[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0mB59n0zBA&w=500&h=301&rel=0]

Oakland, California rap group The Hieroglyphics and Goapele singing about some kind of Soweto circa 2002.

You can go to the jungle/Go to the city/Visit Soweto/Live in the Bay or/Somewhere in between/But you’ll never be unseen … Maybe I’ll go to Angola or the Gold Coast/And blow smoke with the old folks cause they know most”

H/T Charles Leonard.

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.

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.