Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 562

Friday Music Bonus Edition

So drawn into the video (a plethora of faces, personalities and historic moments) Atlanta trio Algiers made for 'Blood', I forgot to pay attention to the lyrics the first time seeing it:

Yanigga recorded the video for 'Dans un ghetto près de chez toi' ("In a ghetto near you") in Logbaba (Douala, Cameroon):

Fatoumata Diawara's been busy touring since releasing her first album last year. Translation of her lyrics on 'Sowa' can be found here. Unplugged in Holland:

Michael Kiwanuka's song 'I'm Getting Ready' comes with a new video:

And, old AIAC favorite, Damian Marley's latest 'Affairs of the heart':

Review. John Akomfrah's 'The Nine Muses'

John Akomfrah's new film, The Nine Muses, continues the powerful cine-cultural tradition inaugurated by the Black Audio Film Collective in Britain in the early 1980s. Similarly to his earlier films, Akomfrah handles archival footage with a profound sensitivity; he does not interrogate the history of migration through the archive, nor pore over 'celluloid fossils', rather, as cultural critic Kodwo Eshun has suggested, Akomfrah delicately weaves an archival assemblage, with the care of 'midwives handling an archival fragment as tenderly as if it were a premature infant.'

Akomfrah's film is essayistic, poetic; it obliquely tells the history of migration to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s: archival material and migrant testimonies are cut with contemporary footage filmed in the vast frozen landscapes of Alaska. Inspired by Homer's Odyssey, and structured by the nine muses, who each form a cinematic chapter, Akomfrah's film dreamily journeys through ice and hot lava, from the steamy depths of factories to the sparse, harsh frozen deserts of the contemporary.

'For the journey itself is home'

The trope of the wanderer, the journeyman, ever moving, back turned to the geography of the already-traversed past, is deftly explored in Akomfrah's film. Each 'scene' of contemporary Alaska is marked by a figure, back turned to the camera, looking out onto the horizon. Jonathan Romney comments that perhaps these breathtaking images, remarkable for their stillness and coldness, 'embody an idea of Absolute North', a 'compassless exile that Britain might resemble to immigrants from warmer places'. Romney's comment reminds me of the work of Achille Mbembe, who so powerfully plots Africa's political history onto a compass, for what was North — skyward, upwards, godly — and what resided south — deep in the underground, occupied different universes for Mbembe. He wrote of Johannesburg, '[it is] a metropolis that pokes and thunders at the sky while its reason for being there is thoroughly subterranean', pointing toward the hundreds of thousands of black miners who kept the city prospering and growing.

In a series of images from The Nine Muses, a similar kind of geography can be traced. Akomfrah cuts from the white of Absolute North, to archival footage of black workers in Britain working with molten metals, hot red lava pouring into buckets and spitting angry sparks at workers. Like they'd punctured the earth's crust, Akomfrah seems to be building upon Mbembe's idea, that the surface exists thanks to those who toil beneath; heat at the centre emanating outwards to an eventually cooled and pristine crust. The words 'a cold coming we had it' by TS Eliot breathe onto the screen.

And to these images, so poetic, suggestive, Akomfrah mixes a dazzling, often overwhelming soundtrack of literary sources. Passages from Paradise Lost, The Odyssey, Richard II, Dante's Divine Comedy, Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, Beckett's Molloy and Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, amongst many more. Akomfrah mines from these — a literary history of myth and journey — monologues and speeches that speak to the migrant experience; from Shakespeare's sonnett; "how heavy do I journey on the way/ When what I seek, my weary travel's end", to Richard's speech "Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs/ Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes/ Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth".

Akomfrah portrays migration both as literal reality — using the archive as testimony, proof, and migration as myth, for he is suggesting that 'stories usually seen through the lens of post colonialism could as easily be viewed through the lens of mythic history'. Akomfrah's essayistic form, weblike, extends outward in multiple ways, telling a powerfully tangible story of migration through the archive, while simultaneously, like a palimpsest, another narrative plays out, linking migration to mythical histories. For in the film itself, Akomfrah shows the form's own ancestry: the muses, the sources of creativity are born of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory's affair with Zeus, and so all nine share a filial relation with memory; memory and creativity are genetically linked in Akomfrah's invocation of Greek myth. In this way again, the form itself reflects the fragmentary character of memory, mirroring its ambiguous nature. Handsworth Songs, the BAFC's brilliant film (viewable here) is also concerned with memory; how it is always a matter of multiple parts than a completeness, and it is always a construction of the imagination.

