Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 591

Can aid organisations still 'sell' Africa?

During the recent Africa Day in The Hague, Holland, BrandOutLoud* director Judith Madigan took part in the second Oude meesters, jonge honden [old icons and generation 2.0] debate on emergency aid in Africa. She spoke about the image of aid provision to the continent and asked whether aid organisations can still 'sell' Africa? And she wrote a column about the above video they made:

I know nothing about emergency aid. In fact, I'd never even been to Africa. Therefore a few weeks ago I went with our film crew out on the streets. It was a confrontational day of 'sad and starving children', and 'bulging bellies'. Surprising? No.

For years, charities have used negative images of pitifully hungry children for fundraising. Compassion and a sense of guilt to induce people to provide (financial) support. This has been the pattern of communication for over 60 years and still is today! Little has changed since the days of LiveAid and people on the street now say. "I'm sick of it. Can't it be done differently? We always see the same image of starving children looking for food among the rubbish. Where's the money we sent them?" The pitch has become implausible and the public is ready for a different picture and a different approach.

While the images of Africa have remained the same, the image of development has changed. The industry itself has created a negative, stigmatising image of Africa. We must no longer hide behind arguments like 'it brings in the most money' or 'the ends justify the means'. How can we change the existing image? By looking into opportunities and learning from young organisations where engagement between the purpose of a project and the donor or volunteer comes first. And above all by showing the power and strength of the people themselves. Remain realistic – situations are often terrible, but those concerned are an essential part of that change. The people on the street are open to this view–listen and talk to them, and take them seriously.

*According to BrandOutLoud's PR information, "we believe powerful imagery is the key to successful communication: Visualise to persuade. BrandOutLoud is a Dutch non-profit organisation that provides tailor-made branding & communications to local aid organisations worldwide."

Serious.

Music Break. Fatima Al Qadiri

Senegal-born, Kuwait-raised musician and artist Fatima Al Qadiri just premiered her new EP, "Genre-Specific Xperience," in New York. The project consists of 5 songs each with corresponding video. Above is "Vatican Vibes" which features "Gregorian trance." As Jody Graf writes in Clustermag, Al Qadiri's introduction to Gregorian trance "… came in the passenger seat of her cousin's car as they drove through a desert of burning oil fields towards the Kuwaiti border." The "violent conflation of apocalypse and heaven" that she witnessed is also reflected in "the dark-Catholic-videogame aesthetic" of the accompanying "Vatican Vibes" video.

H/T: Boima

Mapo do mundo

Remember the Mapping Stereotypes Project and the Afrographique project? (The former maps popular national stereotypes from around the world, while the latter turns any set of data about the continent into a graphic, including a series of maps.) Now, a reader of the blog pointed us towards this "map" of stereotypes that's been circulating among Brazilians online.

Here's a translation for those who don't speak Portuguese.

Canada: polar bears

USA: fat people

Central America: Pirates of the Caribbean

South America: llamas, stash, humble people, us (Brazil)

Greenland: Wally's house

Europe: mustache, pasta, money

Africa: The Clone (Brazilian telenovela), desert, kuduro, "I like to move it" (Madagascar, the movie)

Middle East: Mohamed

Central Asia: bin Laden

China: many people and a lot of rice

India: cows

South East Asia: Rambo

Japan: weird people

Australia: weird animals

* Thanks to Tom for the translation.

Watch The Throne

Remember when South African artist Gazelle postured with his crew for the cover of the Chic Afrique album in 2009, dressed as a white caricature of Mobuto Sese Seko surrounded by his house composer, his bodyguard and wives? It made a mockery of the photographs usually taken by colonial photographers (and anthropologists) in the early part of the 20th century. Of course it also played on race politics in South Africa (there were enough references in there) and South African anxieties about "the continent." We blogged about it here. The publicity shots and video were only half-successful as a mimicry act.

Now (well, last month) South African Hip Hop Pantsula (HHP) released his new album Motswafrika. It comes complete with its own politics. In a video trailer for the album Jabba (HHP leader) talks of Motswafrika as "one land-mass resembling Pangaea, the first world," the only land left after an imagined Flood has washed away anything else. Watch it. Their Motswafrika rather looks like Africa, consisting of four islands, each ruled by their 'elected leaders'. It is one strange cut and paste job. HHP and his crew also posed for their own version of the chief and his wives and bodyguards.

That's the image on the right at the top of this post; Gazelle is at the left.

What is going on here?

