FASHION: Photos from 2009 Swahili Fashion Week held in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania this past November.
Screenshot from Swahili Fashion Week site FASHION: Suno New York. Clothing line designed and developed in New York City’s Garment District and sewn in Kenya. Previous collections have been inspired by khanga cloth from the Kenya coast.
Screenshot from SunoNY site
FASHION: Jamhuri Wear: Nairobi Style. Speaking of NYC and Kenya, the incomparable Nomadic Wax recently featured Jamhuri Wear’s Jeffrey Kimathi whose street wear designs are inspired by both both places.
FILM: Yinka Shonibare: Threads of Art. Speaking of khangas, I was recently in Washington DC and saw the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African Art HUGE installation of Yinka Shonibare’s sculptures, photographs and video. If you are in the DC area, go see, it is well worth the visit. Narration is a little grad-school dissertation-y but does a good job of putting Shonibare’s work in cultural and political context for me after experiencing the art.
“Yinka Shonibare: Threads of Art”, Short Film by Ali Standish
Image of Peter Beard on the shores of Lake Turkana, 1965. From Guardian web site.
Controversial diarist, artist, photographer, writer, conservation activitist Peter Beard links my two worlds in New York City and Kenya. I always thought he was a Kenyan, a Kenya Cowboy to be sure but Kenyan none the less. Growing up, I remember his photography and the publicity it generated around wildlife conservation. The picture of him on the shores of Lake Rudolph (Lake Turkana to the kids) with half of his body in the mouth of a crocodile has always been part of my visual landscape.
In truth Peter Beard was born in these United States. He first developed an interest in Africa through visits to the Museum of Natural History in NYC. After graduating from Yale, he moved to Kenya working on game conservation, as documented in his book “The End of the Game“. The book featured the carcasses of mostly elephants that were dying in Tsavo from a combination of drought and overpopulation brought on by population pressures. Here in the US, Beard hung out with the art/social elite of NYC. Beard’s US base in Montauk (far east Long Island) was the place folks like Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, Richard Avedon, and Jackie Kennedy spent time. He also counted luminaries like Mick and Bianca Jagger, as well as Francis Bacon among his circle of friends.
Excerpts from “Peter Beard: Scrapbooks from Africa and Beyond”
Beard’s mixed media diaries and installations make use of a lot of the ephemera of Kenya’s past and present. From coins, to images of Presidents Kenyatta and Moi, from old photos of colonial Kenya to current images of the land, people and animals of Kenya, there is so much that that is part of my visual and cultural landscape. That his work was inspired by artists like Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon, and his fashion images were featured in Vogue and Vanity Fair, places him squarely in the art scene in the New York of the 60s and 70s.
What one cannot deny about the work of Beard is that he appreciates the raw beauty of Kenya and incorporates it in his art. He can see the beauty of a Turkana woman untouched by modernity and say that it is the same beauty as that of a Vogue model. That bold viewpoint, informed by his life-long love of nature and natural history, challenges the connotation of Africa as that “dark” and primitive place and links the notion of beauty in Westernized, modernized, removed-from-nature New York with that of Africa (and all nature in general).
Beard, after all, is the man who introduced the world to one Iman Abdulmajid, claiming he had discovered her while she was herding camels in the Northern Frontier District (North Eastern Province to the kids). Iman’s arrival on the beauty scene of the early 1970’s completely and irrevocably upended the notion of African beauty in the world of fashion, which is pretty revolutionary come to think of it.
Paradoxically, apart from the Maasai and Turkana who live in the wild (in nature), the rest of us modern Africans are “doomed” for our wanton reproduction and desire for progress. In the debate over the battle of man vs nature in the competition for resources, Beard falls firmly on the side of nature. This quote from the film “Peter Beard: Scrapbooks from Africa and Beyond” in the mid-90s seems to imply that diseases like AIDS are nature’s retribution for our profligacy:
“Coming to Kenya is coming to unspoiled, and unscrewed up by human beings (at least in the 50’s), … a frontier that extends right back in time to the Stone Age. Human beings are not going to stop, they don’t know when to stop. The only thing that can stop them are these diseases that everyone is spending all their money to fight. We are sucking the juices out of the earth to fight the diseases that nature wants us to have because we are too greedy and we have taken over too much.”
