Public Toilets

March 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Residents of a shack settlement in Khayelitsha–that’s an area of cheap housing and squatter shacks about 20 miles from the Cape Town’s city center –”were provided communal toilets by the City of Cape Town on condition they built their own enclosures.” Basically a few communal toilets without walls. Serious.

Several residents told a local newspaper “… they had not been able to afford constructing the walls and roofs and for months they had made use of the toilets in full view of their neighbours.”

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Athol Fugard Can’t End Apartheid

March 18, 2010 By 2 Comments

I am a big fan of Athol Fugard, the brilliant South African playwright. I’ve made a point to see some of his plays–I saw John Kani and Winston Ntshona both in the “The Island” (in London) and “Sizwe Bansi is Dead” (in Brooklyn). And as we know Kani is very much a product of Fugard’s schooling.  So I like the idea behind’s the new theater in Cape Town’s very white downtown, named for Fugard.

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Desmond Tutu Walks on Water

March 17, 2010 By 1 Comment

In my house Desmond Tutu can do little wrong. He’s up there with Nelson Mandela. (The latter complimented Tutu recently as “the voice of the voiceless”). Tutu restores our fight in decency and what’s right when on countless accusations he calls South Africa’s ruling class into line (like he did its previous white rulers), sticks up for gays and lesbians, celebrates when we need to, and takes on intransigent regimes or the American behemoth. We’ll also cut Tutu slack for the empty justice of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (that’s some expensive slack, I know) and the stale jokes he tells on the US lecture circuit or, in this case, for fraternizing with Richard Branson, who’s a better publicist than he is a businessman. But this clip above of the Archbishop swimming–from Sundance Channel’s “Iconoclasts” series where two famous people hang around and chat–is worth it for seeing Tutu in his swimming trunks and Branson helping Tutu with his slippers.

– Sean Jacobs

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All About Nicholas Kristof

March 17, 2010 By 3 Comments

I try not to post about either Nicholas Kristof or Jeffrey Gettleman, the Henry Morton Stanleys of their age.  But even I could not resist this video. In the clip, Kristof sets out to draw attention to the fact that women do all the hard, physical work in Congo (well Eastern Congo to be exact): like carrying water or wood, or working in low level construction. So far so good. But then he turns out it into a spectacle by focusing all the attention on himself.

[Texas in Africa]

– Sean Jacobs

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The Photography of Liz Johnson-Artur

March 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I love the work of photographer Liz Johnson-Artur. Her shot of a smoke-blowing Linton Kwesi Johnston, is an all-time favorite). You may recognize her photographs in music magazines. But she is more than. Crucially, through her work she has documented the under-reported and often invisible black popular culture in Britain for at least two decades now.

Whether fathers and daughters, boxers in Peckham, street parties, in clubs, in parks, Congolese soukous, brethren, Mos Def, or Manu Dibangu (“Years later I heard he never takes his glasses off. I was to shy to ask”).

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Hamba Kahle, Fatima Meer

March 12, 2010 By 5 Comments

Fatima Meer, once a confidante of Nelson Mandela and a social movement activist for Durban’s poor, passed this Friday, March 12. (In this video she talks about the present struggles of black and Indian traders in Durban’s downtown]

Hamba Kahle Comrade Meer.

What did she think about the present government, and the ruling ANC, when she was alive?

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Extreme Makeover

March 12, 2010 By 3 Comments

So Marthinus van Schalkwyk, the last leader of the racist National Party (that was the party who invented Apartheid and governed South Africa from 1948 till democracy came) is the favorite for the United Nations’ top climate post, as director of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, and to force industrial nations to hopefully reach a legally binding climate change agreement.  (The current leader is resigning.).  In the popular memory Van Schalkwyk is remembered more for his inexperience and disastrous leadership of that party (journalists dubbed him “kortbroek” for short pants). Now, as the Associated Press, writes Van Schalkwyk, who served as environmental minister in Thabo Mbeki’s government, “has a reputation as a bridge builder” and has “earned a great deal of respect for being very engaged and informed.” Kyk jhy.

Somebody should read this to Helen Zille.

[The New York Times]

– Sean Jacobs

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The Trumpet King

March 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Jeremy of Naijablog forwarded me this Youtube video of two recorded songs by  Zeal Onyia, the master Nigerian trumpet player from the 1950s of whom Louis Armstrong on a visit to Nigeria in 1961 was to have asked:  “Who is that hip cat?” Here are two of Onyia’s highlife inflected compositions, “Money Trouble” and “Lumumba.”  (The recordings you hear “were taken from a tape of tape that was originally recorded off an old 78 rpm record given to Don [Maxwell, the guy who originally uploaded them to the internet] by Zeal Onyia himself in 1964.”) You can read the story how these two recordings came to be in the possession of Maxwell on his site Abstract Concrete Works.

– Sean Jacobs

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100 Artists

March 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The Spier Contemporary 100, where 100 young South African artists were invited to exhibit their work (more information here) opens this Sunday, 14th March, at the Cape Town City Hall on Darling Street.

If you’re around go see it.

–Sean Jacobs

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Jeffrey Gettleman, Our Man in Kenya

March 10, 2010 By 2 Comments

Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times strikes again. Last month anger resounded across the blogosphere after a bizarre rant by Gettleman appeared in Foreign Policy. In the piece, “Africa’s Forever Wars: Why the continent’s conflicts never end,” the NYTimes East Africa bureau chief gave us his opinion on ending the ‘forever wars’: “capture or kill their leaders.” There have been many excellent responses to his piece, such as the Wronging Rights discussion. This blog has also documented serious inaccuracies in Gettleman’s reporting before.

Now Gettleman tries to cover the Millenium Villages project in Kenya, and he can’t resist adding his own opinion into the mix. When asking whether the project could become national or regional if successful, Gettleman writes:

“For example, one can easily picture what would happen in Kenya, where corruption is essentially a national pastime if there were a free, donor-supported fertilizer program for the entire nation.”

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