At best HHP is making a parody of a parody–fair enough: parodies don't necessarily credit its sources. And cutting and pasting is de rigueur these days. Ask Die Antwoord.

* BTW, the most recent attempt to capture the real world of 'traditional' authority on the continent has been French photographer Daniel Laine's series of "African kings," photographed over twelve months between 1989 and 1991. Of course, the King on his thrown has been reprised by other pop figures, including Nas & Damian Marley, Lebron James and Huey Newton.

Omar Sy, French movie icon

Released only a week ago, 'Intouchables' the film (by Eric Toledano & Olivier Nakache, France, length: 1h52min) is having the most amazing success in France since Harry Potter hit. Supported by a duo of fantastic actors: François Cluzet playing Philippe (a while billionnaire paralyzed in a wheelchair) and Omar Sy as Driss (his young out-of-the banlieue black help).  Here's a link to the trailer (in French). More than 2.5 millions viewers have already hailed that sweet and sour comedy. Omar Sy (with his stand up comedy partner Fred) has was discovered by the Canal Plus cable channel, just like the actor and humorist Jamel Debbouze. Omar Sy, Jamel Debbouze, rapper La Fouine and Chelsea striker Nicolas Anelka all have one thing in common: they were born and raised at Trappes, a poor city not far from Versailles. Big Omar (he's 6.3 feet and even richer in talent and funnier ) is rumoured to get a César Award for Best Actor in February 2012. And France will surely boast of at least one Black movie icon.

Photo Credit: Prakash Topsy.

Fighting somebody else's war

By Basia Lewandowska Cummings

We British are very good at honoring the dead.

Last Friday Prime Minister David Cameron, his deputy Nick Clegg et al attended the Remembrance Day ceremony; all our political elite are competed to appear most sombre, most respectful. Central London was peppered with war memorials–heavy sculptures in dark metals, the lists of names seem endless. What Britain isn't as good at remembering – never mind honouring – are the thousands who fought alongside the British; the Nigerians, Kenyans or Sierra Leonean's who enlisted in the colonies, fighting on the multiple fronts of the war, for a country whose interests were, perhaps, far from their own.  In the newsreels that show hundreds of African's marching toward possible death, the voiceover remarks, 'strong, tough, the most magnificently built race in the world! Negro soldiers march bare foot to their encampment …Africans fight for their cause, and ours'. But it wasn't their cause, and therein lie the fascinating questions that Barnaby Phillips' documentary "Burma Boy" addresses.

Through the remarkable figure of Isaac Fadoyebo, a Nigerian man who fought for the British against the Japanese in Burma, the story of the 100,000 Africans enlisted in the Second World War is told.

Isaac, still alive in Lagos today, sustained appalling injuries during a confrontation in the Burmese jungle. Left for dead, he managed to survive thanks to the generosity of a family in the nearby village who nursed him and his friend David Kagbo back to life. For nine months the two men hid with Shuyiman and his family. Sixty-seven years later, by some miraculous stroke of luck (and a good researcher) Barnaby Phillips is standing in monsoon season in the Burmese jungle–rain thundering on a tin roof–standing face to face with the family who saved Isaac, showing them photographs of the man who has become part of their family history, and part of village mythology.

Barnaby admits,

'we went to Burma not knowing we would find them, I was very sceptical. Isaac's directions were not the best, they were along the lines of 'if you are coming down the river from India, its on the right hand side'… which means that's the west bank of a river that is 300 miles long'. And yet, they found the family thanks to another soldier's account of the skirmish, where many men were killed. 'We just didn't know if the village was still there … it was incredibly emotional for me that we found them…even once we located them I had no idea what they thought about it, and it was amazing to see that they felt about it the same way that I did. This is something they've known about for sixty years, it must have been miraculous to them that this stranger from England turned up, talking about it'.

For Barnaby, this encounter was powerful for two historical reasons:

'we think of Africa as a disaster, a continent that has failed in places. And in this particular instance, the people that saved Isaac's life are in the same village, doing exactly what their parents did, and he has gone on to a (relatively) much more prosperous and comfortable life; he has flown around the world, he has children who are doctors and lawyers, he owned a car, and they so for that reason I find it very interesting.' The Burmese conflict also complicates the ethical compass of the Second World War; it wasn't only the free versus the fascists, the good against evil; 'in Burma it was more clearly a case of two empires fighting for the spoils of war, in somebody else's country. So in a sense both the Burmese local people and the African soldiers were victims of that imperial struggle between Britain and Japan'.

