Listen to Vampire Weekend’s “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” and you’ll immediately identify the Congolese and South African borrowings in the song’s rhythm, right? Ghostface Killah likes the song and he likes Vampire Weekend. He was recently interviewed about this and said he got off his son’s iPod. “You know how kids be, they on [stuff] before you be on [stuff]. But he knew what he was talking about. The beat was like something I never heard before. It was interesting. It sounded like they could’ve had have some Jamaican in it.”  As my wife said when I told her. South Africa is very far from Jamaica. Wu Tang is for the children.

Researcher Kelly Rosenthal writing in the Mail & Guardian about witnessing the beat-down of a poor black homeless man by black security guards in a shopping mall in Cape Town while shoppers (both black and white) look on approvingly: “This is the true toxic inheritance of apartheid, the final trick played on us. Yes, we dismantled an elaborate legal apparatus of segregation and repression. Yes, we made the transition from repressive police state to democracy without civil war. Yes, we conducted a mass ritual to deal with decades of state-sponsored violence. Yes. We did all that. But we did not expunge from ourselves the terrible talent of seeing members of our own community as radically other, signified by some arbitrary feature. It used to be race. Now black people, too, can stand by and laugh when someone is beaten. That’s democracy. These days the more dangerous signifier is class. To be poor is to be inhuman. To be poor is to be a different kind of citizen. And, of course, race is never far from class in this country.”

On matters relating to South Africa: Instead of another story on the white refugee crisis, “The New York Times” recently did some real reporting on the state of education for the majority of the country’s black schoolchildren. And they did not just blame the ANC government. Two stories. I am shocked. Here and here. The first focuses on a school in Khayelitsha outside Cape Town and the second on a social movement that has grown out of the struggle for equal education. I was struck how similar these conditions seemed to when I was a high school student 20 years ago in Cape Town.

Last week three people were killed and scores of others injured or left homeless in attacks on members of a poor squatters movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, outside the country’s third-largest city, Durban. The attackers shouted: “‘The AmaMpondo are taking over Kennedy! Kennedy is for the AmaZulu!” AmaMpondo is a veiled reference to identify the squatter movement as Xhosas. Not as Zulus. Abahlali, however, has both Xhosa and Zulu members and supporters. But as more information emerge this “ethnic” violence has less to do with ethnicity and more to do with politics. In fact, some of the squatters and their supporters claim the attackers did so with the full knowledge of the police and the municipality, the latter which is run by the ruling ANC and which is intent on clearing the city of slums before the 2010 World Cup.

I’d be interested to hear people’s responses to this video, basically a new genre, that claims to counter Western stereotypes of African economic and social life with its own selective, glossy images of a largely urbanized, clean, ordered–oddly without any people–Africa. [Source]

“We are Africans.” Hip hop meets twentieth century black Atlantic identity politics. Watch.

A young boy gets a haircut in a refugee camp in Eastern Congo in this image by photographer, Sarah Elliot. Her most recent work has focused on Kenyan communities. Link.

“Sub-Saharan Africa does not bring to mind an image of a woman with perfectly manicured nails flipping through glossy magazines in search of the latest handbag or celebrity haircut.” It would be interesting to know what the writer of this opening paragraph for a news story in today’s ‘The New York Times’ about women’s fashion magazines (like Arise, HauTe, Helm and True Love) on the continent was thinking? Apart from that unfortunate opening sentence the story is very decent and comprehensive.

News out of Nigeria is that the country’s Information Minister Dora Akunyili asking movie houses in the capital of Abuja to stop screening “District 9” because the film about aliens and discrimination “makes Nigerians look bad.” Akunyili is also quoted as saying that she asked Sony for an apology and wants them to edit out references to Nigeria and to change the name of the main Nigerian gangster character “Obesandjo” because it feels like a dig against former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo. Source.

Been meaning to post the link to a great mixtape highlighting the first decade of Nigerian hip hop at Africanhiphop.com. [Via Comb & Razor]