The Beatles, Black Sabbath and Africa in 2050

No that's not a stadium rock concert, it's the musical references in the introduction to a scenario report, "African Futures 2050," from the South African 'Institute for Security Studies' think tank.* The report, published in collaboration with the Pardee Center for International Futures, was published last month. We finally got around to page through the PDF: dry and packed with stats but an informative and readable analysis of 'a' projected course of African development to 2050 (covering demographics, economics, sociopolitical change, the environment and "human development itself"). In their preface, the authors are quick to admit that "[n]o one can predict the future and we do not pretend to do so. Instead [we] provide one possible future, shaped by recent and likely future developments, but with the clear statement that it is only one such vision." (A necessary footnote, I believe.) The animated infographic above serves as a short introduction. The full report can be found here.

* BTW, there's a point to the Beatles and Black Sabbath references. They're featured in the report's summary of the last half century or so.

One shot project (once again)

Last week we embedded Hache. Today here is Cambio in Harlem, New York City. 

Both Hache and Cambio will be performing in New York City on March 2. For a link to the people behind the One shot project videos, see here.

Documenting Tuberculosis

Last week, the Lens Blog of the New York Times featured a post about Misha Friedman, a photojournalist documenting the epidemic of tuberculosis in Eastern Europe & Central Asia. In 2009, 1.7 million people died from TB globally, including 380,000 people living with HIV. According to the World Health Organization, the majority of deaths were in Africa.

In Eastern Europe, there are now increasing rates of multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB). MDR-TB is extremely difficult to treat — it doesn't respond to first-line drugs — and is often fatal. It spreads easily in places like Russia's crowded and inhumane prisons.

Friedman raises delicate and difficult questions about the role of journalists in covering a health crisis, and in photographing the dying. As a former volunteer for Medicines Sans Frontiers (MSF), Friedman has experience in front of and behind the lens. An excerpt from the post:

"Most of the people you see here are dead," Mr. Friedman said last week, looking through the photographs. "My images have not really helped them. Maybe they'll help people in the future. Maybe they'll help with fund-raising here and there. But to these particular people, they did not help."

On his website, Friedman provides further detail about working in the region:

"Though Ukraine, Russia and Central Asia are very different, they have one thing in common – people are not treated properly, and people are not aware that tuberculosis does not have to be so deadly…They spend months in prison-like clinics, where equipment is outdated and medical and nursing staff are just as poor as their patients. Many leave without finishing their treatment and many come back and back…In that part of the world, unemployment levels are high, most young people are left jobless and spend their time taking drugs, using same needles, having unprotected sex. Many end up HIV positive. But they do not die from developing AIDS, they die much quicker – from tuberculosis. Most of them do not even know they are sick, till it is too late."

For more of Friedman's work, visit his website.

Despite pleas from public health advocates and local activists, the Russian government continues to take extraordinary measures to turn its back on people affected by TB and HIV, and to ignore the evidence of what works in treating the diseases. This past week, it also shut down a website for an NGO that works to provide people with critical health information.

Pay young women in Malawi to prevent HIV infection?

The Guardian reports: "Cash payments help cut HIV infection rate in young women, study finds: Research in Malawi finds girls who receive regular payments are able to resist attentions of older men and avoid infection." The headline pretty much says it all … or does it?

The Guardian report is based on a study that appeared in The Lancet: "Effect of a cash transfer programme for schooling on prevalence of HIV and herpes simplex type 2 in Malawi: a cluster randomised trial." It's accompanied with an editorial, "Paying to prevent HIV infection in young women?"

The study's interpretation of the findings is the telltale heart of the matter:

Cash transfer programmes can reduce HIV and HSV-2 infections in adolescent schoolgirls in low-income settings. Structural interventions that do not directly target sexual behaviour change can be important components of HIV prevention strategies.

Pay to prevent HIV infection in young women? Yes. But the larger lesson is that women's health and wellbeing is always part of the whole life of each woman and girl as well as of women and girls, more generally. HIV transmission is not 'simply' a consequence of sexual behavior, whatever that is. It emerges from the whole life. Paying to prevent HIV infection in young women is an investment in women's education and in women's autonomy, and that is a real investment in a better future and an improved present.

