Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 643

OIL

While I was in Toronto with Sean and Tsitsi Jaji for the Canadian Association of African Studies (CAAS) conference, I checked out Edward Burtynsky's "Oil" at the Royal Ontario Museum Institute for Contemporary Culture (exhibition runs April 9 to July 2, 2011, and getting into the museum is pricy – $25 per person). The three-year touring exhibition is organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, and features Burtynsky's decade-long exploration of the effluvia of our love-affair with oil—from extraction to production to consumption. Included are images of herds of "nodding donkeys" (the pumpjacks used to extract oil), rows and rows of immaculate, identical automobiles in sales lots, meditations on the beauty of clover-leaved, many stranded expressways of LA and Shanghai, and the  beckoning neon fingers of Exxon, Shell, and fast-food drive-throughs in the hinterlands of America. There are also abandoned oil fields owned by the State Oil Company of the Republic of Azerbaijan (SOCAR), mountains of dead tyres, and the Miro-like patterning in the oil sands in Fort McMurray, Alberta. An image of a body of water in Northern Alberta (here and here) which has the second-largest known deposit of oil in the world after Saudi Arabia, contains a mesmerising sky of rolling grey clouds mirrored in what appears to be perfectly still water—but is in actuality a toxic pond. In the large scale of these photographs, we realise how small the presence of humanity is—if it is there at all. In Burtynsky's images of shipbreaking in Chittagong, Bangladesh (above), clinging to the looming hulls, somewhere in the dirty reds, rust, mud, and chemicals, are the bodies of the men engaged in the process of dismantling these giants: hardly noticeable, but made visible because he has carefully enlarged the image to a scale that removes our unknowing and disinterest.

Burtynsky calls his images "the new reflecting pools" of our times. Next to his, George Osodi's "Oil Rich Niger Delta," images are different beasts. The crudeness and cruelty of toxic lives, enmeshed within the grand profiteering and politics of oil extraction in the poorest regions of the world are in the forefront here. Significantly, Osodi is able to avoid pity and guilt. Though his images do not have the finesse of Burtynsky's, they are more intimate, and more immediately "lively" and living (see them here  and here).

–Neelika Jayawardane.

'Native Sun,' The Film

Blitz the Ambassador released his short film to accompany his album Native Sun which was released two weeks ago.–Boima Tucker.

Give me the beat

The video for "Banikidi", the new single from Nigerian Darey's new album Double Dare. That's our Music Break.

Via What's Up Africa.

Locust Couture

Review:  Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

In that rarefied, and manufactured world that surrounded Alexander McQueen during his terribly short life, he was careful to cultivate his intellectual yearnings, as well as his creative ambitions. In "Savage Beauty," we can see that McQueen had more to work with than the average designer's pea's worth of a brain, his brilliant intellect embellishing the sculpted work more than all the blood-red beadwork, gold thread, and metallic sequins in the world. For McQueen, design aesthetics and fashion were deeply imbedded within the political and the historical (and vice versa), a vision that allowed him to see "beyond clothing's physical constraints to its ideational and ideological possibilities".

When he regarded the 'African' as many designers do, McQueen invoked the Romantic to exoticise and frame the African as 'primitive' in the same old problematic manner: "What I do is look at the ancient African tribes, and the way they dress. The rituals of how they dress…there's a lot of tribalism in the collections." In It's a Jungle Out There (autumn/winter 1997–98), which was "inspired by the Thomson's gazelle" ("the poor critter" at the bottom of Africa's food chain) there's a lot of brown skin, gazelle horns, and miniature crocodile and vulture skulls. We are assured that "all were by-products"—the animals were killed for meat, and not solely for their skin or fur.

Yet, McQueen famously said that his collection Eshu (autumn/winter 2000–2001) "was a reaction to designers romanticizing ethnic dressing, like a Masai-inspired dress made of materials the Masai could never afford" (like those we've mocked in previous posts—see Armani, who was suddenly "inspired" by the Touareg). And he once designed an infamous latex dress embroidered with locusts: a "statement on famine." This was no empty gesture: the same modernity that promised to sanitise the world unleashed destruction and misery on swathes of people, while insulating itSelf from suffering.

His work has been described as postmodern reconstitutions of the Romantic notions surrounding the Sublime—in which the artist is able to evoke and signify competing emotions of wonder, terror, incredulity and revulsion. But McQueen also juxtaposed such philosophical abstractions with the concrete symbols of nationalism, and the continued fascination of modern nations/nationals with primitivism and naturalism.

