Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 625

Harvey Levin and Hammarskjöld's body

http://www.tmz.com/2011/07/19/noah-wy...

I grew up in the Copperbelt Province, near the small mining town where Dag Hammarskjöld's plane crashed in September 1961, as he was en route to negotiate a cease-fire in Katanga Province in the Congo. My father, who stuck a small map of the continent on our bedroom wall, and warned us to memorise the 50+ African states within a month of our arrival in Zambia (I was 7), was full of obscure facts that meant little to us at the time. He chugged us to Ndola in his beloved bottle-green VW beetle, and made a sweep around the tiny airstrip: "This is where the great statesman died, perhaps because of treachery," he said.

So imagine my surprise when TMZ's Harvey Levin pronounced Hammarskjöld's death to have been at the hands of 'natives' who tied him to a tree, and split his body apart. Even as his staff members Googled 'Hammarskjöld' and found that he died in a plane crash, Levin holds on to his story: the natives must have  split Hammarskjöld's body, posthumously. He then benign-dictator-style ordered a staff member to get a hold of a "professor" who knows something about the Congo, to confirm his story.

Around 9:30 AM, I went on TMZ's website, and wrote them a note: I grew up not 60KM from the crash site…and can assure you that no natives have been splitting anyone apart.

11:25AM: Harvey Levin himself rings me up to say: he distinctly remembers a story about a person whose plane crashed, survived the crash, but then some 'tribe'/the natives tied him to a tree and pulled him apart using some elaborate system of ropes. Apparently it was all over the news, sometime in the '60s – could I find out who it was? I told him that 'Africa' lends itself to such myths, and I'd be surprised if it were true, but he was heading to a meeting. So I assured him I'd put the word out via AIAC.

Natives and Tribals: do you know of such an incident?

I know of Leopold's people splitting people's hands off from their bodies in the Congo, and the US govt. doing some nasty things to natives from Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., but…

Music Break / Gracias

We plugged Kinshasa-born Gracias not too long ago. This is the video for Mon€y, another track from his new EP.

Spinning in Gauteng

Journalist/photographer Chris Parkinson, who lives in Johannesburg, has shot this short film about car spinning in the city. Invited by a fellow photographer, who is also a spinner, he headed out to Nasrec, a racing track on the edge of Soweto. "What I loved about the event is that it seemed to be completely mixed, racially, both in terms of the drivers and the spectators – this is rare in South Africa where most sports are considered to be either black or white. There was a great atmosphere and everybody was there just to appreciate the cars and the driving," he told me an in email.  Parkinson, born in Britain has been living in South Africa the last 4 years as a cameraman for BBC News.  "I like to think that I came to Africa with an open mind and have really enjoyed travelling widely and meeting so many different people. i wouldn't say that I have a philosophy about how I film and the stories I tell about the continent–I just try to create something interesting to the viewer. I like to do positive stories and to show what a diverse and fascinating continent it is but at the same time it is impossible to hide from the challenges that the people and governments face –those stories must also be covered."

You can view his work here.

Music Break / Akala

There's so much going on in these 8 minutes of rap by Akala, we can only suggest you take the occasion's title on its word: Fire In The Booth.

Via Mikko Kapanen.

Mandela's heirs

The documentary "Dear Mandela," about three young leaders of a shack dwellers movement in Durban, South Africa, is finally here. The film will premiere at Durban International Film Festival–the first screening is on the 26th July. According to filmmakers, Dara Kell and Christopher Nizza, the film will also embark on a national tour in South Africa before screenings here in the US. If the short version of the film is anything to go by, it should be good. In that film, one of the youth leaders, Mnikelo Ndabankulu, speaking after a fire that destroyed 200 shacks in his neighborhood, refers to government supporters, says: "They say, 'Why are these people marching because these times [of oppression] have gone. We are in a democracy. What are they marching for?' [However] the real motive behind our struggle is this thing [pointing to conditions in his squatter community]. It is not a matter of fame, it is a not a matter of power hunger. It's not a matter of disrespecting the authorities. It's being serious about life. This is not life." Then, channeling Mandela' single-mindedness before he was sentence to life in prison in 1964, Ndabankulu says: "You don't need to be old to be wise. That is why we think we need to show our character while we are still young so that when your life ends, it must not be like a small obituary that said, 'You were born, you ate, you go to school, you died.' When you are dying you must die with credibility. People must talk about you saying good things, saying you were a man among men, not just an ordinary man."

