The most important African country to the U.S.

What came across as recognition of Africa Is a Country from a US State Department official, was more a case of speaking too fast.

The German-Nigerian singer, Ayo (Wikiwand).

On September 30th, 2009, the Brookings Institute held a conversation with the Nigerian Foreign Minister, Chief Ojo Maduekwe, on “The Nigeria-U.S. Partnership for Regional Security in Africa,” in Washington D.C. Not really earth shattering stuff, except when 52 minutes into the discussion a senior US State Department official for Africa decided to call out this blog. He wanted to say Nigeria is the most important African country to the United States and instead said, “Africa is the most important African country to the United States.” Listen here.

The BBC: “Across sub-Saharan Africa, women have a one in 13 lifetime chance of dying in pregnancy and childbirth. In DR Congo’s North Kivu, where the basic kits and tools can be in egregiously short supply, the odds are often far worse.”

Artist Robin Rhode, born in Cape Town, raised in Johannesburg and now of Berlin, Germany, is collaborating with the classical pianist Leif Ove Andsnes for a series of performances at Lincoln Center which “… brings together music and film in an evocative performance.” More information here.

The record “Down on my knees” by Nigerian-German singer Ayo.

This sort of thing about skin lighteners is apparently run of the mill in India.

Rising Up Together’ is an exhibition of photographs taken during the apartheid era by veteran South African photographer Gille de Vlieg. The exhibition is currently running at the Durban Art Gallery in South Africa, until early October. Link.

Sabelo Mlangeni’s “Invisible Women” photo series of cleaners in Johannesburg.

If you’re anticipating Finland-based, South African Mustafa Maluka‘s New York solo show, “A Place So Foreign” at the Jack Tilton Gallery, his new work (“The Rhetoric of Sincerity / The Sincerity of Rhetoric”) is opening in Switzerland last month.

Underground LA classic by Daedulus, featuring Pigeon John and Busdriver, “Something Bells.”

I was forwarded the PR for a new book edited by William Gumede (author of a recent book on Thabo Mbeki) and Leslie Dikeni (brother of poet Sandile) on South African intellectual culture. I don’t have more information except that it appears to focus on the Thabo Mbeki era, a period characterized by virulent anti-intellectualism. Dikeni’s chapter is on “pseudo-intellectuals,” while Jeremy Cronin writes on the late exiled ANC intellectual, Comrade Mzala–remember Mzala’s 1980s book on Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, “Chief with a Double Agenda”? which had to be pulled from library shelves after the Chief objected? The book also has contributions from Jonathan Jansen (the first black university president of the University of the Free State), US-based literature professor Grant Farred, Mahmood Mamdani, and poet James Matthews.

British indie-rockers, Noisettes – fronted by the brilliant Shingai Shoniwa (her mother is from Zimbabwe) – is on a media tour in the US. Here is the video of their live performance ofNever Forget You” on the David Letterman Show at the end of last month.

Do we really need another memoir by a white Zimbabwean? Alex Perry, in “Time” magazine, reviews “The Last Resort,” the memoir of journalist Douglas Rogers,

The glossy Nigerian magazine, ARISE, brought its “Arise: African Promise” collection (the video has some highlights) to New York Fashion Week.  It featured designers like Lisa Fola­wiyo, Folake Folarin-Coker, Eric Raisina and David Tlale. We have so many questions: Is this all worth it? Will North Americans and Europeans buy the clothes or does inclusion of African designers amount to a bit of “humanitarianism” on the part of New York Fashion Week?

The Onion’s “news channel” lampoons US-based Darfur-focused pressure groups. One question to its fake news panel: How can the people of Darfur thank Americans? Best response: “I would like a clay pot.”

In Kibera, the large informal settlement in Nairobi, the residents are paraded like animals on safari for foreign tourists. Via The Guardian.

“A Panther in Africa,” the 2004 film about a Black Panther who fled Kansas City in the U.S. midwest in 1970 for a new life in Tanzania (by director Aaron Matthews), is now online. (Link updated)

Reports are emerging about the extent of world-beating 800 meter track and field athlete, Caster Semenya, and of the collusion of South Africa’s track and field officials (who pretended they were on her side) with the world body, the IAAF. South Africa’s Mail & Guardian published details of the kind of “testing” she’s been subjected to.

The Committee to Protect Journalists wrote a letter to the Kenyan Prime Minister, Raila Odinga about the decapitated journalist: “We are writing to express our concern over the lack of progress in the case of murdered Kenyan journalist Francis Nyaruri. The journalist was found decapitated, with evidence of torture to his body, on January 29 in Kodera Forest near his hometown of Nyamira …”

The versatile South African actor who starred on Broadway (he won a Tony Award in 1982 for his performance on Broadway in Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold and the Boys”) and in Hollywood films (he was brilliant in Euzhan Palzy’s “Dry White Season”) despite Apartheid, died in Las Vegas last month. I doubt the rainbow generation (and those with amnesia) even knows who he is.

Further Reading

And do not hinder them

We hardly think of children as agents of change. At the height of 1980s apartheid repression in South Africa, a group of activists did and gave them the tool of print.

The new antisemitism?

Stripped of its veneer of nuance, Noah Feldman’s essay in ‘Time’ is another attempt to silence opponents of the Israeli state by smearing them as anti-Jewish racists.