In Praise of the South African Constitution

US Supreme Court Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently praised the South African Constitution making process–over that of the United States–as an example that could be instructive for a post-revolution Egypt. Ginsburg's comments, in a wide-ranging interview with Egypt's Al-Hayat TV, in which she repeatedly praised her country's Constitution, have sparked outrage among tea-partying right-wing pundits in the US.Asked whether the Egyptian process should look to the American Constitutional model, Ginsburg said:

I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a Constitution in the year 2012. I might look at the Constitution of South Africa… [The South African Constitution was] a deliberate attempt to have a fundamental instrument of government that embraced basic human rights, had an independent judiciary… It really is, I think, a great piece of work that was done. Much more recent than the U.S. Constitution.

She went on to recommend the Canadian Charter on Rights and Freedoms, and the European Convention on Human Rights, as similarly instructive for a nation charting a democratic future.

This led Foreign Policy Magazine's website to ask "Why does Ruth Ginsburg like the South African Constitution so much?", and, in so doing, they take a side swipe at the South African state as "often [being] in violation of many of [the goals of the Constitution.]"

Senator Marco Rubio (a Republican Vice-Presidential favourite who embellished his parents' voluntary departure from Batista's Cuba as 'fleeing Fidel's revolution'), breathed new life into the controversy in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, by attacking the Court–"So let me just say if you're an [American] appellate lawyer, you need to brush up on your South African law, because that's how some cases apparently are going to be decided here"– while concurrently confessing his ignorance of the issues in play: "I don't know what the South African constitution says."

Ginsburg is not alone, as a representative of the American legal establishment, in her admiration of the South African Constitution; Cass Sunstein, the former Harvard Professor currently heading the US Government's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has written that the South African Constitution is "the most admirable constitution in the history of the world".

In his previous life as a Community Organiser, US President Barack Obama made comments to the effect that the US constitution, while remaining "a remarkable political document" contains "flaws" representative of the "polity" that created it. The polity to which he refers being wholly white and male, and overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, Christian. The amendments undertaken to abolish slavery, and establish voting rights for women and black Americans – among others – attest to the imperfection of the original compact.

The view that the US Constitution is increasingly out of step with global constitutional trends is backed up by a recent study by two American constitutional scholars (covered by Adam Liptak of the NYTimes here) who – having analysed 729 constitutions adopted by 188 countries from 1946 to 2006 – found that since the beginning of the 21st century, there has been a precipitous decline in the use of the American Constitution as precedent, to the extent that "the constitutions of the world's democracies are, on average, less similar to the U.S. Constitution now" than any time in the past 60 years.

The South African Constitution and the emerging rights jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court are, demonstrably, influential. In 2009 when I was on assignment in the Maldives to assist human rights and civil society organizations in the aftermath of their democratic breakthrough (now sadly reversed) I was amazed to find the South African Bill of Rights repeated almost word for word in their founding document. Moreover, the decision in India of the High Court of Delhi to strike down sodomy laws drew extensively from the majority judgement penned by Justice Albie Sachs on gay marriage, and other decisions of the Court relating to equality. Similarly, the United Nations Human Rights committee, in their analysis of the conditions of death row inmates, drew on the Court's discussion of human dignity in their dismissal of the death penalty. Today, South African Justices retired from the Constitutional Court are sought after for visiting positions at some of the most prestigious international law schools.

As for Foreign Policy's glib dismissal of the South African government's record in upholding the Constitution, it is a matter of record that Thabo Mbeki's AIDS madness was stemmed through a range of cases brought before the Court on the part of the Treatment Action Campaign, government was compelled by the Court to pass legislation to legalise unions between same sex partners, and a litany of cases–Soobramoney (1998), Grootboom (2001), Treatment Action Campaign (2002), Modderklip (2005) and Olivia Road (2008)–have guided government's responsibilities in upholding the social and economic rights contained in the Bill of Rights. It is a matter of nuance, but the South African Government was not "violating" the Constitution in these cases, but was found by the Court to have failed the test of "acting reasonably" in upholding the Constitutional imperative to "progressively realise" social and economic rights "within its available resources".

A more compelling argument could be made that the rush to personal enrichment banally represented by members of the South African government and other elites – corrupt or not – perpetuates the suffering of millions of the poor, while concurrently re-emphasizing the structural indignity of poverty.  The advent of Mbeki's AIDS denialism, the crass attempts by the Government to squash investigations into the Arms Deal, the rise of the 'tender-preneur', and the undermining of Parliament's role in executive oversight (etc.), have ushered on to the stage a new South African politics that can less easily be upheld as a "model" for new democracies to follow.

