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
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.
A pan African vision of remembering your origins and imagining a future that honors those but moves forward.
Tricia Rose on the definition of Afrofuturism.
Tricia Rose is a professor of Africana (???) Studies at Brown University. In the audio clip above from the NPR show “Studio 360” she weaves a thread of futurism through black american music linking Sun Ra’s space jazz (“Space is the Place”) with Parliament/Funkadelic’s ghetto sci-fi funk of “Mothership Connection” and Afrika Bambaata’s epic electrofunk in “Planet Rock“. In the present, Lupe Fiasco becomes a robot in “Daydreamin’”. The impetus behind futuristic music in black American pop culture comes from a desire to escape the f**keupness of the current situation (slavery, inner city violence/poverty) and to imagine a better self using the vehicle of science fiction.
See also:
MUSIC: “I’m Not a Robot” by Newcleus. Although immortalized for the frivolity that is “Jam On It”, Brooklynites Newcleus explored sci-fi and spirituality in most of their work.
FILM:Brother from Another Planet. Black space alien crash lands in New York City and ends up in Harlem where the residents, sympathetic to his alien status, accept him and protect him from galactic bounty hunters seeking to return him to the slavery of his home planet.
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.
Kenyatta, Mboya and Kibaki are overwhelmed with joy on hearing that K.A.N.U. had won the election. From the book “Kenyatta: A Photographic Biography” by Anthony Howarth.
This is the image that has been floating around in my head since Obama’s election victory and the resulting celebrations. It is one of those iconic images I remember from my childhood that condenses the import of a certain moment in history. Something in the image speaks to the start of a new era, to overwhelming joy that what seemed impossible to visualize at some point has come to pass.
If I was more eloquent, I would be able to describe why a historic image from independence-era Kenya can stand in for a just completed election in the United States. I would be able to discuss the complex relationship between Kenya and the United States, about how Kenya saw fit to declare a national holiday to celebrate the results of an American election. But, for now, I will just let that picture stand in for all those words and for how I feel.
Quality surfing for afro-media goodness has suffered a precipitously decline lately here at casa forota, captivated as we are with the US elections. Against our better judgement, we have been spending all our alloted Internet time (and more) scouring the political blogs to make sure there isn’t an event that will disrupt what is looking increasingly like the election of the first 21st century global citizen as the leader of the free world.
This feels like one of those moments in time when history bounces off current events and moves in a whole new direction. In addition to a historic election, the global 21st century finally arrived recently with a noisy, gigantic financial thud and a big cloud of evaporated market wealth. There is now no question just how interconnected this world is thanks to money, the Internet, human networks and global popular culture. I have an academic background in International Business, so the global economy is a personal, if not academic, interest for me. So far it looks like most leaders and public institutions are not even in the same ballpark in terms of understanding or even addressing the complexity that surrounds the social, economic and political implications of the recent crisis and the process of globalization that underlies it.
So … what happens now? The US President, as the ultimate symbol of that global leadership, will need to signal the right kind of behavior to attract the concentration of minds and money in the US and elsewhere to continue to take globalization in a positive direction. This is as opposed to what we have seen in the last 8 years where America, in response to an admittedly traumatic event, created a fortress around itself and viewed almost everyone they saw through its turrets as hostile. As the recent financial events are showing, we are all in this together; we may not be crazy about each other but no one person, group, country has the right answer about which way to go now.
Street art poster, Lower East Side
It has been a little baffling to see, on one hand the large crowds that Barack Obama draws, but on the other the closeness of this race given how unpopular the Republican party is and how overmatched McCain is in terms of campaign resources. There are those who love Obama because they can project their hope and aspirations on him. There are those who won’t vote for him because of the color of his skin. And then there are others with no reason to be racist who can’t put their finger on who he really is.
Those of us who have grown up or spent large chunks of their adult lives beyond the borders of where they were born, instinctively understand Barack’s appeal, and his challenges connecting with certain Americans. We have learned to live with multiple identities, literally, to be able to navigate all the worlds we encounter. For instance, I have one “mental” hat for when I am in Central Kenya visiting with my 80+ year old uncle and the rest of my relatives. I have another hat late at night in Brooklyn when I am with my friends. My uncle no doubt claims me as his flesh and blood, but I know he has a sneaking suspicion that he doesn’t really know me (he is so American!). Central Kenya and New York City have little in common in terms of place, but are now linked in the abstract by the global economy and in reality by my existence.
I believe that this has been the core of Barack Obama’s challenge with some of those hard working “real” Americans. This is a man who has lived in Hawaii and Indonesia, has been to Harvard and worked on the South Side of Chicago. Unable to possibly appreciate that he could a composite of those experiences, some pick parts of his life to define him (Muslim! Terrorist! Elitist!) But it is that ability to navigate different realities that is sorely needed at the commanding heights of both policy and economy at this time of exploding global interdependence. A 21st century leader will need the ability to sense that seemingly unconnected people, places, events are nonetheless related by our growing interconnectedness. More and more Americans are getting comfortable with Obama’s potential as a leader, let’s hope enough of them are convinced to make it more than just potential.
Let’s vote already! I need to get back to looking at the less weighty aspects of globalization and its effect on our media and culture.
Sign in shop window on Fredrick Douglass Avenue in Harlem
Saw the above sign in a window while out on a stroll in Harlem over the weekend and it made me think of “Hot Irons” Andrew Dosunmu’s documentary that covers some of the characters and out-of-this-world hair styles highlighted at the Hair Wars show in Detroit. Hair as art, as quoted in the movie trailer below.
Detail of the July issue of Italian Vogue
I recently picked up a copy of the July Italian (”A Black Issue”) Vogue to see what the big deal was. There are few places better than the fashion rags to see the current state of fashion/editorial art, so at the newstand I occasionally reach over the Economist or Fader to crack open a Vogue to see what photographers like Annie Lebowitz or Steven Meisel are up to.
The editorial images in Vogue.it/07 feature many African diaspora models past and present (including Somali/Canuck Yasmin Warsame and Ugandan/Angelino Kiara Kabukuru). The concepts are not self-consciously ethnic, they are of beautiful women who happen to be Black (personal fave is an homage to Grace Jones and Jean-Paul Goude). There are are features (in Italian, natch) about Black women of note (Donyale Luna the first Black cover model, Michelle Obama, Ebony editor Linda Johnson Rice, South African Afro-soul diva Simphiwe Dana, and art from Kara Walker and Wangechi Mutu). However, as has been pointed out elsewhere, it is hard not to notice that most of the ads feature non-Black models. Unsurprisingly, the August issue of Vogue Italia is bereft of Black models a reversion to form, even on a mock tribute to Yves Saint Laurent who was one of the first designers to feature Black models on the runway as well as being the first to use a black woman as a fashion muse (Martinique born, Paris resident Mounia).
Ugandan-born model Kiara Kabukuru is among the models featured in the July issue of Italian Vogue