This is a position that is hard to abide considering that as post-colonial Africans we are free to screw up our environment (or not), without the moralizing of people whose ancestors destroyed their environment and big chunks of other peoples’ to boot. It is the romantic, outmoded “Out of Africa”-era fetishistic attraction to Africa the primordial and the repulsion at Africa the modern with its complex, intractable problems that makes it hard to have unalloyed admiration for Peter Beard’s art, as much as he has contributed ecologically, culturally and visually. However, I suspect that is the essence of the man, who while decrying the superficial nature of modernity, has no problem doing fashion shoots for magazines that embrace that same superficiality. The world is full of contradictions.
Trailer for the Waris Dirie biographical film “Desert Flower”
FILM: Desert Flower. Waris Dirie’s book of her escape from Somalia, rise to supermodel superstar-dom and later fight against female genital mutilation gets the Hollywood treatment. Ethiopian Liya Kebede stars.
Screenshot from Suresh Natarjan’s portfolio site on the Behance Network
Politics: “Democracy in Dakar” The intersection of hip hop, activism and politics.
African Underground: Democracy in Dakar is a groundbreaking documentary film about hip-hop youth and politics in Dakar Senegal. The film follows rappers, DJs, journalists, professors and people on the street at the time before during and after the controversial 2007 presidential election in Senegal and examines hip-hop’s role on the political process. Originally shot as a seven part documentary mini-series released via the internet – the documentary bridges the gap between hip-hop activism, video journalism and documentary film and explores the role of youth and musical activism on the political process
Human Rights: “Nosotros los de la Saya” (“We of the Saya”) Afro-Bolivians struggle for official recognition.
WE OF THE SAYA (pronounced “sigh-yah”) is a feature-length cultural and social documentary about the marginalized Afro-Bolivian community, and their struggle to achieve recognition as a legitimate ethnic group in the new Bolivian constitution. In addition to enriching culture and music, this film will present the rise of an Afro-Bolivian civil rights movement. “We of the Saya” is an inspirational story about the Afro-Bolivian movement (and all Afro-Descendant movements in a broader sense), and their resistance to suffer more years of continuous marginalization.This is an inspirational story about self-determination and seizing the moment in order to improve a community’s way of life.
(In Spanish with subtitles)
Trailer for the film “Thomas Sankara, Upright Man”, now publicly available at California Newsreel
California Newsreel is making this collection of feature films available directly to consumers — for the first time in its history, the Library of African cinema will be widely available on DVD for $24.95 each.
The collection includes widely celebrated feature films such as Ousmane Sembene’s “Faat Kine” (2001), Djibril Diop Mambety’s “La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil”, also known as “the Little Girl Who Sold the Sun” (1999), Zézé Gamboa’s “The Hero” (2004), Newton Aduaka’s “Ezra” (2007), Moussa Sene Absa’s “Ça Twiste à Poponguine” (1993), Joseph Gai Ramaka’s “Karmen Gei” (2001) and Mohamed Camara’s “Dakan” (1997).
In the summer of 1969, there were two landmark music festivals in the great state of New York*. One of them was the Harlem Cultural Festival, 6 weeks of free concerts featuring the likes of B.B. King, Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach, the Fifth Dimension, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, the Staples Singers, Hugh Masekhela, Cal Tjader, Mongo Santamaria and others. The concert was held at Mt. Morris Park (now called Marcus Garvey Park) in Harlem and was attended by over 300,000 concertgoers over the course of the series. NYPD refused to provide security so the event organizers engaged the Black Panthers.
A producer Hal Tulchin took over 50 hours of footage of the festival, but was unable to get it aired on the American TV networks of the day. Currently that footage lies languishing in vaults; apart from Nina Simone’s performance that is making the rounds of YouTube (see below), most of that footage has not seen the light of day. 1969 was a pivotal time in black culture, it was a tense period post-MLK’s assassination and the race riots of 1968, but before the more celebratory 70’s that were captured by Wattstax and by Soul Power.
