Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 619

Shake hands with your ancient self

What do you do as a South African tourist industry when the promised surge in visitors after the World Cup fails to materialize? You move your aim, target the local 'upcoming individuals, independent couples and families', draw up an 'energetic, vibey and pacey' campaign, get some of those upcoming individuals on board — and you turn the local into a daft trope.

The BLK JKS, for example, take a left turn where the hitch-hiker's carton says 'local', meeting up with 'the original men: the San', shaking hands 'with their ancient selves'. South Africans are urged to get out of their 'comfort zone', 'get off the map, get out of the suburbs, keep moving', because 'sometimes you've got to loose your way, to find yourself again':

Artist Mary Sibande undertakes a 'spiritual journey to Limpopo and Mpumalanga', pulling over at 'the cultural landscape' of Mapungubwe, the cycad forest of 'the other-worldly' Ga-Modjadji and meets up with Esther Mahlangu, 'the icon in African traditional art':

And DJ Black Coffee flies low over KwaZulu-Natal's Drakensberg Mountains:

You no longer need to be white to feel like a tourist in the country.

Music Break / Y'akoto

German-Ghanian singer Y'akoto's biography on her website made me look up the meaning of the word "hegira" — a beautiful word, but maybe not the best translation of the original German 'Suche', as in: "search" (for herself). Great track, and a nice video. Live recordings show her playing with the Mighty Embassy Ensemble, Blitz The Ambassador's backing band. That makes perfect sense.

Via Kweligee.

'Contested Terrains' at the Tate

Contested Terrains features four artists working in Africa who explore and subvert narratives about the past and present, each engaging "with ideas of history and identity that in Africa have long been shaped by the claims and disputes of conflicting ideological and economic interests. Drawing connections across time and space, their works examine the impact of imperialism, notions of historical truth, and the representations and mechanics of power." While the trope of Africa as a 'contested terrain' is a bit hackneyed (isn't every terrain contested?), the art and artists included are wonderful, as is the dialogue they establish across time, histories, and viewpoints of the audiences: this is not a show that showcases Afropessimism, nor one that blindly pays homage to an unrealistic present.

Apparently, there are some black artists from Africa who are worthy of landing up at the Tate, even if there are no black writers of note in Southern Africa worthy of making it to an anthology put together by PEN Africa.  Hooray.

Of special interest are Opara's almost Victorian portraits in 'Emissaries of an Iconic Religion' , an energy he says he never intended to construct, but ended up emanating from the sepia tones and lush drapery of the diviners and deities he photographed. In other hands, these images would look dated and smack of exoticism; but Opara manages to give them a richer story, hinting at the communities and centuries that gave each person their depth, while portraying his subjects within the dignity of the present.

The four featured artists:

Kader Attia (b. 1970, Dugny, France. Lives and works in Berlin and Algiers)/

Sammy Baloji (b. 1978, Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo. Lives and works in Lubumbashi)

Michael MacGarry (b. 1978, Durban, South Africa. Lives and works in Cape Town).

Adolphus Opara. (b. 1981, Imo State, Nigeria. Lives and works in Lagos);

"Orisa Egbe Deity of Destiny (Mrs Osun Yita) from 'Emissaries of an Iconic Religion'  2009 (illustration above).

See Contested Terrians At the Tate, London.

The news about Romelu Lukaku

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You've heard the news about Romelu Lukaku? The 18-year-old Belgian-Congolese striker signed a contract with his dream team Chelsea over the weekend. Lukaku's star rose fast since debuting for the national team in 2010. Football aficionados aren't surprised by the move. And Lukaku? He knew it all along. The above fragment* is taken from a series ('The School of Lukaku') that was aired on Belgian national tv last year. The series followed a class of youth living and studying in Brussels, doing a good job at showing the Belgian audience a part of the city most prefer to avoid — and a reality they choose to ignore. The video shows Lukaku visiting Chelsea's stadium on a school trip. No doubt he will make it at Stamford Bridge, or so the fans say.

* Gotta love the use of Elbow's Lippy Kids.

Romelu Lukaku

You've heard the news about Romelu Lukaku? The 18-year-old Belgian-Congolese striker signed a contract with his dream team Chelsea over the weekend. Lukaku's star rose fast since debuting for the national team in 2010. Football aficionados aren't surprised by the move. And Lukaku? He knew it all along. The above fragment* is taken from a series ('The School of Lukaku') that was aired on Belgian national tv last year. The series followed a class of youth living and studying in Brussels, doing a good job at showing the Belgian audience a part of the city most prefer to avoid — and a reality they choose to ignore. The video shows Lukaku visiting Chelsea's stadium on a school trip. No doubt he will make it at Stamford Bridge, or so the fans say.

