COLOPHON: Do not attempt to adjust your monitor you have come to the right place. I am just continuing my search for a suitable theme for this site. Not overly thrilled with this one either, so I will be dusting off my rusty config skills to tweak it to suit.

Screenshot of Carol Pineau’s film “Kenyan Stories”

FILM: Kenya National Business Plan Competition. Carol Pineau’s work in progress film about 100 aspiring Kenyan entrepreneurs who get to pitch their business concept to a panel of sponsors before the 2007 elections and the fracas that followed. I am no fan of reality shows like “The Apprentice” which is how the story was shot/edited, but I suspect that presenting this story as an earnest documentary style wouldn’t generate much notice for the film either. [via Kenyan Pundit]

PHOTOGRAPHY: JR: Women are Heroes. Guerilla photographer has taken photographs of women in Kenya, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Brazil. He usually asks his subjects to make exaggerated/humorous facial expressions and shoots them up close with a wide angle lens. Hen then posts the images he has taken (often illegally) in the environments where his subjects can see them (as opposed to a gallery/museum). Most recently he has posted his images on the sides of homes in the Providencia favela of Rio de Janeiro. [via rion.nu]
Previously: Portrait of a Generation previously featured here.

Obama - Extra Golden feat. Opiyo Bilongo

MUSIC: Extra Golden: “Obama”. Kenyan-American Benga/Rock group pays tribute to a prominent American of Kenyan ancestry.

Stephanie McKay performs “Tell It Like It Is” live for the Darfur Olympics at BB King NYC

MUSIC: Stephanie McKay: Tell It Like It Is. Bronx native McKay’s new album has me digging back in the crates for that old soulful funk from the early to mid 70’s. Prediction: this will be one of the standout releases of 2008.

Excerpt from “Secondhand (Pepe)” a documentary by Hanna Rose Shell & Vanessa Bertozzi which explores the meaning of the word “pepe” that is given to secondhand clothing worn by working class/poor Haitians. [insert similarities to Kenyan mitumba here].

recently got back from a 3.5 week trip home to kenya. all plans to blog from home came to naught as i got caught up in the planning whirlwind that preceded my brother’s wedding. i also have new respect for anyone who blogs from kenya. here i have plenty of unstructured time to plan, think about and post blog entries. over there i had very little time alone what with social commitments practically 24/7. priorities are quite different at home.

the post-election violence, the political impasse and the talks to end it were pretty much the only stories in kenya. all conversations i had when i initially landed eventually came around to the current situation. some other impressions:
– i was impressed by how much media there is. there are multiple newspapers, the FM dial is chock full of stations. but i seriously missed an NPR-like big picture view on what was happening in the country. the only attempt at serious analysis came from a series in the nation newspaper called “the state of the nation” that related current events to others in kenya’s history as well as across africa. public discourse in kenya sorely needs a strong, objective, intelligent “above it all” voice to puncture some of the emotional tribal-based partisanship that brought the country to the brink of chaos. the press is best suited for that, but as vibrant as it is, it hasn’t yet developed much past spot reporting.
– relatedly, there also needs to be a new political vocabulary so that “kikuyu” is not proxy for “conservative”, “luo” code word for “progressive”. so that a progressive or conservative kenyan doesn’t feel like she is betraying her tribe by espousing a particular political viewpoint out of step with the dominant party affiliation of her ethnic group. i am not holding my breath that a post-tribal national leader will appear anytime soon, but i believe that this is what an intelligent media can start to inject into the political conversation in the country.
– nairobi now has epic traffic jams, all over town, all the time. with thousands of “new” cars coming into the country (sign of growing middle class), there has been no significant new road construction in the city since forever. amazing.
– westlands has changed beyond recognition. as a kid, we shopped in westlands all the time as it was between school in Parklands and home in Kile. there was oven door bakery for fresh, hot bread, dairy den (???) for ice cream, an uchumi, not much else. no nakumatt westgate next to sarit center, no tall buildings, no music/club district. wow.
– kenya must lead the world in one statistic: number of prayers offered per capita. maybe it’s because i attended many family gatherings, and i live in america (that sick society, as one of the preachers at a family gathering called it), but that really stood out to me.

it was quite a whirlwind trip, so i am still processing what i experienced. will post more impressions anon.

the changing (i.e. more ethnic) face of corporate stock photography. “the visual monoculture of the 20th century is in the dustbin of history”. so posits getty images.

the last time i was in kenya in 2003, i spent an afternoon with some friends listening in horror at their recollections of the bomb blast in nairobi on 8/7/98. shattered windows a mile away from ground zero, with dust, smoke and paper flying everywhere. the panic and anguish when friends and loved ones couldn’t be reached by phone. people ferrying blood soaked strangers in their cars to local hospitals.

judging from those stories, what happened in nairobi that morning is no different to what happened in london on 7/7, in madrid on 3/11, and in new york on 9/11 in terms of the impact to the cities and their citizens’ sense of security. even though the nairobi bombing hit closer to home metaphorically speaking, i am so much more intimately familiar with the details of the pain surrounding 9/11.

why is that? it could be that new york, london, madrid are media-saturated cities. journalists, photographers (professional and otherwise), digital cameras, cell phone cameras, security cameras, blogs, vlogs, e-mail all helped diseminate the stories surrounding those events in the most intimate detail throughout the world over and over again for days on end.

