Africa Is a Country

Our People

Our People

By
Sean Jacobs

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0mPUpojd84&w=500&h=307&rel=0]

This past summer at least three prominent figures of the Cape Town jazz scene–the saxophone players Robbie Jansen and Ezra Ngcukana and, most recently, pianist and historian Vincent Kolbe–passed.

For me, this recent live recording of “Os se mense” (Our people) by a representative of the next generation of Cape Town jazz musicians, Kyle Shepherd Trio, is a fitting tribute to these men.

* BTW, it is worth reading the historian and photographer John Edwin Mason’s separate tributes to these three giants on his blog.  Mason also includes a link to a film of Kolbe by Rio Allen.

Further Reading

Goodbye, Piassa

The demolition of an historic district in Addis Ababa shows a central contradiction of modernization: the desire to improve the country while devaluing its people and culture.

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.