* Gotta love the use of Elbow's Lippy Kids.

Sampling Semenya

An interview in a (South African) Sunday paper with a 'hopping mad' Caiphus Semenya (the South African musician* was surprised to hear his music was being sampled in the 'Murder to Excellence' track on the Jay-Z & Kanye West's Watch The Throne album — without him being consulted) got us curious about the song used. Turns out it is 'Celie Shaves Mr./Scarification Ceremony', of The Color Purple soundtrack which Semenya co-wrote with Quincy Jones, Harvey Mason Jr., Joel Rosenbaum and Bill Summers:

Get them, Caiphus.

In the meanwhile we'll stick to Zuluboy sampling another song of his ('Nomalanga'):

*If you're wondering who Caiphus is: with his wife Letta Mbulu (fronting their family band) they built respectable careers out of Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s. (Click through for the videos of Letta on Soul Train with Caiphus on backing vocals and later in the early 1980s.) When he arrived in the US in the early 1960s, Caiphus started collaborating with Hugh Masekela and Jonas Gwangwa (listen to their Union of South Africa).

Louboutin's Emancipated Breast

Christian Louboutin is known for the same impossible stiletto heels as Jimmy Choo, but with an added attraction: a strip of carmine-red leather, sewn to cover the underside of each shoe. As a woman walks (or totters) off in those 5-inch heels, she leaves a flash-trail: an infinitude of sexual invitation. Or, as my uncles say, "It's like a lady baboon's red arse. Seeing red as she walks away means she's sexually mature and ready." (Indeed, some in the hip-hop mogul community call Louboutins "Red Bottoms".)

And so far, that's all I had to beware of when I strumpeted around in my only pair of Louboutins: that I was sending 'lady baboon' signals (also that I'd permanently damage my ankles, back, feet, and feminism). But for Louboutin's Fall 2011 'Lookbook', he teamed up with photographer Peter Lippman to re-envision a hodgepodge of Rennaisance-y/Restoration-y portraits that recreate paintings. Each 'look' showcases a specific portrait, but also the fall collection; there's sumptuous costumery, heavy symbolism, heaving fruit, the hint of spilling bosoms, and well-placed products: sky-high heels.

There's Georges de la Tour's "Magdalene and the Flame": instead of Magdalene's intensity and longing, intensified by the presence of the flame, in this arrangement, the flame is reduced to a secondary player – it is the extraordinary boot that gets her smouldering stare. Francisco De Zurbaran's demure "Saint Dorothy" gazes not heavenward, but at a platter topped with a purple shoe. Even James McNeil Whistler's "Grey and Black: The Artist's Mother" (popularly known as "Whistler's Mother") is given the glamour of a feather-topped bootie.

But wait! Black people are represented in Louboutin's spread, too!

It's a take on Marie-Guilleme Benoit's "Portrait d'une Negresse" (illustration above), where (you guessed it) a seated young, black woman poses for the painter, an exposed breast slipping out of Grecian folds of cloth. People like to argue that because this portrait was painted six years after slavery was abolished, and because the painter is a woman, it is an iconic image of emancipation: for black people as well as for women. We're supposed to see "The Negresse" as an embodiment of steely determination and femininity (one would have to steel oneself, if one was asked to pose in a compromised manner by a white painter, a handful of years after the legal end of slavery). And the fact that the painting was acquired by Louis XVIII 'for France' in 1818 may tell you something interesting, too.

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't need to expose a boob in order to celebrate my emancipation form forced labour. Looks more like Benoit's exploring and exploiting a well-known trope: desire and revulsion projected onto the Dark Other.

Black Hamlets and White Othellos are now passé, so Alex Wek could have posed in any of these other 'looks'. Of all the possible paintings that the artistic director of Louboutin's Fall Lookbook could have picked, one in which a black model could pose, why pick the one with the liberated breast?