Barnaby's film complicates the narrative of the war; it isn't just a European tragedy, and Britain was not only fighting for freedom, but for gains elsewhere. And this was to be the empires own undoing, for "Burma Boy

… Once the genie was out, once they had a better understanding of their place in the world, once they had seen the fallibility of Britain, they could relate to white people as human beings.

Indirect rule in Northern Nigerian kept the white district commissioners far away from local people, then 'suddenly they would be on a boat with some swearing cockney sailor or navvy from Liverpool, and the scales would drop from their eyes about what Britain was, so it was an empowering experience.'

Does Isaac perhaps personify the shifts in attitudes between peoples?

'Yes… many of the East African soldiers ended up fighting for the Mau Mau against – in some cases- the same officers who they had been with in Burma. One of these describes how Burma was a seminal moment for him, as it taught him to fight in the jungle, it taught him new ideas, he met African-American troops who questioned why he was fighting for the British, so for all sorts of people it transformed their perspective'.

Barnaby's documentary is a clear, historical approach to a part of Britain's legacy that has been fogged, clouded by the will to remember those closer to home. Similar to Idrissa Mora Kpai's film "Indochina, Traces of A Mother" (2010), that follows the story of the 60,000 African soldiers enlisted by the French to fight the Viet Minh, Barnaby's documentary departs from the normal, perhaps neater narrative.  It is all the more poignant, that at this years Remembrance Day ceremony in Lagos, Isaac was guest of honour, finally recognized for courage and support in Britain's battles.

You can watch Barnaby Phillips' documentary in full-length here (on Al Jazeera's site) or on Youtube:

Paris, France. N°2

By Hinda Talhaoui*

This is the second in my weekly series of popular music from my hometown.  Here's a link to my first contribution: Paris, France. N°1. This week's it's the world of popular rap.

Algiers-born, Montreal-raised Zaho is big in Paris now. See what she does with the  Bangladesh instrumental for Lil Wayne's "6 Foot 7" for her song, "En avant la musique." (We also suspect an Angelique Kidjo sample about 0:46 into the song.)

Zaho's 2nd album "CONTAGIEUSE" comes out in December.

Bonus: Zaho freestyles with popular rapper La Fouine, on a tune that breaks with his usual, braggadocious style:

Later this month Nessbeal, a veteran of the French rap battles, drops his fourth album, "Sélection Naturelle." This is the video for the first single " force et honneur":

Sefyu never shows his eyes. And he won't next week when his latest album, 'Oui je le suis' (Yes I am) comes out on Thursday. In the video for "5 Minutes," the lead single off the new album, he keeps that posture. (Random fact: he was a promising footballer when he got injured and became a professional rapper.)

Finally, some nice beats from Richie&Beats. This is "H@y Baby" from his forthcoming (2012) project "Since 1985/ I'@m…MisterBeats."

See you next Sunday.

* Hinda Talhaoui is also known as Sean's "French-Algerian connection." Hinda grew up in Paris and now lives in New York City. She mines the playlists of her friends back home.

Music Break. Friday Bonus Edition

Lately Girl Power is big among female West African pop singers. We've featured Goldie Harvey and Lousika (Ghana) here before. Now here's two more. First up is Ghanaian Efya with "Sexy Sassy Wahala," from the soundtrack of 10-part Ghanaian movie "Adams Apple":

Next up is Nigerian singer Zara Gretti:

Related: Jogyo, one half of whom is from Gabon:

Unrelated: The Congolese-American (is there a meme here?) Hugo Million is building a following back in the DRC, while mixing party and political music (not unusual to Congolese artistes, of course). Here, from a few months ago, is "Benga Nzambe," which takes a political tone and which is appropriate given the volatile climate around elections in the DRC now:

Finally, some French rap "made in Normandy!" HVJ du Coeff & Jeune Karn with "Les égouts de l'underground':

H/T: Okayafrica, What's Up Africa, Tom Devriendt

Die Antwoord's at it again

We promised ourselves we won't get drawn into this. This is the week in which Cape Town viral rappers Die Antwoord released the music video for their new single "Fok julle Naaiers."  The music video contains some Die Antwoord staples (spiders and scorpions come out of rapper Ninja's mouth while he throws around the word Nigger, and tattooed coloured men are used to reference prison gang culture in Cape Town; the latter a big part of his persona). But there's also these lines from their DJ, Hi-Tek: "You can't touch me faggot …" and "I'll fuck you till you love me faggot."  See for yourselves:

The group was roundly criticized for the homophobia and the (apparent) glorification of rape in the lyrics.It appeared their American label, Interscope, was also was uncomfortable with the video and song lyrics.