More information and future screenings times here.

DSK, the maid from Guinea and 'agency'

Robert Thornton is an anthropologist who teaches at Wits University in South Africa. He also maintains  a blog: An Anthropologist in South Africa. In this guest post, he gives his take on Dominique Strauss-Khan and the Guinean-American hotel staff member who accused him of rape. What's different here, from the thousands of other analyses you've read? Thornton argues that it is important, here, to include an analysis of global economies (both the 'legitimate' and the 'black') showcasing complex, interdependent power relationships between seemingly oppositional sets of people. He also posits that gender, race, and other binaries beaten to death in the popular media may be secondary to the most significant issues relevant to this case. We at AIAC found Thornton's positions to be provocative, innovative, and yet, simultaneously problematic and needing engagement. Contributor Neelika Jayawardane takes up some of the points raised by Thornton in the second half of the post.*

Robert Thornton:

The most extraordinary aspect of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape case is the remarkable similarity between DSK and his accuser: they are both global players. Each deploys gendered power in different ways within radically different but intimately linked frameworks. Far from being the exemplar of the powerful against the powerless, each shows agency in extraordinary ways.

Commentators have focused on the fact that they represent the polar opposites of global political and gender categories: a predatory and powerful male against a powerless and virtuous woman, one rich the other poor, Jew and Muslim, White and Black, European and African, French and American immigrant, a manager of vast wealth and a hard working cleaner who was there to pick up his tissues and wash his sheets.

The affair seemed to personify the great dialectical oppositions of race, class, and gender. What brings this affair to international notice, however, is not just their difference but that fact that both operated in global markets, each successful in their own terms.

DSK was the head of the International Monetary Fund, while the Guinean hotel maid was an international multiple fraudster. According to the reports in the press, she had faked her appeal for asylum status by memorising a tape that she had bought from a man who specialised in sad stories of abuse and trauma.

These were not just any sad stories, but stories that Americans, and American immigration officials in particular, would believe. Her story revolved around being a devoutly religious woman who had been gang raped by out-of-control African men in the violence-torn streets of yet another African failed state.

The apparent back story is that this is where terrorist train and hide from American forces, but where good women who fear god, but who can also change bed linen and run a vacuum cleaner, also live in precarious balance with the forces of evil.

In a continent where HIV/AIDS prevention programmes pour hundreds of millions of dollars into promoting sexual abstinence, a masculine gang had forcibly raped her. By seeking to escape this antithesis of morality and good government, and by bravely standing against the oppression suffered by all women, she stood out as a beacon of what is called 'hope'. Except she didn't.

Instead, it turned out that she was a strongly motivated and clever player in the global market. The story that she told the US Immigration office, that she had learned by heart off a tape that she had paid good money for, had been worth its weight in any currency she might deal in. She had asylum status in the wealthiest country in the world, and was making a mint.

She was not what she seemed: a poor hard-working African women without agency or power to oppose the forces of patriarchy, race and class that oppressed her. Instead, she had multiple bank accounts spread at least across the US, if not the world, and had received at least $100,000 into the US accounts in the last year alone. She had reported on her US tax return that she was the sole bread-winner for two children, (only one of whom turned out to be hers), and that her only income was from her job as a cleaner in a big hotel chain that catered for uber-wealthy clients like Domnique Strauss-Khan. She was cheating the welfare system for rent on a New York apartment, and a successful tax fraud. The female accuser has moved from a point of high virtue to someone that Americans seem to hate most: an illegal immigrant, a tax fraud, and a welfare cheat. Its all about the economy.

In fact, it turned out she had a boyfriend in jail in Arizona. He was a Wolof-speaker like her from Guinea to whom she exposed her plan on the telephone. Translated from an obscure dialect of Wolof, she assured him that she knew what she was doing with Frenchman, and that she expected to make a lot of money from the rape story. Her boyfriend had been caught trying to barter counterfeit fashion items, almost certainly made in China, for marijuana from Mexican drug dealers in Arizona. He was an illegal alien, and the prison recorded his conversations. All in all, this was an elaborate global deal involving people from most parts the world's multiple economies.

