Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 620

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.

"Egyptian Reggae"

The music of a kawala and fish-skin riqqs drift through the Mounira neighborhood in Cairo each Tuesday night, piquing the curiousity of many passerby. These are ancient instruments, still used in popular Egyptian music but usually so integrated into electronically manufactured melodies that they are an afterthought. The music comes from Makan (Place), an arts venue which celebrates the many musical forms of Egypt's diverse cultural heritage. On Tuesday nights, it is Nas-Makan, or People-Place. Singers bring with them endangered forms of music, such as mawwal (country ballads – my favourite), ghagari (gypsy songs), jafraa, zikr (Sufi recitations of the Quran) and zar – a very old Abyssinian style of music which encourages relaxation (trance), though is sometimes associated with exorcisms.

Zar singer Umm Saleh and her band Mazahar perform here, and this video, below, posted on Vimeo a few months ago is interpreted and labeled by the filmmaker Muhammed Hamdy as "Egyptian reggae."

It's an understandable error–the message of the music, its Sufi-like mood and its inherent subversive quality are very near to reggae's own roots. Much of this musical tradition is from East Africa – especially the Sudan and Nubia – but East Africa also includes Egypt, and the union of traditional styles is apparent. It is a reminder that Egypt's borders are quite recent, and generally an inconvenience to its wildly diverse population. At Makan, Egyptians and expatriates alike gather to hear their heritage and, as the zar intends, to relax.

Fair and Lovely

Horrified by the skin-lightening creams you see advertised in the cityscapes of Africa?

Wait till you see the adverts people walk past daily in India or Sri Lanka. This huge billboard (above) sits somewhere on the 10-kilometre distance from Kelaniya (my family's ancestral home) to Colombo (the city). The script below the ever-whitening out images of the model says: "For white/light skin, apply daily".

South Asians have Africans beat on this front.

People in the Indian subcontinent have been obsessed with light skins for…well, it's a matter of debate as to the social and historical reasons behind why. Some say it is because of our agrarian heritage: those who had to work outdoors (most people) were darker from the sun. The few who could afford to stay indoors – especially the women of the wealthy – were lighter-skinned. So lighter skin displayed wealth and power, especially if your women (another asset through which to display wealth and power) were lighter skinned. It's common on marriage-adverts to write that your daughter is "fair" as one of her added bonuses.

Others say that this obsession arrived along with the invasion by Aryans from the north – lighter skinned people originating from what is modern day Iran/Iraq (yes, Hitler Yougend, take note – Aryans are not Germanic peoples). They became the new rulers for several hundred years, encroaching on the Dravidian-populated India as far south as Mysore. In Sri Lanka, the Sinhala royalty often sent for marriageable women from India (there's lots to say about that, but that's for a different academic paper). So again, power, privilege were displayed by lighter skin. When our successive waves of European colonisers arrived, it didn't help matters on the skin front.

Al Jazeera English tackled the skin deep issue last year:

Happily, Indians are finally making fun of the obsession with being 'white'. Check out this spoof of the unbelievably popular skin-lightener, Fair and Lovely:

Come on, What's Up Africa, where's your version?

R/T S.Pathak

Recycling Rubbish

Many of you know those spectacular images of burning computer parts and beautiful, sad young men, taken in some God-forsaken corner of polluted Ghana where the 'West' has dumped all its obsolete toys to be 'recycled'.

Now, here's Southern Africa's answer: we can do apocalyptic burning and degraded human beings on rubbish tips, too. Portuguese photographer Jose Ferreira's images of the "Trashland of Maputo" , taken in the dump of Huléne (just a few meters from Maputo's airport), are supposedly meant to make us move beyond the "caricatures of the poor and homeless, who are often camouflaged between common jokes and cartoons from the civilized world." He adds that  the people in these images, "who have empty eyes and shapeless smiles," make the experience of their lives "more human."

It's not that lives like this do not exist; it's not that this is a compelling subject (why do we allow such suffering? Why permit such degradation in fellow human beings?), or unworthy task to force those who are either ignorant of such suffering, or usually like to turn the other way to really stand and contemplate the lived reality of these Others. It may be that Ferreira makes us think about all that we discard. But there's something that's rehashed here – too much of the whiff of exploitation, for the value of shock, rather than an invitation into a space of contemplation (and possibly, towards action).

And please: I know this isn't about computer parts, or the discards of the West. But if you want to make your mark as photographer, why copy Pieter Hugo's "Permanent Error"?

Nicolas Jaar covers Abdullah Ibrahim

From May this year: "… an unrehearsed, first-take cut" of Nicolas Jaar's remix (recorded in London) of Abdullah Ibrahim's jazz track "Ishmael".

Via Pitchfork

White Writing

Years ago, during my first years as a hired hand in academia, I was more careful about doing The Right Thing. I'd read JM Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians as a student, and something clicked for me – the colonial mentality, the hopeless fantasies of each successive militarised 'civilisation' – in a way that no amount of theory had done. I became an instant acolyte of the Master's writing. In 2005, attended my first JM Coetzee conference, at Royal Holloway: the university for those sons and daughters of the wealthy who didn't make it to the Oxbridge universities (this according to a friend who went to Oxford on scholarship).

