Structures fit for animals

A selection of news items, videos, music from and drive by commentary before I shut down for December 2009.

The South African editorial cartoonist Zapiro usually gets all the shine because he is good. But equally good, if not better, is Gado, the Kenyan cartoonist. Watch.

An early December news report from German broadcaster Deutche Welle on the self-styled healers and profit-hungry businesses take advantage of the helplessness of people living with AIDS in South Africa. Until early this year, they had supporters at the highest level in government. Watch.

I’m a big fan of Johannesburg photographer Sabelo Mlangeni. The series “Men Only” series which documents the daily routines of residents of the run-down George Goch hostel on the East Rand of Johannesburg. The “hostel” (more like structures fit for animals) was built by mining capital for black migrant workers at least fifty years ago. Mlangeni aimed to “… capture the normality that exists in an abnormal, unnatural situation.”

Abdullah Ibrahim has a new album with the WDR Big Band Cologne, “Bombella.” That’s all.

If you’re an Oscar winning black actor and Hollywood stops calling you, what do you do? You go make TV commercials somewhere in the world. Where they have money. It used to be the Gulf and Japan, but now actors like Louis Gossett Jr., who won an Oscar in 1982 for “An Officer and a Gentleman,” go to places like South Africa. There, Gossett stars in ads for Windhoek Lager beer. Watch here, here and here.

An excerpt from the South African episode of the excellent documentary TV series, “Future Express,” in which the Dutch director Rob Hof travels around the world on long distance trains.

The trailer for the film, “Football Fables,” by English director Baf Akoto about the globalization of Ghanaian football.

The work of Nigerian photographer, Folarin.

Mike Chavez is a Filipino-Australian artist whose work explores Filipino immigrant culture, racism and parochialism “… through the western lens of post post modernism.” His work has some parallels with that of South African artist Mustafa Maluka.

Finally, I think the idea with this early 1970s video was for James Brown to give dancing lessons, but then he got carried away.

Further Reading

Let Robeson Sing

Manic Street Preachers pay homage to the greatest American of the first half of the twentieth century, Paul Robeson. The music video by Nigerian Andrew Dosunmu is a tribute too.

The New Black Atlantic

What does it mean when a Tanzanian rapper joins a cypher on BET, the US entertainment TV channel on its biggest night – during prime time – and rhymes in Swahili.