A Times correspondent in France, Elaine Sciolino, commented after the new stories emerged that "Until today, it was white versus black, rich versus poor, man versus woman, Jew versus Muslim." It seemed to reflect, in other words, the received wisdom about the standard categories of world conflict. Although these were also in play, what is perhaps more important is the fact that DSK as IMF primo represents that global public economy while his accuser clearly represents the other global economy: secret, mostly illegal, untaxed, mostly unobserved, dealing in drugs, fraud, money laundering, counterfeit goods and clever narratives that make it all work.

Both Strauss-Kahn and his accuser are part of opposite halves of the global economy. Their stories reveal its hidden double nature. The formal, public economy of the IMF creates as its dark twin in the unobserved economy that supports many people like the Guinean hotel maid, her children, and her boyfriend.

This is not just a story of rich and poor, white and black, macho male and guileless female. It is also a story of how the world really works as opposed to how it is supposed to work. When the accuser phoned her boyfriend to discuss how much money she could make off Strauss-Kahn, she was doing on a personal level what a Goldman-Sachs trader, or any banana-republic dictator, does on a daily basis: they gamble and deal with flows of wealth that span the globe, that knit its economies together, but also permit a range of economic practices that may be far from the norm, and far from legality.

Seen as a global player in the unobserved economy of drugs, fraud and cash, DSK's accuser was a successful woman. She was making money despite her origins in a country that should have doomed her to poverty. Ironically, she is one of those who benefits most, as she is meant to, from the euro-socialist policies that Strauss-Kahn speaks for. That she does so fraudulently is built into the way the system actually works.

But the IMF is also accused by its many detractors of dealing very roughly with those who do not play by IMF rules. It imposes harsh penalties on countries that do not comply with its structural adjustment programmes. In some cases, those penalties drive people like DSK's accuser all the way to New York where she can seek a kind of revenge on the chairman of the IMF itself. The IMF works at the level of states and complex institutions. DSK's accuser works at the level of networks of hidden economic deals involving untaxed and unaccountable values and cash in an unobserved economy of a different sort entirely.

This has implications, too, for the way we understand gender. The political version of the gender story in this case is about the powerlessness of the female victim of male violence, the immigrant, the single mother, the black woman in the urban metropolis. When we are able to perceive the varieties of power that this woman is able to utilise, however, we also should be able to see how the realities of 'power' and gender is as multiple—or at least two sided—as the economies that DSK and his accuser participate in.

Gender here may indeed be less important that the social forms of gendered lives that oppose each other. Dominique is the pater familias supported by a loving wife and daughter. This is a powerful social form, not just a powerful 'male'. This 'domestic' unit is opposed to the fatherless composite family that the woman supports with the help of a felonious boyfriend dealing global contraband and confidence stories.

Gender appears in this light far too abstract to comprehend the real struggles. It is the social forms of 'family' in which gender plays only a part that is far more important in the longer-term outcome of the alleged rape. A focus on the rape alone, like the focus on class, race and gender fail to illuminate much that is important. The small scale social forms of the 'domestic' and the daily life, as much as the global political economies in which they each participate, are as important as the grand categories of the usual social analysis.

In other words, the homogenising, binary concept of 'gender', like the concept of 'the economy' or 'class' obscures more than it reveals in an attempt to understand the DSK affair that concentrates so many of the grant dichotomies of today's world.

To be 'real,' women need more than being assigned to the category 'female'. The same is true for men. To be 'real women', in other words, women need what we call 'flirtation', and this is something that mere category of 'male' and 'female', or even 'patriarchy' and 'the oppressed' fails to generate. But more than this, it is hard to deny that the sense of danger, or of loss and gain as in a game, can be central to our sense of being who we are as 'gendered' selves. The fact that both DSK and his accuser are 'predatory', seeking gain with other's loss, make this story even more compelling. While much has been written in the press, and said in conversation, about how 'powerful men' seem to need the predatory sexuality that seemed to be in play here, less has been said about how the 'powerless' deploy their own systems of predation. The fact that one is more successful than the other in long run is what makes class and gender the fundamental categories that they are, and we must not lose sight of the intricacies of the way they are played in the real world.

