One of the human rights activists featuring in the 2009 documentary Cameroon: Coming Out of the Nkuta is Alice Nkom. The film sketches the daily struggle of young gays and lesbians in Cameroon. Nkom was in The Netherlands this week to talk about their fight.
Music Break
March 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment
I like this video for Sayon Bamba’s song ‘L’excisée’ (from her album Dougna). Born in Guinea she resides in Brussels these days. A message doesn’t come much clearer than this.
A road accident doesn’t make a revolution
March 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Recent demonstrations in Sudan’s capital Khartoum over road conditions and traffic signals have led some observers in the West to speculate about the possibilities of a Egypt-style revolution there (see FT, BBC and Al Jazeera English, for example; Sudan-specific blogs, like Making Sense of Sudan, are silent on the protests). For our sake, I asked a friend in Khartoum–who wanted to remain anonymous–his opinion. Below I print his response:
Traffic and the control thereof are diabolical in Khartoum, and the populace have developed a pretty mental informal code for dealing with things (a combination of subtle physical nudging of cars, flashing lights, flicker use, and the morse code of horn signalling) so I’m not suprised there is risidual or constant anger relating to that issue. But a road accident doesn’t make a revolution.
‘We should have left it in North Africa in the first place’
March 30, 2011 By 1 Comment
This conversation on CNN (about an escaped Egyptian cobra at the Bronx Zoo) strikes me as a particularly apt allegory of the United States’ relationship to the revolutions throughout Africa and Asia.–Sophia Azeb.
The Zim Alliance
March 26, 2011 By 2 Comments
“The Zimbabwe Alliance is a funder/advocate partnership to promote a vibrant civil society and a successful democratic transformation in Zimbabwe. The alliance is non partisan and does not accept corporate funds.” Nothing here we are not in support of, so we figured we’d share this promotional video for the Zimbabwe Alliance, recorded by Nomadic Wax’s Magee McIlvaine.
Music Break
March 25, 2011 By 3 Comments
I love this track, “It Would Be,” by Cape Town’s Alleycat (government name: Enslin Grootboom) featuring fellow rapper, T100. The song is Cape Town for real: riding the Jamaican riddim, the transplanted patois and the stripped-down video. (Artists in Cape Town rarely do bling unlike their Johannesburg counterpunts.) I also recognize the milieu: The music video was filmed in and around an area, Elsies River on the Cape Flats, where I spent most of my school holidays as a teen a long time ago. (My cousins still live there.) Things haven’t changed much for the city’s poor. As for Alleycat, he’s been rapping since the mid-1980s. In an email, he describes his lyrics as “stirred by emotion – happiness, social welfare, love, fears, amusement, failures and achievements.” Bring that emotion.
“What do African leaders have in common?”
March 25, 2011 By 2 Comments
Seun Kuti has a new album coming out next month: “From Africa With Fury: Rise.” He also has time to talk politics, including why we’re not seeing Egypt-style revolutions in Sub-Saharan African countries and what he thinks about African political leaders.
“Sub-Sahara Africa is very divided … We don’t have unifying culture. In the north we have Islam and it’s unified by that. I so want to see my brothers with the voice to speak together in every part of Africa … ”Everything is against the common man in Africa … No one cares what happens to you. Everyone has to toe the line. Nothing is cheap in Africa, though we are the poorest. Everything is imported, costs too much, so this is about the young man in Africa, fury, being an African, a young man with everything against you. That’s why I wrote the song ‘Rise.’ People want to change things for themselves. ‘Rise,’ for me, is the [center] of the album, where I’m speaking my mind the most: How I wanted to think about Africa, how our rulers treat us, how we should see ourselves, what we want for our children … What do African leaders have in common?” “They talk a lot of s—.
Ouch.
Video: Homosexuality is African
March 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment
The 46-minute video of the recent BBC World “Debate” with the unfortunate title: “Is Homosexuality Un-African?” It is of course as African as sadza, ugali, nsima, asaro and pap.
The show was recorded in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Via My Big Debate.
Music Break
March 24, 2011 By 3 Comments
Remember the Belgian-Congolese project Héritage? It took them a while to record a video for one of the featuring songs. The two singers on this track are Stefy Rika and Nina Miskina. You’ll recognize the infamous Africa Museum’s diorama in the first part. It gets interesting halfway through.
