If the murder of Andries Tatane is a watershed moment in public perceptions of state violence after Apartheid, it is also teaching us a thing or two about South Africa’s media.
Had this police murder happened in Tunisia, Egypt or Libya, we would probably all be glued to our TV screens, praising the BBC or Al-Jazeera for their coverage in bringing images that brought home the extent of the oppression in those countries and the bravery of protesters.
What do we do in South Africa?
Journalist Pascal Zachary–on his blog Africa Works–argues that the protests in Uganda that started April 4, are strategically “ill-timed” and that opposition leader Kizza Besigye (shot in the hand, and in jail at present), while brave, can only take the movement against Life President Yoweri Museveni so far:
The [current] protests seem ill-timed. They should have come before the national election, not afterwards. Besigye is brave and consistent in his criticisms of Museveni’s cronyism, and excessive spending on military equipment. Yet he lacks strong tactical instincts and his failure to galvanize the diverse opponents of Museveni into a overwhelming political movement indicates that perhaps the time has come for his to step aside and allow a younger, more creative opposition leader to tackle the enormous task of forcing Museveni from power.
Read the rest here.
The website of South Africa’s ruling party was down for a minute after hackers took it over. The site is back up again. But given that lately ANC leaders make no distinction between political office and running businesses, I don’t know what’s the worry about:
The ANC has vowed to “unhack” its website after visitors were redirected to what seems to be a Turkish website which advertises food and shoes. On offer are products such as strawberries and peri-peri. ANC spokesperson and national executive committee member Jackson Mthembu said the hacking was in bad taste. “Those responsible for this do not want us to reach the electorate. This happened before. We are going to unhack it,” he said. Mthembu said the ANC would attempt to “unhack” the site by this evening. At 6:30pm it was still reverting to another website.
I suppose we should be proud or something.
Reporter Janny Scott in The New York Times, and the author of “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother,” writing about Stanley Ann Dunham:
The president’s mother has served as any of a number of useful oversimplifications. In the capsule version of Obama’s life story, she is the white mother from Kansas coupled alliteratively to the black father from Kenya. She is corn-fed, white-bread, whatever Kenya is not. In “Dreams From My Father,” the memoir that helped power Obama’s political ascent, she is the shy, small-town girl who falls head over heels for the brilliant, charismatic African who steals the show. In the next chapter, she is the naïve idealist, the innocent abroad. In Obama’s presidential campaign, she was the struggling single mother, the food-stamp recipient, the victim of a health care system gone awry, pleading with her insurance company for coverage as her life slipped away. And in the fevered imaginings of supermarket tabloids and the Internet, she is the atheist, the Marxist, the flower child, the mother who abandoned her son or duped the newspapers of Hawaii into printing a birth announcement for her Kenyan-born baby, on the off chance that he might want to be president someday.
Perry Anderson in The New Left Review:
The odious cast of the regimes in place [in North Africa and the Middle East] has persisted unaltered for decades, without triggering mass revolts against them. The timing of the uprisings is not to be explained by their aims. Nor can it plausibly be attributed just to novel channels of communication: the reach of Al-Jazeera, the arrival of Facebook or Twitter have facilitated but could not have founded a new spirit of insurgency. The single spark that started the prairie fire suggests the answer. Everything began with the death in despair of a pauperized vegetable vendor, in a small provincial town in the hinterland of Tunisia. Beneath the commotion now shaking the Arab world have been volcanic social pressures: polarization of incomes, rising food prices, lack of dwellings, massive unemployment of educated—and uneducated—youth, amid a demographic pyramid without parallel in the world. In few other regions is the underlying crisis of society so acute, nor the lack of any credible model of development, capable of integrating new generations, so plain.
“When It Hits You, You Feel No Pain”: A Conversation about Music and Politics
Wednesday, April 27 · 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Lang Cafe, The New School, 65 West 11th Street, NY, NY, 10003
65 West 11th Street
New York, NY
Music has power to move people’s bodies, but does it have power to move their bodies into action? Music and politics are often intimate partners in society whether an artist consciously connects them or not. What role does music play in the politics of today’s world?
What is the responsibility of artists as public figures to be politically conscious? Can the two stand on their own, or are they forever linked? We will explore some of these and other questions at this panel as part of GPIA’s Media and Culture Concentration’s
Conversations series.
With invited panelists Brian Jackson (musician/composer and Gil Scott Heron’s main musical collaborator in the 1970s), Raquel Cepeda (journalist and director of “Bling, A Planet Rock”), DJ Laylo (DJ/filmmaker), Eddie ‘Stats’ Houghton (journalist, The Fader), Wills Glasspiegel (artist manager and radio producer) and Masauko Chipembere (musician, composer).
The panel will be moderated by Megan Bandle (South Africa House Initiative, Brooklyn).
Organized by Sean Jacobs and Boima Tucker.
Plus, Afterparty at Cayenne featuring Eddie Stats and Boima DJing
128 West Houston. Starting at 10pm
Celebrating Sierra Leone’s 50th Independence Anniversary
Les Nubians have a new album (it’s been on sale since yesterday). These are the videos for the singles “Afrodance” (above) and “Veuillez Veiller Sur Vos Reves” (below).
