Volunteer. His photos live at zacharyrosen.com and he blogs (occasionally) here.

"Katse Kombi," his first pick, is the portrait above. Zachary:

In my photographic work I seek to document social transformation. My images depict the intersection of various influences on people and their environments; the traditional; the contemporary; the local; and the foreign. I document how the creative amalgamation of those influences produces new social contexts that are each unique. As active participants in what could be called social remixing, the subjects of my images challenge assumptions of static, shallow, generalized culture. My first choice is "Katse Kombi". Just after sunrise in Lesotho's town of Katse, high in the mountains of Thaba Tseka district, a kombi driver waits to load his vehicle with passengers from communities surrounding the mammoth Katse Dam. I took this shot as I was on my way to Lesotho's capital Maseru after visiting a friend in the area and witnessing the spectacle of the dam. I happened to be under the weather as I rode this vehicle down the snaking road to the Maseru lowlands, but a collection of Brenda Fassie's greatest hits on the car stereo improved the ride by reminding me that I'm no "weekend special."

Graduation Party

While in Lesotho, I was invited to a party in Mazenod at the home of a work colleague whose sister was graduating from the National University of Lesotho. In the photo, their father, a PhD and lecturer at the same university is moving to give a speech in front of their home. Family, friends and community members have come to partake in the celebrations and the feast.

Mbabane Community Pool

In the middle of Coronation Park in Mbabane, Swaziland sits the community pool. A caretaker removes debris from the pool in preparation for the afternoon rush of children and families looking for reprieve from the Swazi heat. I laid eyes on the pool early in the morning on my way to catch a vehicle to Maputo and I just had to stop and admire its sparkling cleanliness and the aesthetic appeal of its geometric layout.

Rooftop Braai

A man braais [BBQ's] chicken and boerewors on the rooftop of the Keleketla Library, a media arts space in central Johannesburg, South Africa. Framing the scene are towering high-rise apartment buildings emitting a synchronized, wavering glow from the many televisions tuned into an evening soap opera. In the courtyard below, a crowd gathers to hear live jazz and DJs in an event sponsored by Chimurenga Magazine to launch their latest masterpiece, "The Chronic."

Painted Dream

A fine art painter dozes off in a shared studio space, strokes of color fresh in his mind. It was at this studio near the ocean in Maputo, Mozambique, where I met a painter named Viler, who had recently returned home after nearly 10 years in New York City. He brought the New York accent with him. After a few hours of exchanging stories about our travels, we agreed to collaborate on two new paintings, one for each of us. The next day we took taxis all over town to get canvases and finally as the sun went down we coated them with a base layer of white paint. Since the white paint needed to dry we passed the time at a karaoke bar in downtown Maputo, where the crowd overflowed into the street. By the time we returned to the studio the sun was re-emerging. With collaborative panache, paints were then brushed, splattered and splashed until the canvases were replete with color.

Oprah and Kristof: What don't they have in common?

[image error]

In the first sentence of my recent essay in Harvard's Transition Magazine, I declared that I did not want to write about Nicholas Kristof because his writing was boringly predictable. But I also did not want to write about him because the fundamental problem my essay tries to explore is not really about him. It remains intriguing to me how he became the spokesperson and even poster boy for a certain kind of development and humanitarian intervention. Perhaps it's even more interesting to ask why he is so resistant to changing the parameters of his thinking in the face of increasing criticisms. Just in the last few months Elliott Prasse-Freeman published a pointed critique in The New Inquiry, pointing out how Kristof's advocacy is neo-colonial. Anthropologist Laura Agustín, in her blog The Naked Anthropologist and Counter Punch, used her own scholarship on prostitution to show clearly why the specifics and the particular histories and circumstances of the women Kristof claims to be rescuing actually do matter. But his writing certainly did not create the relationship between Americans and Africans that I find so disturbing.

My book, Travel, Humanitarianism and Becoming American in Africa, which came out in 2010, concludes with the same argument that I make in my essay on Kristof, about the costs of humanitarian and development programs that erase particular histories and places in the interest of a single grand narrative. In the book, I take on the Oprah Show's representations of Africa and Africans and Ms. Winfrey's own intervention in South Africa, especially her Leadership Academy for girls in Henley on Klip. Like Kristof, she builds a way for her audience to learn to empathize with a generic group of African girls whose suffering is brought home by their kinship with Oprah herself. In this way Oprah extends her relentless domestication of structural problems in America, turning a personal desire to help sufferers of abuse into a more than acceptable (to her viewers and fans) African development program. Both Oprah and Kristof simultaneously generalize while individualizing political and social challenges, making them very effective storytellers for  the neoliberal governance of good citizens; citizens who take their individual responsibility very seriously and believe that others should, too. For years Oprah offered comfort food to Americans who truly believed that their time would come, that Oprah's story was not unique or a freak of nature; that they too could generate true success if only they believed enough, worked hard enough. In both America and Africa this story, like Kristof's, helps to reduce complex structural and political problems to individual choices. I, therefore, couldn't help chuckling at the possibility that historians might, in the future, see a direct connection between two events: 1) Occupy Wall Street's recognition that American poverty is structural, not the result of people not working hard enough; and 2) the end of the Oprah Winfrey Show's television run.