Nina Simone: “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” performed at the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969
I lived many years in southern California, spiritual home of skateboarding and thus am quite familiar with its roots in that state and its culture. So that is why I am so intrigued that skateboarding is what is the new new thing for kids in the black diaspora. New expressions of youth culture have typically flowed the other way; from the city to the suburbs from black kids to white kids, from black America to Africa. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes me wonder if hip hop (which has so dominated pop culture in the last 2 decades) is so played out that young black kids are now looking outside/beyond it for something new to identify with.
See also: Trailer for the Stacy Peralta-directed documentary “Dogtown And The Z-Boys” chronicling skateboarding roots in southern California where it drew inspiration from surfing, the tough latino cholo sub-culture of LA and the empty backyard pools in the ‘burbs that skateboarders first used to start figuring out how to do the high-flying-death-defying moves that are staples of the scene today.
Screen shot of trailer for the documentary “Good Fortune at the Transient Pictures website.
Good Fortune is a feature length documentary that explores how massive, international efforts to alleviate poverty in Africa may be undermining the very communities they aim to benefit. Through intimate portraits of two Kenyans battling to save their homes from large-scale development organizations, the film presents a unique perspective on the struggle to overcome world poverty.
There is a screening of Good Fortune on June 24th at Walter Reade Theater at The Film Society of Lincoln Center here in New York City as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival. Screening details here.
The “Importance of Being Elegant” is a film by directors George Amponsah & Cosima Spender. It sheds a light (too little I think) on the Congolese SAPE (Société Ambianceurs et Persons Élégants) scene in Paris and Brussels. The narrative centers around Papa Wemba, widely considered Sapeur #1. He has just been released from prison on human trafficking charges. Among other things in this cinema verite style documentary, Papa Wemba is rehearsing for an upcoming show and laying tracks for a new CD. It also turns out that he has found religion while in prison, so this is a transitional time for Papa Wemba, who wrestles with how to marry his new spiritual side with the worship of “the cloth” that is the hallmark of La Sape. He struggles with how to keep his central position of power in the expat Congolese community, but also take them in a new direction. This leads to some pretty hilarious situations. In one he is laughably decrying materialism; in another he is in a high end (Cavalli?) boutique justifying to another Sapeur the wisdom of spending 15,000 euros on one article of clothing.
The film has some brilliant footage of Papa Wemba in rehearsal (that voice!). Those of a certain age will remember vinyl 45s of Congolese rumba available in Nairobi that contained one song pressed on two sides. The first side (Part 1) had the emotive, mellow side, and while I know zero Lingala the emotion conveyed by the singing was of sadness, longing, loss. Part 2 was the upbeat guitar-driven side; basically ”life sucks, whatever. Let’s dance!”. This contradiction, a willingness to live with the fact that this moment contains both sad and happy together forms the genius of rumba and informs the world view of Sapeurs, it seems to me. If you are from a place like Congo, where there is little hope for the future, why not live like all your dreams have come true, like there is no tomorrow?
La Sape has always been about escape even for the now old gentlemen in Congo Brazzaville where this all started in the 1940s. The young men in the film have bought into that escape fantasy to propel themselves from the poverty and war of Kinshasa to a life of luxury and elegance in Paris. In the final scenes when the filmmakers follow a sapeur nicknamed “the Archbishop” as he attempts to establish himself in Paris and in the SAPE scene there, we get a peek into the harsh realities awaiting these young men when they arrive, including a realization that it is all just a mirage.
One can tie a thread through two other NYAFF films I saw: “Killer Necklace” and “Area Boys”; through “Tsotsi” and “City of God” earlier. All these stories dramatize the effects of the developing world’s near complete failure to provide for its youth who can’t make a living, a life in the cities they grow up in. These young men become “area boys”, “tsotsis”, “sapeurs”, “pantsulas”, and other urban fringe subcultures created in the search to find meaning in life. Those who are lucky and can leave wind up living on the fringe of cities like Brussels, Paris, London, New York City, hawking knock-off merchandise, driving cabs and cleaning toilets, while avoiding deportation. Those who are left behind and who lose hope fuel the crime in Nairobi, Lagos, Johannesburg, and war in Congo, Sierra Leone, Somalia.