Harlem is Nowhere

Excerpt from Sharifa Rhodes Pitts' memoir of the black metropolis, "Harlem is Nowhere," which came out this week in the UK:

The Langston Hughes Atrium [of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture] is available as a rental facility, so that Hughes's resting place is also the location for receptions, conferences, and cocktail parties. Once I came up from the reading room to find a reception and conference taking place there. It was attended exclusively by Senegalese and was being conducted in French and Wolof. It seemed to be a conference focusing on business and real estate development in Senegal. I would have ignored it, but one of the many displays crowded into the space caught my eye. It showed the map of a vast city. I recognized its name, Touba. Along the stretch of West 116th Street called Little Senegal there is a shop called Touba Wholesale, whose business involves shipping goods to Africa. It is adjacent to a restaurant that advertises its dual specialties in "Jamaican and Southern Style Cuisine." Several other African stores on 116th Street share the name Touba; it is also a brand of coffee sold in those same shops. The store windows are filled with shelves bearing cans of Touba coffee stacked in alluring displays, among other dry goods imported to supply homesick West Africans. The picture decorating the package shows a tall minaret rising from the mosque at the city's center.

Touba is the holy city of the Mourides, a sect of Sufis in West Africa. There is a concentration of Mouride faithful in Harlem's Little Senegal. Touba means "bliss," referring to the eternal life afforded the pious. The city's mosque holds the shrine and burial place of the Mouride saint Cheikh Amadou Bamba. It is now the destination of a pilgrimage so grand that detractors charge it as blasphemous for attempting to compete with Mecca. During the life of the Cheikh the same land was a vast wilderness; it was the place where he launched his teachings on how seekers could keep to the spiritual path by emphasizing work and generosity, along with other teachings that made him an enemy of French imperialism. According to the conference brochures, a massive suburb was being developed in the neighborhood of Touba—un projet de réalisation de 12,000 logements à Touba—presumably allowing those Mourides who are both faithful and well heeled to dwell as near as possible to the resting place of their ascended master.

On another occasion, I visited the library and found that a large gathering was taking place in the auditorium just beyond the Hughes memorial.

It was a public hearing convened by the United Nations special rapporteur on racism, who was then traveling the country to take testimony that he would present in a report to the international body. The hearing went on for hours, with hundreds of people signing up to bear witness to historic and contemporary experiences of injustice, violence, and indignity. These ranged from the treatment of Haitians seeking asylum to inequalities in education and housing, and from the plight of mothers whose children had been taken by a sometimes draconian child welfare system to the difficulties faced by ex-convicts who wished to find work. Some speakers presented their testimony with the cool detachment of academics. Others, relating the more immediate horrors of their daily lives, approached the rapporteur as if he were endowed with the power of direct intervention. The rapporteur listened to them all, and when the hearing was done, he thanked everyone profusely but took great care to mention that his only power was to listen and then to submit a written report to the larger body. He said he hoped the facts would be taken into consideration.

Around the same time, the library hosted an exhibition in its gallery on the art of that Senegalese mystic sect whose saint's shrine is found at Touba. Their holy men minister with words. If you are in need of guidance or are in ill health, the priest will write out a prayer that is also a prescription. The ink is washed from the wooden board where he writes; you are cured by drinking the water that washed away the words. In other instances, he might write out the remedy on a cloth. You make a shirt from it and wear it till it falls apart, or wrap yourself in it and, while covered in this shroud, are healed as you sleep.

Buy it here or here.

* Thanks to the publishers and Sharifa Rhodes Pitts for granting permission to use the excerpt. Photo Credit: Beatrice De Gea

Music Break / Maurice Kirya

"Wooye" by Ugandan crooner Maurice Kirya.

 

August 7, Côte d'Ivoire

Côte d'Ivoire celebrated their 51st year of independence from France yesterday. Music has played a role in national political identity throughout the country's conflict. I'm sure that it will continue to play a role as the country tries to move on from its recent turmoil.

The Ivory Coast in the 70′s and 80′s had one of West Africa's strongest recording industries, and became a magnet for musicians, especially from what was then Zaire. Congolese Soukous still has a strong influence on Ivorian popular music today.

In the 80′s Alpha Blondy came on the scene and made the Ivory Coast a Reggae country. Tiken Jah Fakoly continues that tradition today.

But, no other music points to Ivory Coast's national identity in the world today more than Coupe Decale.

Of course, with the genius of those like DJ Arafat…

and the international appeal of Magic System…

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Zouglou and Coupe Decale have become important touchstones in my own musical life.

I hear Zouglou is making a resurgence after being bumped out a little by the more digitally oriented Coupe Decale. To me, Zouglou is one of the best musics to hear live:

Also, with distinct styles coming out of camps like the Choco Gangster Rap crew (who we talked about here) and CIAfrica, the Ivorian Hip Hop scene is growing strong as well.

Here's to hoping that this independence can mark a permanent step towards peace and unification in the Côte d'Ivoire.