Neelika Jayawardane: Response

The insomniac's early morning on which I read that DSK's accuser had been identified as 'African', I shot off an email to Sean Jacobs: already, we almost foresaw just how things would play out – and they have, rather predictably. The initial narrative that reached the world, as it was orchestrated by the popular media, was one that represented "the polar opposites of global political and gender categories," as anthropologist Robert Thornton observes: a 'powerless' woman's word against the pronouncements of a man (and his team of lawyers) who had power over the global economy; a poor African immigrant who had to supplicate her way into a cleaner's job contrasted with a superbly well-connected global cosmopolitan; a 'devout' Muslim in opposition to the 'liberal' mores of Enlightenment Europe – embodied, in this case, by a Jewish man. Yes, we loved that initial story, as long as it remained an "affair" that "seemed to personify the great dialectical oppositions of race, class, and gender: man/woman, white/back, powerful/powerless," as Thornton clarifies. But, unsurprisingly, out came muddy details of the woman's romantic life, immigration narrative, financial status – all of which derailed the previous, 'attractive' narrative of untarnished victimhood. Yet, this secondary narrative was quickly adopted as 'victorious': while 'bad' happened in this world, the 'system' in a democratic nation still 'worked'. This now became fashioned as "a victory for corroboration and justice," as Dan Moshenberg pointed out in a previous post.

The French Left did spend some time trying to prove that DSK was elaborately set up by the offer of sex in a hotel room, all the better to defame him and thereby eliminate him from opposing Sarkozy in a future election. French reporters were incredulous, then, to find that the chambermaid did not appear to be particularly 'seductive', as they proceeded to systematically violate her privacy: imagine encountering the agent sent to seduce one of the most important European officials in the world, and she turns out to be…well, a woman who did not strike the reporters as some hot harlot looking like she was doing the walk of shame/glory at the courthouse after a night of conquest at a frat party. However, as long as this was the case about the hardworking and law-abiding immigrant hotel chambermaid who was allegedly assaulted by a white, wealthy, well-connected European official, most people in the US only argued about whether this case of assault and sexual battery could be proven or not. For many, this case of rape illustrated what people always knew: that rape is a potent tool in demarcating difference and displaying power. Further, the case appeared to illuminate an axiom that comments on the junction between violence and power: the wider the gap between gender, 'race' and class of those who collide at any particular confluence, the greater the probability of injustice.

However, as Thornton points out, the binaries that gave us comfort are problematic at best. He initiates his discussion with the claim that DSK and his accuser are "both global players" who "deploy [...] gendered power in different ways within radically different but intimately linked frameworks," showing "agency," each in her/his own way: in this, Thornton points out, far from presenting us with binaries, the "players' are "remarkably similar." Further, Thornton argues that it is important, here, to include an analysis of global economies (both the 'legitimate' and the 'black') showcasing complex, interdependent power relationships between seemingly oppositional sets of people. He also posits that gender, race, and other binaries beaten to death in the popular media may be secondary to the most significant issues relevant to this case, and instead, showcases the more complex, interdependent power relationships (including power as it reveals itself in familial and sexual arenas) between seemingly oppositional sets of people as determinants of their 'agency'.

What I have trouble with has to do with is the wording of Thornton's descriptions of the 'players', and what such choices of words reveal about our biases. For instance, DSK is described as "the head of the International Monetary Fund," while, in the same sentence, "the Guinean hotel maid" is described as "an international multiple fraudster". Indeed, she had (again, according to press narratives), "faked her appeal for asylum status by memorising a tape that she had bought from a man who specialised in sad stories of abuse and trauma," had an "illegal alien" lover who was in jail, and was a "successful tax fraud" and a "welfare cheat".  While DSK is indirectly reprimanded for being head of an international financial machine that is "also accused by its many detractors of dealing very roughly with those who do not play by [its] rules … impos[ing] harsh penalties on countries that do not comply with its structural adjustment programmes," our chambermaid "moved from a point of high virtue" to someone that Americans vilified.

If we are looking into DSK's accuser's financial dealings, let's look at his. What of DSK? What of his hustle, the billions he helps squeeze in and out of nations, blackmailing like any gangster-hustler, and the millions he has in lawyers to ferret out the financial information, when the case is about rape? Why have we not ferreted out his financial records? Why are the IMF's black dealings not part of the narrative? Are we won over by DSK's (and his lawyers') 'legitimacy' to blackmail, fuck over, and obliterate the focus of the case, because the maid said, "I know what I am doing, he is a rich man"? I wish the woman who said she knew what she was doing had known what she was doing a little better – that would have made her more of an 'equal' in this lopsided hustle.

