Bajah + The Dry Eye Crew are superstars in their native Sierra Leone. Although their sound traverses hip hop, reggae and dancehall and their shows are seriously festive; the former Sierra Leone war is not far away, tinging some of their music with a heightened sense of social awareness that comes from living with the effects that harrowing conflict.
Bajah + The Dry Eye Crew (in collaboration with DJ Gray) have released a FREE mixtape titled the “Kings of Salone,” ahead of their debut full length album slated for later this year/early next. Link to downloadable mixtape available from their site.
Posted: September 4th, 2009 | Author:kamau | Filed under:music, politics | Comments Off
3 Years in Kingston by Peter Dean Rickards (PDF available here) WARNING: NSFW. Some pretty arresting imagery taken in Jamaica taken from 2002 to 2006 (fashion, editorial, reportage, landscape) taken by Kingston-based Rickards (founder and Editor of First Magazine and creator of The Afflicted Yard). There are portraits of Jamaican musicians from Sean Paul to Lee Scratch Perry, coverage of Kingston’s gun violence (”gun like dirt”) and pretty, skimpily clad young women.
The recent* arrival of “fat pipes” in Kenya courtesy of the new SEACOM sub-marine fiber optic cables has me flashing back to an article from 1998 that fundamentally altered my world view. It was titled “Africa Rising” written by John Perry Barlow. The subtitle of the article was “Everything you know about Africa is Wrong”. The article appeared in Wired 6.01 during the pre-Conde Nast, Lou Rosetto, super-optimistic, neon-hurt-you-eyes-design era of the magazine. During that time the magazine prided itself on presenting “idees fortes” (powerful ideas) to challenge conventional thinking on an issue. This was Barlow’s idee forte:
Most Africans stayed out of the loop of the 20th century and were not homogenized into the generica that is now much of the Northern Hemisphere, or what they call the North. And thus their continent – so intensely different from the rest of the world, so vastly different within itself – represents a huge and still unconnected battery of stored potential. All it would take for Africa to leapfrog into the wonderland of an information economy would be to attach the electrodes – get it wired, in other words – and then watch its huge voltage zap the gap. Or so went my theory.
The idee forte created a “eureka” moment in me when a whole new set of possibilities opened up in thinking about how Africa can develop itself. The internet, techno-libertarian frontier that it was in those days, could help individuals route around the sclerosis, incompetence and plain lack of resources of African instituitions and find ways to better themselves. Harness the power of the individual, and step out of the way.
It sounds like pan-glossian optimism to think that a continent that has so little (unreliable) electricity, a place so full of people who are hungry, sick and/or fleeing conflict should divert resources away from alleviating such chronic needs to build something for people to “surf” on. What attracted me so powerfully to his idea was that John Perry Barlow saw the enormous untapped potential in Africans themselves, while most (including Africans themselves) just see a continent full of basket cases in need of charity. I don’t think anyone would have predicted the explosive growth of mobile phone technology around Africa when it was first introduced. The launch of the Seacom fiber optic cables is a next phase in Barlow’s wiring of Africa; who knows yet what the impact of that will be?
The problems on the continent are so complex and intractible that institutions, government or otherwise, can’t possibly even conceive of solutions to them all. Development will best come from the bottom up. From individuals, families and communities thinking through how to solve their own problems, how to grow themselves, how to connect themselves to the world at large without physically leaving their communities. Connectivity harnessed to the wild innovation and creativity that one sees in the informal (jua kali) sector in particular and in African culture in general is one way Africa is going to lift herself up.
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
Screen shot from BBC News photo essay on Congolese migrants in South Africa
PHOTO ESSAY: Congolese migrants in South Africa staged a La Sape fashion show as a way to increase understanding between their community and their Johannesburg hosts in the wake of the deadly violence against immigrants there in 2008.