In the end, TIOBE is a lost opportunity. It is really an immigration story masquerading as a fashion story, a superficially narrated fashion story at that. In Q&A after the NY African Film Festival showing recently, director George Amponsah mentioned that they didn’t visit Kinshasa while filming and noted that Papa Wemba thought he was depicted as a gangster after seeing edited footage. It seems to me the director chose to caricature the Sapeur scene as a way of finding a strong narrative arc and to make the film accessible to non-African audiences. That way it was not necessary to explore any of the contradictions thrown up by Papa Wemba and the Sapeur culture. I was a little miffed that some people, unaware of the history of Congo in general and of La Sape in particular, probably walked out of that showing thinking “What losers! Spending 15,000 euros on a jacket while living in a hostel and running from la migra, wtf?!!”. To someone like me who grew up in Africa where music and pop culture was so driven by men like Papa Wemba, Franco and Tabu Ley, it is an injustice to reduce all that to just a buffoonish worship of clothes.
Why do I blog about Africa? Two words. Chinese film. Wait, let me explain. I grew up a very westernized kid in Kenya. I am in the second generation of people that grew up with the world view that was distilled as follows: “Modernity (Europe + Christianity) = good. Backwardness (Africa + tradition) = bad”. I believe Fela Kuti called it “Colomentality”. Don’t get me wrong, I am intensely proud to be Kenyan; I just felt no real compulsion to learn more about my culture beyond a reasonable competence in my mother tongue.
The Chinese art film I discovered in the 90’s (I’m a huge fan of Zhang Yimou and Wong Kar Wai) was a window into Chinese culture and through that to one central insight. Modernization is not Westernization. For all of us non-Westerners, our challenge is to balance African-ness/Asian-ness/Eskimo-ness/whatever-ness with the best of what the modern world has to offer in science, technology, philosophy, art, culture. That is the promise of globalization.
I blog mostly for myself, filling in the blanks in my own knowledge of the culture of the African diaspora, a lot of which already navigates that space between old and new, tradition and modernity, Africa and Europe. Film, photography, and other visual arts are critical tools to communicate the stories people tell themselves about their place in the world. Like Zhang Yimou’s films which were (are) motivated in part to portray China differently after the shame and chaos of the Cultural Revolution, I hope this obscure little part of the blogosphere and the visual media it highlights becomes part of the the new story we Africans tell about us and our place in this globalizing community.
FILM: “Pray the Devil Back to Hell”. Documentary about peace efforts of Liberian women led by Leymah Gbowee to end their country’s war. What started out as sit-ins at fish markets developed into meetings with the warring factions and even pressure during peace talks to ensure that negotiations went all the way to fruition. There is a quote over at The Daily Beast from film producer Abbey Disney (yes that Disney) on how easy it was to find Liberian war porn but (little) no footage of Gbowee and other women trying to end the fighting (they got some footage from a former presidential videographer):
One of the interesting things was how easy the combat footage was to come by—you do a search for it, and the next thing you know is you are swimming in the most disturbing images of blood and gore. What was hard to find were the women working for peace, because no one knew they were there—we had reporters say to us, “We knew they were there, but why shoot them?” They were so pathetic.
Trailer for This is Nollywood
FILM: “This is Nollywood”. Director Franco Sacchi spotlights the third largest movie industry in the world, by following Nollywood director Bond Emeruwa in his quest to make a feature length film with $20,000, a digital camera, 9 days and a whole lot of Lagos-style chutzpah.
“We are telling our own stories in our own way, our Nigerian way, African way,” Bond says. “I cannot tell the white man’s story. I don’t know what his story is all about. He tells me his story in his movies. I want him to see my stories too.”
Bond Emeruwa, Nollywood director
TEDTalks: Welcome To Nollywood. Franco Sacchi discusses the making of his documentary “This is Nollywood” and the significance of film and a vibrant storrytelling culture to Nigerian society. Includes excerpts from the documentary.
Kofia Tip for Nollywood linkage: Africa is a Country