Thornton shows us the significance of DSK being appealingly invoked as "the pater familias supported by a loving wife and daughter": this powerful representation of a man as part of the "'domestic' unit'", as "opposed to the fatherless composite family that the woman supports with the help of a felonious boyfriend dealing global contraband and confidence stories" certainly brings about a different set of binaries. I'd agree with Thornton that an 'intact' and 'nuclear' family headed by a powerful man with supportive spouse and daughter (both of whom are indentified as 'modern', independent, emancipated – rather than women who fearfully cling dependently to a patriarch for status and money) play a significant role in the public's imaginary – and are deployed as such by those very family members, lawyers, and firms hired to project and remake one's public image. But I remain unclear about why Thornton sees gender as "less important" and "too abstract to comprehend the real struggles", or why the "focus on the rape alone, like the focus on class, race and gender fail to illuminate much that is important." True, focusing on any one part of our lives inevitably reveals only half-truths about each of us, but if DSK is accused of one thing, let's focus on that.

What troubles the most is that the accuser – the former victim, "the working African women without agency or power to oppose the forces of patriarchy, race and class that oppressed her," is now caricatured as a global player with agency deployable on the same scale as the Global Player. When those in vastly smaller/diminished positions of power play in the fields of the Big Lords, they do not become, in any way, 'equal' players. It's been fashionable, lately (especially in South Africa/Cape revisionist history) to look at how the indigenous, slave, indentured, and those in sexual bondage somehow managed to negotiate 'power in the interstices'. Sure, those who are subjugated, at any level, cannot be written off as bastard-victims, wordless fools with barely a frontal lobe in evidence – thusly permitting them no room for negotiating a (however slight) better position for themselves. But let's be careful. When we desire to do 'good', by not blanketing all subjugated people under the same moronic victimhood, we may fall into the trap of giving those who are 'victimised'/subjugated (or in whatever position of diminished power) far more agency than they actually had/have.

There's agency, and there's agency.

For instance, having a $100,000 in US bank accounts or in unreported income in a year in the US? Whatever. That's not even considered 'wealthy' in American terms, which says one must earn more than $125,000 to be considered properly wealthy (and that's just for tax purposes). Whether $100,000 makes one 'wealthy' is especially relevant in an overpriced city like New York (in Chinatown the other day, I saw a man wearing a t-shirt bearing the statement: "I Can't Afford to ❤ NY").

Now: are we angry that a woman who should be 'lower' than us knew how to hustle in the black economy – the only one in which she could have access to the marketplace of power – and are we even more angry at her for not staying 'authentic' and poor, devout and downtrodden, immigrant and cleaning, there for us to glorify in her pure Mother Mary victimhood? Sure we are.

And are we angry that she learnt that in order to supplicate at the gates of power, she had to obliterate any agency she had in fashioning a future for herself, and manufacture a feature film-version of victimisation? Knowing that Power loves Victims, she narrated the necessary story – in order to make a living (in a way, every job interview is like that). Millions of people have done that in order to be mobile, to participate in powerful economies, and make themselves something other than victims. That's what immigration is about – and recipient nations love to subvert our stories, and fool us into believing that we are here solely because we are exceptional, because we 'worked hard', and that is why we succeed in such an 'exceptional nation'.

Finally, what bothers us most about Calibans is this: that they dissemble, that they play not one role, that they do not remain in supplicating positions, that they do not stay victims. One could grow to love even a hideous Proconsul, but only if it spoke monosyllabically, and had no plans but to supplicate with a singular narrative. But give the monstrous Caliban poetic language, multiplicity, and yes, some agency, and we will not only turn on him, but attempt to conjecture that he exists on a level playing field with Prospero.

Every once in a while, we in these Enlightenment nations love a story where the less powerful get to have their day – it legitimises the myth of a working 'system'. A number of us who write for Africa is a Country are immigrants to the US – we came here from varied social, economic, and family backgrounds. Allow me to invoke the power of the personal narrative here: each immigrant can tell you that her/his agency (power to make decisions, direct our lives, and even re-route others' lives, while speaking meaningfully about our worldview) as an immigrant depended intimately on the social power with which each person arrived. Each of us learnt about what it meant to hustle on multiple stages of the global economy (one that determined our geographic, intellectual, and financial mobility), putting up with those who exclaimed how lucky we now were, to be welcomed in a 'superior' system that 'worked'. Educational opportunities, familial support systems, connections to other well-connected people, a great deal of fortuitousness, and the internet means that we can actually project a shared – and different – worldview of ourselves, rather than settle for the story being told about us. Like Dan Moshenberg, I cannot presume to know the Guinean-American woman's story, nor that of DSK. But I am interested in moving away from what Slavoj Zizek most criticises in contemporary 'Liberal-leftist-intellectual-academic' circles: high-minded, well-meaning, moderate, and esoteric modes of thought. While the 'Middle Path' is something for which I attempt to strive, I'm also far more interested in mobilising towards a more 'radical' conversation with emancipatory politics in favor of increasingly obscure considerations of our subjectivities.