In Eshu—"inspired" by the Yoruba people and the synonymous deity—the "tribal details" of horsehair, skin, and skull are tailored so precisely with beadwork and luxurious fabrics that the locations on which the two meet are impossible to critique. So surgically exact are the constructions that the inherent primitivism referenced in these pieces enters the technological and modern in weirdly seamless ways. The coat of black synthetic hair and a dress of brown horsehair embroidered with yellow glass beads and others in the It's a Jungle collection meditate on the interchanges between the modern and primitive, and the dynamics of power between prey and predator, haves and have-nots, as might a Nollywood film.

McQueen's ability to highlight the body and design as sites of contravention are obvious in the first dress that confronts the galloping herd of museum-goers: a gleaming, bleeding-red, one shoulder dress that calls attention to how brilliantly our diseases helped dress the fame of many a celebrity. The upper part is a cascade of dyed-red glass microscope slides; the bottom, a plumage of billowing red ostrich feathers. Here, sewn together, hangs our primitive, ebullient past, and the technologically precise present, rapier sharp in its diagnosis of our collective illness. Walking in to that dark space, all I could think of was how those glass slides were smeared in blood, carrying the harbingers of our destruction. What McQueen does, in coupling these glass rectangles with the delicacy of fine ostrich feathers, is to make us question the supremacy of instruments that attempt to define, isolate, and contain our futures within their 90-degree angles.

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, is currently showing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, second floor. Free with Museum admission (you pay what you can at the Met!).

–Neelika Jaywardane

'Mom, what's for supper? In Mandarin'

Six years ago there were 12 Chinese-language immersion programs at U.S. schools for children in grades 12 and below; this year that figure is closer to 50. Back on the continent, CNN did a feature of elementary school in South Africa's capital learning Mandarin. We never get a sense from the report how widespread the teaching of Mandarin is in South African schools, but, I bet some observers will see this as part of China's Africa strategy.

How much do the Burkinabe artisans get?

Produced in a limited edition [and costing $1,720.00], with each piece unique, the 'Muse Two Artisanal Recycled' bag marries the savoir-faire of Yves Saint Laurent leather goods with the artisanal handiwork of women from Burkina Faso.

H/T: Matt Kirwin

New Indians in Africa

The Guardian has a glowing piece on India's growing economic influence on the continent. It opens with Manmohan Singh receiving a red-carpet welcome as he led a delegation to the India-Africa summit in Addis Ababa, which 15 African leaders reportedly attending.

"The India-Africa partnership rests on three pillars of capacity building and skill transfer, trade and infrastructure development," said Singh at the start of the six-day trip to Ethiopia and Tanzania. "Africa is emerging as a new growth pole of the world, while India is on a path of sustained and rapid economic development." The trade meeting is to be attended by 15 African leaders. On its fringes was an India show comprising business seminars, cultural projects and a trade exhibition.

It may be high-revivalist times for former non-aligned nations, but building political and economic ties, and positioning itself as different from China-all while attempting to distance itself from the criticism about human rights abuses and corruption-isn't going to be easy for India. (For starters, in the image above, taken at the start of the summit, Singh is posing with, among others, two despots to his left: King Mswati III of Swaziland and Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea; we won't say much about the host regime for now)

The comments below the article are also indicative of the ignorance, fear, and sillyness when nationalist sentiments that bubble up when trade agreements (which are about money and securing assets, not about high-minded patriotism) are made. Africa – and Africans' part in the deal – is lost in the vitriol.–Neelika Jayawardane

Music Break

'Feel Me' is the second track from a soon-to-be released EP by (Kinshasa-born) Finnish rapper Gracias. ('HKI' was a first.) I can't remember last seeing a copy of King Leopold's Ghost featured in a music video.

H/T: Mikko Kapanen

Gil Scott Heron

Gil Scott Heron, the original hip hop artist, died on Friday afternoon. He had fallen ill while on tour.  This video, which gives a good overview of Scott-Heron's life, is from a 2009 BBC Newsnight feature.  Part 2 is below.

See also the 2004 documentary "The Godfather of Soul" as well as the 2010 New Yorker article on Scott-Heron's drug addiction.

As a bonus, here's my favorite Scott-Heron tune:

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When You Refuse, You Say 'No!'