… there’s something about the urgency of French photographer Nicolas Premier and his Africa is the Future project that’s just too deafening to tune out. Premier visited Africa for the first time back in 2001. Having been raised by a French mother and a Congolese father, the Parisian artist was shocked to find the captial of his father’s homeland, Brazzaville, in a crumpled post-civil war heap. The bullet-ridden walls, he explains, were even more difficult to look at given the fact that France had played a role in the conflict.
On his return to Paris Premier took part in a group art exhibit and made up a one-off shirt inspired by his trip for the show—what he calls his cri du coeur. It wasn’t long before his friends were asking for their own shirts, and he was forced to pull in a business partner to help keep up with the demand. Premier has documented the progress of AITF in images on the website for the past year and a half, but there are also some thought-provoking photo essays like Mathilde Chapuis’ “Nevada Paradox” up there too. For Premier, the T-shirts are about sparking healthy debate around the continent
Chioma Nnadi of THE FADER on photographer Nicholas Premier’s t-shirt and related ongoing image project.
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.
Since January 2006, about 50 young Senegalese from Thiaroye’s neighbourhood have been lost at sea trying to get to the Canary Islands in dugout.
Getting together mothers who lost their son at sea, the Group of Thiaroye’s Women tries to dissuade the young people to leave and risk their life.
“The concerned photographer finds much in the present unacceptable which he tries to alter. Our goal is simply to let the world also know why it is unacceptable.”
–Cornell Capa (b. 1918), photographer
While America is preoccupied with the war in Iraq (cost: half a trillion dollars and counting), and while think-tank economists continue to spit out papers debating whether vital resources are running out at all, China’s leadership isn’t taking any chances. In just a few years, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has become the most aggressive investor-nation in Africa. This commercial invasion is without question the most important development in the sub-Sahara since the end of the Cold War — an epic, almost primal propulsion that is redrawing the global economic map. One former U.S. assistant secretary of state has called it a “tsunami.” Some are even calling the region “ChinAfrica.”
There are already more Chinese living in Nigeria than there were Britons during the height of the empire. From state-owned and state-linked corporations to small entrepreneurs, the Chinese are cutting a swath across the continent. As many as 1 million Chinese citizens are circulating here. Each megaproject announced by China’s government creates collateral economies and population monuments, like the ripples of a stone skimmed across a lake.
Beijing declared 2006 the “Year of Africa,” and China’s leaders have made one Bono-like tour after another. No other major power has shown the same interest or muscle, or the sheer ability to cozy up to African leaders. And unlike America’s faltering effort in Iraq, the Chinese ain’t spreading democracy, folks. They’re there to get what they need to feed the machine. The phenomenon even has a name on the ground in the sub-Sahara: the Great Chinese Takeout.
Screen shot of Earth Wind and Fire performance from WNET site
First half of a January 1973 show from the SOUL! series entitled “Elements” features a performance by soul/jazz/funk-playing Earth Wind And Fire. Cool: the song “Mom” from the album “Last Days and Time”. Also cool: Verdine White’s Hendrix-esque bass solo (talk about slapping the bass!) Check out Philip Bailey’s pan-African red, green black outfit (yikes!) and all the fly outfits in the audience. In secondary school you could tell my exercise books and geometry kits; they were the ones with the Egyptian symbols on them (the ankh featured prominently) copied from EWF album artwork.
The second half of the show features Broadway star Linda Hopkins and the Soul Quintet (featuring a young Mtume). This is absolute soul gold.
Description of SOUL! from the WNET web site the New York City PBS station which aired the series from 1968 to 1973:
This entertainment-variety-talk show was not only a vehicle to promote African-American artistry, community and culture, but also a platform for political expression and the fight for social justice. It showcased classic live musical performances from funk, soul, jazz, and world musicians, and had in-depth, extraordinary interviews with political, sports, literary figures and more. It was the first program on WNET to be recorded with the then-new technology of videotape, and most of the shows were recorded in real-time—not live, but unedited.