* We're not sure whether this will become a regular feature. But we consider this is our inaugural Debate post.

The people of Blikkiesdorp

For at least 3 years now South African photographer Lizane Louw have chronicled the lives of the people of Blikkiesdorp (translation: Tin Town), a temporary relocation camp in Delft–not to be confused with the Dutch town and one of the poorest townships in Cape Town, located about 30 km from the city center.

Life there consists of daily humiliation for the camp's residents who face no, or little, protection from violent crimes, rape and robberies. (Some residents, though, have organized themselves.) For city officials, run by the Democratic Alliance, the camp is at once a temporary and permanent solution to housing problems. Lizanne speaks of  the city planning to erect another 200 structures in Blikkiesdorp.

Lizanne decided first photographed residents of Blikkiesdorp 2 years ago. In February this year she wanted to publish some of the pictures, including one of a 92 year old grandmother, Ouma Magdalena. When she went back to ask Ouma Magdalena for permission to publish the image, she found the old woman had passed away. She had TB. "Ouma is a big inspiration for this project that I am currently doing. I would like to use her story to make a change in this community. I don't think it is ethically and morally acceptable that people that are poor must live in such challenging and substandard living conditions. Something needs to be done and we need to seriously reflect on ourselves as a society, when these things happen in your backyard without us attempting to do anything about it."

All the photos are available on the project's Facebook page.

Below Lizanne talks us through some of the images.

This photograph is one of the first I took in Blikkiesdorp. The name "Tin Town" comes from these rows and rows corrugated iron structures that make up the streets and community in Blikkiesdorp. This is a very special photograph. Ouma Johanna walking in one of the alleys in Phase 1. The green dress that she wore that day was her favourite. When I met her, she was sitting outside her structure and she smiled. She said that she knew she had to put on her favourite green dress, because that day was going to be going to be a special day. I smiled and enjoyed following her and photographing her in Blikkiesdorp. Ouma Johanna passed away in 2010.  She died of starvation.

Blikkiesdorp has a moon landscape, there is no colour, no solid structures, no plants,grass or trees. When I first started photographing there it looked to me like a metal tin-town. I understood the name it was given by the community ' Tin Town' or in Afrikaans " Blikkiesdorp". The "architecture" is changing as more people are moved in and more structures are build. And yes, it is becoming another shanty town.

[The children are wearing makeshift raincoats and throwing up gang signs--Sean]. This saddened me from the very beginning. Gangs, 28's and 27's, are the role models in this society. It is very rare that you would find children that would not pose without giving you a "nommer" (gang sign; literally "number"). This is the reality and if you ask them about it they will share their stories and their understanding. They don't know anything better.  However, what I find inspirational about Blikkiesdorp is that the people always use creative ideas to overcome obstacles, the "raincoat" is a good example of this. These "raincoats" are made out of plastic bags they pick up in the garbage bins. These garbage bins are an endless source of entertainment for the children. They also make kites out of these garbage bags. This is what they do. It is normal to them. Some of them even make their own "raincoats" when they go to school …

[This is] Adeen and Anton. I have not seen Adeen (left) for about a month. Anton applied for and  received his first disability grant at the end of May and left Adeen in Blikkies. I plan to visit her soon. From this news, I gather that their "engament" is off and also the wedding her mom, Tannie Elna, was dreaming about.

There is no form of recreation for any of the 7500 children. The children and teenagers make toys out of anything they pick up. Here the group  build a table from stuff that they found. Dominoes is a very popular game in Blikkies. Most evenings and during holidays, people can be found playing dominoes in the streets.

* You can also follow the project on Twitter.  Finally if you want to support Louw, who wants to put up a exhibition and a sustainable initiative on INDIEGOGO.

Happy Birthday Nelson Mandela

South Africa's first democratic president is 93 years old today.