Anyhow, it was an all-white affair. I was the token brown person there, except for a British Indian student who flitted in and out of a few sessions. (Another academic leaned over and said, conspiratorially, that this young man sends him "fawning emails". Right. Not only was I being handed the ubiquitous racist caricature of the arse-kissing Indian, but I was being invited into the 'club': my sarcasm had permitted me to leap over the Indian hurdle, and into white acceptability. Goody for me.) During a couple of sessions, when some students from continental Europe were presenting (albeit somewhat poorly constructed papers), the UK-and South Africa-based white academics trashed them publicly, right there during the session. This was not a place to come to be informed, gently directed, or invited to an ongoing conversation, but a location in which territory was reinforced, and the 'right' of the few to belong staked out.

At the end of the conference, everyone gathered in the large auditorium to take a group photo. I didn't get in on that. Someone asked me why I didn't want to be in the picture, and I said that it was because I'd lose my Coloured People's Credentials. Weirdly enough, though my own paper was quite rubbish (it was my first year as an academic, and I spent a lot of time writing drivel), I was invited to send in a revised version for a collection of essays, compiled from that conference. I never could get motivated to do it. I guess I realised, even then, that I was being asked to be the Sole Brown Representative in a book of essays about JM Coetzee. I couldn't do it.

Instead, I wrote about how that experience taught me a thing or two about the reification of 'white' culture by scholars of Southern African literature, via the objectification of JM Coetzee – using his person, as well as his writing. I presented that paper at a Chimurenga Session in 2009, in Cape Town. It was a liberating experience.

Hilariously, the South African writer, Sandile Dikeni, turned up with Nicole Turner, and rose up to defend JM. "Where are you from?" Dikeni asked, as a way of opening a line of inquiry that basically consisted of stating, "If you are not from here, how dare you criticise our most famous writer?" Of course, I began by asking Sandile "Where are you from?" before proceeding to an explanation: in a critique of how the person, persona, and writing of Coetzee have been used to reify a troubling aspect of white supremacy, as well as the protectionism of such views behind fine language and theory, my level of 'locatedness' in South Africa has no bearing. Afterwards, over drinks, Dikeni was more gracious: it was like he didn't know what came over him, when he leapt to defend JM. But he was still troubled by my critique.

So when JM Coetzee compiles a list of "winning stories", African Pens 2011: New Writing from Southern Africa, and people like Kavish Chetty (in Mahala) point out that this collection –  which includes no black writers – promotes a problematic view of writing from Southern Africa, I worry about how gentle Chetty is being.

"I do think there's something both strange and remarkable about an anthology of Southern African writing which omits black authors. Their absence here draws attention to itself: are black people simply not committing ink to paper? Or perhaps, more interestingly, are they simply not producing anything of value in the eyes of lavished adjudicator, Monsieur JM Coetzee?"

The man who wrote the definitive book of essays analysing on 'European' writing in South Africa (the excellent White Writing), the man who is protected from valid critique (not the idiotic politically-motivated nonsense) includes no black writers? I'm hardly shocked. The politeness evident in this Chetty's critique indicates the level of tiptoeing one is obliged to do, whenever approaching the circle of protection around Coetzee. As Chetty points out, "I think we have a puzzle on our hands here. Is it possible to compile a volume called African Pens without (strictly speaking) an African anywhere in the process" ("let's not get started on what 'African' actually means", Chetty adds), when there are "fifteen SADC countries all eligible for these awards" and when there were over 500 entries?

The stranger thing is complicity of the editor and publisher, who agreed to continue to permit such a lopsided selection. While Coetzee's name on the cover means that there will be good sales, this selection also endorses the view that no black people can write well enough to be selected by The Master. Apparently, none of them read Chimurenga or Kwani?

By the way, I still read Coetzee, and remain a fan of (some of) his writing and analysis.

Slo-mo better than No-mo

Not personally in love with the song, and I get this feeling all the way through that I want to hear the music the dancers are actually moving to, but this is great slow motion footage of "street" dancers in Rwanda and Burundi.

Weekend Special, August 5

The famine in the Horn of Africa has revived the debate about "starvation photography." The blog of the Irish NGO, Dóchas, has compiled the different viewpoints in one place.

* Related: What groundbreaking images of 'Africa' can we expect this year from The International Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan, France?, asks Duck Rabbit. Sadly, more of the same.

*  Jonathan Faull sent in this item on parachute journalism at its "best" featured on CNN's website: "Photographer captures 'unbreakable spirit' in West Africa"

Photographer "Thomas Nybo has captured images of some of the toughest issues facing Africa, from child mortality to access to education" presumably during his indepth understanding of the continent gleaned from his extensive understanding of the "five countries he recently visited in 11 days."

Nybo also takes the obligatory photo of himself posing with children. (What is it with foreign correspondents posing with children all the time. The adults don't like you?) As Jonathan remarked: Watch the video for some spectacularly patronizing nonsense.