Gregory Mann

Guest Blogger

I had to buy The New York Post this week. It's something I never do because, as the letters page reminded me, it's something of a Zionist rag. But Tuesday the cover caught my eye: a story called "Got it maid" claimed that people working for disgraced ex-IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn had gone to Guinea to try to buy the silence of the young Guinean hotel maid who has accused him of attempting to rape her in New York. A seven-figure sum was bruited. Some of her relatives—two men and a few boys—were on the cover, and a page five photo showed their solidly middle class house, which her wages must have helped build. This was something new in the media clutter around the story.

A befuddled French press had already turned its attention on the woman—whom its journalists shamelessly named—after shuffling from disbelief to hazy conspiracy theories to a comfortable anti-Americanism (French indignation about the perp walk was justified, but due to a bad translation, many thought that Strauss-Kahn has to prove his innocence, rather than the state his guilt). Some trotted out the old line that she'd brought the rape on herself. French feminists girded their loins for a debate about "DSK" and the sexual habits of the French haut-bourgeoisie.

From Paris, this is a story about sex, France, and—at its most profound level—the failure of French democracy that a complicitous press represents. It's also about champagne and a smug but shaken elite, as Philip Gourevitch reports from the front lines in The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town." In New York itself, the DSK affair is being domesticated, transformed into a parochial story about real estate and co-op boards—the former front-runner for the French presidency has lots of money to spend, but no one wants him for a neighbor. Leave it to The Post—of all papers—to suggest that this was also a story about West Africa and its place in the world. African working-class women in Paris—from janitors to nannies—see it that way, as does the West African blogosphere.

As we shared a platter of yassa poulet on their lunch break last week, Jolie and Amie, two Malian maids, argued that the woman might have made a mistake. Jolie used to work as a maid in a fancy hotel in Paris, and now she cleans dormitories with Amie. She says she and the other maids were told never to enter an occupied room alone, and that if the door was ajar or anything seemed out of place, not to go in. Go straight to security, they were told, so no one accuses you of stealing. You'll lose your job. But the fact that this element of the story didn't make sense to them didn't mean that the woman was right or wrong. For them, she was just a bit player in a bigger plot to bring down DSK. That's how politics works, and it must have been French President Nicolas Sarkozy trying to get rid of a rival. But then didn't DSK, like all other French politicians, have a marabout in Mali? He ought to be able to take care of things… In other words, these two women argued, both maids and politicians put themselves in dangerous situations, but the maids do it because they have to. They need the wages, and they too could use a little spiritual protection.

Chatting at a playground in the 16th arrondissement while their charges ran wild, Ivoirian nannies (southern Christians all) couldn't understand the maid's logic. This was about sex, and therefore money. "IMF?" they said, slapping their thighs. "IMF?! If you come to me and you say 'IMF,' the door is open. That's cash!" Let's not forget that the IMF is a hell of a lot more powerful in West Africa than it is in Manhattan. Still one of the Malians murmured to me later, "The Ivoirians have no shame. That woman is a Muslim. She is a Muslim." There too the story was about the maid's comportment and about the dignity of refusal.

But the story is also about rape, power, and impunity. The intersection of those three things in Guinea has a history that is very recent and very dark. Hundreds of women—especially Peuhl women—were gang-raped, beaten and abducted by soldiers and militiamen loyal to Captain Moussa Dadis Camara during a political rally in Conakry's stadium on September 28, 2009. That mass atrocity was more dramatic, more visible, and more urban than dozens of other collective assaults in the course of the region's wars. It certainly made bigger waves than the everyday harassment of girls and women by teachers, employers, and aspiring sugar daddies. Maybe because of it, this singular case of a Peuhl woman standing up to such a powerful man, accusing him of rape and bringing him down makes her a hero to some in West Africa. She refused silence, while so many other victims of sexual abuse by more powerful men go unheard. Even in Guinea, where Camara is long gone from power, the new president doesn't want to pursue justice against the Captain and his henchmen. Alpha Condé doesn't even want reconciliation. He wants resignation. No wonder then, that for a certain number of people posting to West African chat rooms from Guinea, Mali, and Cote d'Ivoire, this hard-working Peuhl woman is a hero. She won't be a victim, even faced with one of the most powerful men in the world—and even if she needs her job, just like Jolie and Amie need theirs, and just like the Post says she told Strauss-Kahn. She remembered the lesson of Samori Touré, the nineteenth-century Guinean anti-colonialist: Quand on refuse, on dit 'Non!'.