Die Antwoord then quickly announced that they were splitting with Interscope. They would now release their new album themselves.

But here is where it actually gets interesting (the rest is the same old boring vintage Die Antwoord, remixed). Ninja decided to film a video statement, where he presumably  sets out to explain the use of homophobic/racist epithets in "Fok Julle Naaiers":

His first defense: DJ Hi-Tek is gay. So it's ok for the group to drop the 'f' bomb liberally. That argument, in itself, is a stupid defense: i.e. membership of an objectified minority group means you can be racist/sexist/homophobic.

Ninja then accused "some people from America" of being "heavy sensitive," thusly implying that South Africans are okay with calling each other faggot as a term of endearment.  Hardly true–especially not in a country where lesbians are subjected to "corrective rape," gay men to hate crimes and Evangelical Christianity (with its clearly expressed homophobia) has a strong hold on the population.

Third, Ninja concludes his use of racist epithets with the claim that black South Africans are okay with white South Africans calling them Nigger.  And vice versa. More news to me.

Finally, he said South Africa is a "rainbow nation" and that "we have the pay off line 'Simunye' we are one."

What he forgot to tell his audience is that both the descriptors–the first (rainbow nation) was dreamed up by politicians, and the second (Simunye) by advertising copy writers to promote a TV channel–are outdated (they last had currency in the mid-1990s) and widely discredited (think the politics of the movie Invictus) by anyone who lives in the 'real' – that is, the vast majority who continue to experience nothing but the failure of that rainbow promise.

Waddy Jones' defenders will probably says he was in "character," the whole thing satire (original video and 'apology' alike), and that he is being ironic.

Perhaps the fact that I am writing about their charade now will also be read as evidence that they're good.

Die Antwoord at it again

We promised ourselves we won't get drawn into this. This is the week in which Cape Town viral rappers Die Antwoord released the music video for their new single "Fok julle Naaiers."  The music video contains some Die Antwoord staples (spiders and scorpions come out of rapper Ninja's mouth while he throws around the word Nigger, and tattooed coloured men are used to reference prison gang culture in Cape Town; the latter a big part of his persona). But there's also these lines from their DJ, Hi-Tek: "You can't touch me faggot …" and "I'll fuck you till you love me faggot."  See for yourselves:

The group was roundly criticized for the homophobia and the (apparent) glorification of rape in the lyrics.It appeared their American label, Interscope, was also was uncomfortable with the video and song lyrics.

Die Antwoord then quickly announced that they were splitting with Interscope. They would now release their new album themselves.

But here is where it actually gets interesting (the rest is the same old boring vintage Die Antwoord, remixed). Ninja decided to film a video statement, where he presumably  sets out to explain the use of homophobic/racist epithets in "Fok Julle Naaiers":

His first defense: DJ Hi-Tek is gay. So it's ok for the group to drop the 'f' bomb liberally. That argument, in itself, is a stupid defense: i.e. membership of an objectified minority group means you can be racist/sexist/homophobic.

Ninja then accused "some people from America" of being "heavy sensitive," thusly implying that South Africans are okay with calling each other faggot as a term of endearment.  Hardly true–especially not in a country where lesbians are subjected to "corrective rape," gay men to hate crimes and Evangelical Christianity (with its clearly expressed homophobia) has a strong hold on the population.

Third, Ninja concludes his use of racist epithets with the claim that black South Africans are okay with white South Africans calling them Nigger.  And vice versa. More news to me.

Finally, he said South Africa is a "rainbow nation" and that "we have the pay off line 'Simunye' we are one."

What he forgot to tell his audience is that both the descriptors–the first (rainbow nation) was dreamed up by politicians, and the second (Simunye) by advertising copy writers to promote a TV channel–are outdated (they last had currency in the mid-1990s) and widely discredited (think the politics of the movie Invictus) by anyone who lives in the 'real' – that is, the vast majority who continue to experience nothing but the failure of that rainbow promise.

Waddy Jones' defenders will probably says he was in "character," the whole thing satire (original video and 'apology' alike), and that he is being ironic.

Perhaps the fact that I am writing about their charade now will also be read as evidence that they're good.