* Mohammed Keita, Africa coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, writing in Washington D.C.'s political newspaper, The Hill:

In a White House meeting last week, President Barack Obama praised four recently elected heads of African states as "effective models" for democratization who are "absolutely committed" to good governance and human rights. Yet, as the New York Times noted, ambitious promises and lofty rhetoric in Washington glossed over troubling, but all too familiar, reports of coup plotting, an assassination attempt, and fresh human rights and press freedom violations.  With the exception of President Boni Yayi of Benin, three new African leaders, Presidents Mahamadou Issoufou of Niger, Alassane Ouattara of Ivory Coast, and Alpha Condé of Guinea, have each been in office for less than a year after emerging from some of the most contested ballot tussles on the continent. Yet, in their short time in office, two of the leaders Washington has most embraced in "building strong democratic institutions," Ivory Coast President Ouattara and Guinean President Condé, have already been implicated in rights abuses.

* More democracy: The Morroccan King may be reconsidering the annual"King's Allegiance Day Parade." The people keep turning up and telling him he has no clothes.

* South African culture blog, Mahala.com has two must-read posts about what's considered normal in South Africa: white writing (what's out for our longer post on Monday on this) and white insurance.

* And staying with whiteness: white advertising executives in Cape Town heart each other.

* Brooklyn Rail–which a while ago featured a shortlived series about African immigrants in New York City–have two articles with continental themes in the latest issue. First editor Theodore Hamm's account of protests in Senegal (he was there with his small child and wife who was doing research) and a second by Hawa Allan about child soldier lit.

* CNN on the growth of radio stations–including in Pidgin–in Nigeria.

* The New York Times has a story listing all the people charged in Zimbabwe with insulting President Robert Mugabe. The latest perpetrator:

… A security guard faces up to 12 months in jail because of remarks on the Zimbabwe president's health and a taunt over a snack of biscuits and a fruity milk drink. After years of acute shortages of food and confectionary, the guard allegedly told a colleague that President Robert Mugabe ruined the economy and empty store shelves were only restocked by the former opposition party with cookies and soft drinks that his pro-Mugabe colleague ate for lunch.

* Remember in 2008 when New York Magazine's annual "Reasons to Love New York" included  (at no.17) the story of King James Oladipo Buremoh, a Nigerian King who moonlights as a Gray Line tour bus driver in New York and is a former pro-wrestler?

New York Magazine's editors were of course more into novelty of King James' life. But now the King is the subject of a short documentary film that takes him more seriously:

* Rhodes University academic (and decent writer) Richard Pithouse in CounterPunch on the case of the "Kennedy 12″

* Al Jazeera English has a new series about African immigration to Europe:

* Some hipster humor:

* Talking about hipsters. Reggie Watts now sells chickens for South African fast food giant, Nandos:

* Oh and blogs/tumblrs to #FF: Uganda Be Kiddin' Me! (her real job), The Africa They Never Show You and A Spare Thought.

* Finally, some good hip hop to ride out the weekend:

H/T's: Kiss My Black Ads, Duck Rabbit, Jon Jeter, Sophia Azeb, Ntone Edjabe, and many others we can't name or did not want to be namechecked.

See you Monday.

August 5, Burkina Faso

Why not start the celebration of Burkina Faso's Independence with an explosive live performance by rapper Art Melody. (You gotta love his t-shirt!)

The Hip Hop scene in Burkina Faso has grown, with the help of the annual Waga Hip Hop Festival in Ouagadougou. Waga has been on my destination radar for awhile as well as Fespaco (the film festival).

Nomadic Wax recorded Burkinabe group Yeleen, doing an acoustic performance at the last edition of Waga:

The duo travels back and forth between Paris and Ouagadougou, giving them some international connections as evidenced by this collaboration with Magic System:

I had first heard that Burkina Faso had a rap scene through Yeleen, as well as from the Vrai to Vrai compilation posted at Awesome Tapes from Africa, which is still available for download, (Side A,  Side B).

Staying in the era of that compilation, Dancehall and Reggae not surprisingly find their way in. The following classic looking video reminds me of some early Reggaeton a la Big Boy (This too!).

Burkinabe traditional music is typical of the region, using instruments such as the Kora, Balafon, and the Ngoni. It always excites me when rappers mix elements like those in, as seen in this video showcasing what seems like local youth arts programs:

Or when they sample:

For more great Burkinabe Rap footage, check the always dependable Nomadic Wax, and their Waga wrap ups.

Princess Fatu

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Back in the states, I'm going to be able to fulfill my promise to post on Liberian music, and the vibrant growing scene there. I'm publishing another couple of articles for Cluster Mag about it, and am really excited about a compilation Akwaaba Music and I have decided to put together. So keep a look out for those.

In the meantime, enjoy this track from John Beadle's African Diva's Compilation Vol. 1.

Most of the information on the Liberian music industry available on the web is from artists that were recording before the war and who have since left. Princess Gayflor is one of those artists. Read about her here.