The artwork is a collaboration between the two Dutch artists Anton Corbijn and Berend Strik. (Via: ZAM Magazine)

* It would be appropriate to click through to our February 11, 2010 post "Songs for Nelson Mandela" (on the 10th anniversary of Mandela's release of Mandela). Here.

Weekend Special, July 17

All that stuff we could not blog–we have real jobs–or were too lazy to put up.

First, up a rough cut of "Quel Souvenir," a new film (currently in post-production) about the new Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline is screening on July 27 at the DocuClub in Manhattan. Here is the trailer.  Here's the description by the director, Danya Abt: "… The Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline was the largest investment project ever made in sub-Saharan Africa, a 600 mile pipeline from the oil fields of Southwestern Chad to the beaches of Cameroon.  'Quel Souvenir' follows the pipeline through the the many communities it touches, who ask 'If the land is rich, why are we so poor?' and frames the project withing a larger context of growing oil exploitation in Africa."

* I have fond memories of the Africa Center in Covent Garden–a building housing a restaurant, bookstore and basement bar/club–from my short time as a graduate student in London. So I was sad to read in this weekend's The Financial Times it may not be no more, taken over by a property developer "with South African roots" (I can only imagine what that means) who has turned everything else in the neighborhood into "high-end retail shops and restaurants." Anyway there is a last ditch attempt to still keep it open. I doubt the nearby Springbok Bar has difficulties getting patrons or sponsors. More here.

* Nuruddin Farrah, the Somali writer who still (?) lives in Cape Town, compares the Mogadishu of his childhood with its violent present.

* Meanwhile, here's US public radio service NPR with an interactive map of China's global reach. (Strangely, the data for the map comes from the rightwing Heritage Foundation, which tracks "China's foreign nonbond investments and contracts worth more than $100 million.") Here.

* And since we're talking about graphic displays of data. You have to like this Tumblr blog.

* The video for "Zef Side" which introduced Die Antwoord to the internets (more than 7 million views at last count) has won its director Sean Metelerkamp a D&AD award.

Anyway, where is Die Antwoord?

* "Fire in Babylon," the filmic ode to the triumphant West Indies cricket team of the late 1970s through the mid–1990s is playing New York City at a few venues this summer and Fall: At the Rerun Theater (July 22 – 29th) in Dumbo, the Summer African Diaspora International Film Festival (Aug 12 – Aug 22) at Harlem's Riverside Theater and at BAM Cinematek, Brooklyn Sept 17. I rented the film on iTunes. At the heart of the film is an attempt to link the team's growing dominance to black power politics (classic scene is the on-field humiliation of England's South African-born captain Tony Greig on the West Indies' 1975 tour to England after he threatened to make them "grovel"). It also briefly explores the decision by some of the team members to sign for a 2-tour deal to Apartheid South Africa in the early 1980s against the wishes of South Africa's people. Here's the trailer:

* Photographer Simon Weller's "township barbershops and salons" project. Look at it here.

* When South Sudan gained its independence earlier this month, The Guardian put up this interactive map charting Africa's history since colonialism to this month.

*What the Gates Foundation does when it not trying to destroy public education in the United States.  Read it here.

*  Something to look forward to: The South African poet Keorepetse Kgositsile–who gave The Last Poets their name–will be reading stateside next Spring. But he may found that few cares about his achievements other than that he is the father of Earl Sweatshirt of rappers Odd Future. Here's a taste of Kgositsile, accompanied by Tumi & the Volume, paying his respects to Johnny Dyani:

* CNN on Shangaan Electro taking Europe this summer.

* Check out Aaron Leaf's Tumblr and Blog about his travels in West Africa. Here.

* And on the streets in Haiti they refer to "mixed-race" Haitians as "Marabou." Buried in a New York Times Magazine piece about the political ambitions of Wyclef Jean.

Finally some music to ride the weekend out with: Sexion D'Assaut from Paris (via What's Up Africa) and Ntjapedi from outside Johannesburg. And I've had Blitz the Ambassador's "Native Son" album (link is to full stream) on repeat this week. BTW, Blitz makes a guest turn on L4's "Back to You" with Jon Tarifa. Here's the video shot around tourist landmarks around New York City:

H/T: Bombastic Elements, Sophia Azeb, Tom Devriendt, Neelika Jayawardane, Cassandra Herman,

Music Break / Ken's Song

Some rural flavor from Hambale, Zambia. Filmed by David Tree.

H/T: Adrian Bischoff.