While I can understand the importance of these stories to Oprah, given her background, it is less clear why a journalist like Nicolas Kristof should be so besotted with stories of individual helplessness, generally in the global south, relieved by individual actions by good people, generally in the global north. Has he become seduced by his own fame? Here is the other side of the Kristof narrative that makes him more than just a representative of the generic relationship between those with privilege and those without. While he has occasionally bemoaned the New York Times readers' obsession with celebrity, he has also used celebrities as central figures in his "journalism," all in the interest of getting readers to care about so-called unknown/unknowable places in Africa. He has his own story of how to become the thing you admire; he is his own best narrative hook. So even if Kristof is simply mirroring a broader trend, I feel we are forced to care about why and how he himself got to be famous. His caring about the suffering of women around the world has made him a celebrity in his own right. It has enabled him to dramatize his narrative, and this is why so many well-intentioned people want to hear his stories about Africans and other supposedly helpless/voiceless people. His story makes it hard for people doing the work that needs to be done both in the US and Africa because in the end, it makes it so easy to think that all you have to do is care about the figures seen through his eyes, rather than understanding people and their contexts on their own terms.

* This is an edited version of a post that first appeared on the CIHA Blog based at the University of California, Irvine.

#Kony2012 and British media

To British eyes the polished, high-gloss viral campaign of Invisible Children's 26 minute video–with its high-end production, fast paced edits and expensive motion graphics–clearly favors the grabby style of American political campaign imagery, a style that increasingly adopted in the British party political broadcasts too. It's an immersive, yet distinctly oppressive style of polemic film making. Apart from Charlie Brooker's takedown on Channel 4′s "The 10 O'Clock News" show (where we learned of Jason Russell's extensive music video oeuvre), how are the rest of British media reporting and analyzing this business?

According to YouTube analytics, Kony 2012 has been most popular among the 'Female 13-17′, 'Male 13-17′ and 'Male 18-24′ . John Vidal, The Guardian's environment editor, in a video on the Guardian's website commented: 'this video is aimed at children, narrated to children and even involves the children of the film maker'—he's unsurprised with the popularity amongst the younger generation of the world, who are at home with this MTV-crisis-issue kind of film making.

In a review of the video itself Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian writes; 'it can't be considered great documentary-making. But as a piece of digital polemic and digital activism, it is quite simply brilliant'.

Perhaps because of their glaring soft spots for all things digital and sentimental, the Guardian were caught flat-footed. From their man who is tasked with covering the whole of Africa, David Smith, there has been ne'er a murmur (perhaps he's been at the theater?).

While Bradshaw hummed and hawed about how "principled" the whole thing seemed, the Guardian's right-wing rival, the Daily Telegraph, immediately (right when 'Kony 2012′ went live) put out a zinger of a piece from Nairobi by Mike Pfanz, who described "growing outrage in Uganda" and canvassed a strong range of informed Ugandan opinion well before everybody else in the Western media decided to do the same. The fascist and celebrity obsessed Daily Mail, most read news site in the Western world, came late to the story. So far the Daily Mail's army of commenters (made famous at the end of last year in Esquire's feature on the Daily Mail, titled "Bullshit.com") have roundly denounced Kony2012 as a "scam" and "propaganda".

The debate was presented initially interchangeably throughout the UK media, who were merely detailing information of Invisible Children, the viral and it's ensuing 'outrage'. Most of these media reserved their online platform to publish more outspoken opinions.

The Guardian utilized their site to call for open collaboration, running a feed that gathered a myriad of perspectives from academics, charity workers, journalists and blogs. In addition, providing a selection of old articles their reporters had written on Uganda to provide breadth and depth to the issues raised.

An article published by the American publication, Foreign Affairs, in November 2011 resurfaced and offered the most comprehensive record of the U.S.'s intervention in Uganda. One of the authors of the piece Mareike Schomerus, at the London School of Economics, told a Channel 4 news reporter that Invisible Children's primary ambition of forcing the arrest of Kony was 'naive and one dimensional'. The reaction and its call for transparency led Invisible Children to respond, which they did, but it did little to calm the fiercest reactions that were the most deeply felt.

A blog post by poet and writer, Musa Okwonga (his family is from Northern Uganda), who had been one of the first in the UK to write about Kony2012 on The Independent's blog pages (Elliot commented on Okwonga's critique of Kony2012 on this blog) was also later interviewed on Channel 4 News. Okwonga said that the viral depicted a 'painfully familiar tale' which 'has unpleasant echoes of colonialism'. A 'paternalism' that seems to have dominated the Western methods of presenting the 'African story'.  But he stated that, 'on the other hand, I am very happy – relieved more than anything – that Invisible Children have raised worldwide wariness of this issue'.

There was a clamor to include "authentic African voices."  The same set of people on Twitter and African bloggers, mostly based in the West, listed by American publications like The New York Times and The Atlantic, were listed here. The Youtube video response by Ugandan journalist Rosebell Kagumire, to Kony2012, was widely referenced.

If there is one clear aim that has been achieved by Invisible Children's viral is that it has brought Joseph Kony into the minds of many. Unfortunately, to achieve this, the responsibility to impart a historically, contemporary and factually accurate picture of Uganda has been abused and floridly edited. Sanitising a complex, multifaceted story down to clear divisions of good vs evil and raising Joseph Kony to the source and solution of all Uganda's struggles.

* Jonathan Duncan is a writer and designer living in London/Dorset.

Music Break. Kefee & Becca

Kefee (from Nigeria) and Becca (from Ghana) bring their version of 'Dan Maliyo'. Pop and play as we like it.