8/7 is a huge story in nairobi but nowhere else. not because the world doesn’t care what happened there, but because so few stories traveled beyond east africa to capture the world’s attention/sympathy/empathy and elevate the event into the global consciousness. that is the reality of these times. people in london or new york did not suffer more or less than those in nairobi, kikambala, dar-es-salaam, they were just better able to get attention.

i started this post with some research (aka googling) to link to some images in remembrance. the paltry results saddened me and prompted me to blog pensive about it. so, anyway, the images:
pulitzer site: AP staff images
washington post photo gallery: searching for victims and clues
nytimes coverage: embassy bombings in east africa

finally got a chance to see the film “hotel rwanda” this past weekend. i am sure that not even the filmmakers hoped to capture the scale of what happened that april in 1994, but hopefully depct scenes that, point to the real life turn of events.

for instance, the scene where all the westerners are evacuated from the hotel pointed out to me how the west wanted nothing to do with the rwandese situation beyond getting any of their people out of there. while they had the pain of somalia failure fresh in their minds, the message is that africa is such a remote, unknowable place for the west that even with such horror unfolding, african suffering does not register on a human scale.

another part of the movie that hits home is the scene when joaquin phoenix’s character dramatizes the reaction that the world would have to his images of the massacre. he correctly says that average news viewers will watch the footage, shrug their shoulders and continue eating their dinner.

this sentiment is borne out by the coverage of the time. i remember listening to radio reports of the aftermath of the massacres when refugees had poured into congo, specifically goma. i remember one npr correspondent trying to convey the scale of suffering and squalor in the refugee camps. for a number of weeks he filed reports where he roved around amid the refugees with his mike attempting to describe what he was seeing. i would hear what sounded like despair in his voice in seeing the suffering and his powerlessness to accurately convey its scale.

i remember listening to those reports in my car on the way home from work in suburban LA and while the f**ked up nature of the situation would make sad or angry, i would get home, make dinner, watch tv and go to bed, those emotions fogotten. that was my reaction and i am an east african; i had some rwandese acquantances. the killing seemed so far away that the human dimension of it all didn’t register with me. it was just another in the line of disasters that were afflicting the world that decade (in srebrenica, in grosny, in baidoa). but as in-depth reports started to get out and i got better informed on what really happened, i have grown to feel ashamed that one of the greatest atrocities of humans against others happened during my time and i did nothing; didn’t even feel something beyond temporary sadness. close to 1 million africans dead. in 90 days. a lot of them dispatched with pangas (machetes) which has to be a most painful way of dying.

i suspect that in the rush of images, and sounds we are exposed to daily, even news of the killing on the scale of that in rwanda get compressed into a visual montage of faceless seas of dark-skinned people, bundles of useless posssesions, undistinguished corpses, endless rows of temporary shelters and bloodthirsty youth. such images blend harmlessly into the media landscape of car ads, health reports, sitcoms, etc., etc., without conveying their impact on the devastation of human life.

the south african film “drum” wins the top award at this year’s confab of all things african film, fespaco. in praising the accomplishment by the film’s crew that covers the victorious struggle against the injustices of apartheid in sa, thabo mbeki said “”This gives momentum to the revival of thought, innovation, art and music that lies at the heart of the African century that is unfolding.” [via allafrica].

separately, the angolan movie, “the hero” won the best picture prize for this year. the film directed by zeze gamboa was also awarded the best foreign dramatic movie earlier this year at the sundance film festival. [via allafrica]

director gaston kabore has decided to open a film school in burkina faso’s capital, ougadougou. kabore insists he is grappling with one of African film’s most pressing problems - the lack of training schools in Africa, which means many of the continent’s filmmakers train abroad. “it is not just to make films” says kabore who won the top award at the 1997 fespaco film festival for the film “buud yam”.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4305449.stm

nyt interview with sophie okonedo, british theater actress who is up for a supporting actress oscar tonight.

“embraced here as the new face of multicultural modern Britain: her mother is white and Jewish, and her estranged father, who left the family when she was 5, is Nigerian. She grew up in the projects, inside a notoriously rowdy and dangerous council estate (as the projects here are called).

GROWING up with a foot in two cultures - black and Jewish - was something she never overanalyzed. It was life, and she adapted when she needed to adapt. “It has certainly opened doors to the many colors of what it is to be human for me, what you need to get through life,” she said. “But all of us have different worlds we juggle - work world, family world.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/26/international/europe/26fprofile.html

africa finally gets its mtv when MTV base started broadcasting to the 48 countries of sub-sahara. with MTV base joining the palette of other mtv outlets globally, african contemporary artists have a growth path out of the continent that they previously didn’t have, with restricted exposure and frankly a perception that nothing good comes out of africa pop music-wise. the channel will reach 1.3 million subscribers 2/3 of them in south africa

http://nytimes.com/2005/02/24/arts/television/24MTVA.html