'A bridge across the gulf between Queensbridge and Somalia'

Behind the scenes video of Nas and K'Naan on the set of the latter's music video for "Nothing to Lose." The video premieres on Friday.

That line in the title of this post is from OkayPlayer, who posted the video first.

* BTW, sometime later this week we should have Boima's take on K'Naan remixing Paul Simon on his new EP.

Really FOKN Crazy

The Ghanian Hip Hop pranksters FOKN Bois (who is deliberately setting out to prove that Ghanaian music is more than highlife, hiplife or azonto) are back with perhaps their craziest project yet. In celebration of yesterday's day of christian love, they bring us the world's first "Gospel Porn album by the most politically incorrect Christian Rap group of the times."

Um… need I say more?

Ok a little bit more…

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Take that to your African art class!

The FOKN Bois will be touring Babylon this Spring:

13 March – SXSW, Texas

16 March – Cologne, Germany

17 March – Berlin, Germany

23 March – Copenhagen, Denmark

24 March – Stockholm, Sweden

06 April – Munich, Germany

Nelson Mandela (Hollywood; plural)

Rumours are circulating on various Hollywood gossip and film blogs that Stringer Bell also known as Idris Elba — the East London boy made good in Hollywood — is next in line to play Nelson Mandela. Surfing on the mammoth success of his character in The Wire, his relatively popular series Luther on the BBC (but so shocked were we that he actually has an English accent it was difficult to concentrate on the rest), a brief role in Thor and the excited buzz (and fear) of Ridley Scott's upcoming Alien prequel Prometheus, Elba is rumored to be the chosen one for an 'official biopic' of Mandela's life. If the rumors are true, our beloved Stringer, the towering be-tracksuited crime underboss turned businessman will join a line of famous black actors who have attempted to incarnate the great Mandela. But do they incarnate, or impersonate? Lets have a look at their efforts. 

First, Danny Glover in a made-for-TV film titled Mandela. This film was made in 1987, in the 25th year of Mandela's imprisonment. It covers the years 1948-1987, charting Mandela's rise from young lawyer to national icon. I can't find a trailer, but here's a faded production still of Glover and Alfre Woodard who played Winnie. Any American readers old enough to have seen the TV film?

Next up, Oscar-winner in a 1997 TV film titled 'Mandela and de Klerk'. Michael Cain, playing the last Apartheid president FW de Klerk puts in a good effort, but ultimately retains much of his "you're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!"-patter. He's a sort of cockney-cum-Afrikaner de Klerk. Poitier portrays Mandela's serene confidence and quiet power, and to be fair, looks a bit like him too. Also, his accent is passable, a rarity in films made about South Africa. (Some mainstream US critics, take the The New York Times for example, liked Poitier's performance especially.) Here's a link to the trailer. And below is the poster:

Next, TV actor Dennis Haysbert (more remembered for his roles in films like Waiting to Exhale or cop shows) does 'action-hero Mandela'-pumped muscles and lots of explosions in the forgettable Goodbye Bafana (2007), which was more about Mandela's white prison guard:

And then to Morgan Freeman, perhaps the most celebrated Mandela actor, who played him in Invictus (2009), the huge Hollywood feature with Matt Damon as captain of the Springboks, described by Sean as a "film in which Matt Damon saves South Africa and gets whites absolved for Apartheid by winning a rugby match."

If you can get past Freeman's American accent, he does do quite a good job at incarnating Mandela. Bill Keller in The Guardian argued that Freeman successfully channels Mandela's 'manipulative charm', his 'force of purpose', his 'mischief' and his 'lonely regret'. In fact, at a press conference in 1994, promoting his memoir A Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela was asked by the press who should play him on film, and he said Morgan Freeman. This royal stamp of approval gave Freeman access to Mandela whenever they were in the same city, a rare privilege as Mandela grows older.

From Hustle and Flow to Winnie (2011), where Terrence Howard plays a distinctly American Mandela, with Jennifer Hudson as Winnie, both with awkward, confused accents.

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There's also BBC4′s not-strictly-Hollywood one-off drama, "Mrs Mandela" starring Sophie Okonedo. The smaller role of Nelson Mandela was played by fellow Brit actor David Harewood.

It seems, with the addition of Elba to this line-up, the recent Mandela's of Hollywood have become bigger, more muscular — in short, somewhat blunt instruments with which Hollywood seeks to address the history of South Africa. Let's wait and see how Stringer Bell does.