Before moving down from Maseru to Cape Town in 2008 and exploring the Cape’s hip hop scene, Core Wreckah was already heavily involved in Lesotho’s capital hip hop scene. When we saw him plugging his new song ‘Reverb’ here and there on the web, we thought it a good moment to throw him 5 questions about what both scenes have in common, and what sets them apart. But more about that plugging after the song:
I grew up in the Copperbelt Province, near the small mining town where Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane crashed in September 1961, as he was en route to negotiate a cease-fire in Katanga Province in the Congo. My father, who stuck a small map of the continent on our bedroom wall, and warned us to memorise the 50+ African states within a month of our arrival in Zambia (I was 7), was full of obscure facts that meant little to us at the time. He chugged us to Ndola in his beloved bottle-green VW beetle, and made a sweep around the tiny airstrip: “This is where the great statesman died, perhaps because of treachery,” he said.
So imagine my surprise when TMZ’s Harvey Levin (yes, the gossip “news” show) pronounced Hammarskjöld’s death to have been at the hands of ‘natives’ ‘in the Congo’ who tied Hammarskjöld to a tree, and split his body apart. Even as his staff members Googled ‘Hammarskjöld’ (and mangled Hammarskjöld’s name; Levin called him “Dog Hammerfield’) and found that he died in a plane crash, Levin holds on to his story: the natives must have split Hammarskjöld’s body, posthumously. He then benign-dictator-style ordered a staff member to get a hold of a “professor” who knows something about the Congo, to confirm his story.
Around 9:30 AM, I went on TMZ’s website, and wrote them a note: I grew up not 60km from the crash site…and can assure you that no natives have been splitting anyone apart.
11:25AM: Harvey Levin himself rings me up to say: he distinctly remembers a story about a person whose plane crashed, survived the crash, but then some ‘tribe’/the natives tied him to a tree and pulled him apart using some elaborate system of ropes. Apparently it was all over the news, sometime in the ’60s – could I find out who it was? I told him that ‘Africa’ lends itself to such myths, and I’d be surprised if it were true, but he was heading to a meeting. So I assured him I’d put the word out via AIAC.
Natives and Tribals: do you know of such an incident?
I know of Leopold’s people splitting people’s hands off from their bodies in the Congo, and the US government doing some nasty things to natives from Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., but…
We plugged Kinshasa-born Gracias not too long ago. This is the video for Mon€y, another track from his new EP.
Journalist/photographer Chris Parkinson, who lives in Johannesburg, has shot this short film about car spinning in the city. Invited by a fellow photographer, who is also a spinner, he headed out to Nasrec, a racing track on the edge of Soweto. “What I loved about the event is that it seemed to be completely mixed, racially, both in terms of the drivers and the spectators – this is rare in South Africa where most sports are considered to be either black or white. There was a great atmosphere and everybody was there just to appreciate the cars and the driving,” he told me an in email. Parkinson, born in Britain has been living in South Africa the last 4 years as a cameraman for BBC News. ”I like to think that I came to Africa with an open mind and have really enjoyed travelling widely and meeting so many different people. i wouldn’t say that I have a philosophy about how I film and the stories I tell about the continent–I just try to create something interesting to the viewer. I like to do positive stories and to show what a diverse and fascinating continent it is but at the same time it is impossible to hide from the challenges that the people and governments face –those stories must also be covered.”
You can view his work here.
There’s so much going on in these 8 minutes of rap by Akala, we can only suggest you take the occasion’s title on its word: Fire In The Booth.
Via Mikko Kapanen.
The documentary “Dear Mandela,” about three young leaders of a shack dwellers movement in Durban, South Africa, is finally here. The film will premiere at Durban International Film Festival–the first screening is on the 26th July. According to filmmakers, Dara Kell and Christopher Nizza, the film will also embark on a national tour in South Africa before screenings here in the US. If the short version of the film is anything to go by, it should be good. In that film, one of the youth leaders, Mnikelo Ndabankulu, speaking after a fire that destroyed 200 shacks in his neighborhood, refers to government supporters, says: “They say, ‘Why are these people marching because these times [of oppression] have gone. We are in a democracy. What are they marching for?’ [However] the real motive behind our struggle is this thing [pointing to conditions in his squatter community]. It is not a matter of fame, it is a not a matter of power hunger. It’s not a matter of disrespecting the authorities. It’s being serious about life. This is not life.” Then, channeling Mandela’ single-mindedness before he was sentence to life in prison in 1964, Ndabankulu says: “You don’t need to be old to be wise. That is why we think we need to show our character while we are still young so that when your life ends, it must not be like a small obituary that said, ‘You were born, you ate, you go to school, you died.’ When you are dying you must die with credibility. People must talk about you saying good things, saying you were a man among men, not just an ordinary man.”
More information and future screenings times here.
Robert Thornton is an anthropologist who teaches at Wits University in South Africa. He also maintains a blog: An Anthropologist in South Africa. In this guest post, he gives his take on Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the Guinean-American hotel staff member who accused him of rape. What’s different here, from the thousands of other analyses you’ve read? Thornton argues that it is important, here, to include an analysis of global economies (both the ‘legitimate’ and the ‘black’) showcasing complex, interdependent power relationships between seemingly oppositional sets of people. He also posits that gender, race, and other binaries beaten to death in the popular media may be secondary to the most significant issues relevant to this case. We at AIAC found Thornton’s positions to be provocative, innovative, and yet, simultaneously problematic and needing engagement. Contributor Neelika Jayawardane takes up some of the points raised by Thornton in the second half of the post.*
Robert Thornton:
The most extraordinary aspect of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape case is the remarkable similarity between DSK and his accuser: they are both global players. Each deploys gendered power in different ways within radically different but intimately linked frameworks. Far from being the exemplar of the powerful against the powerless, each shows agency in extraordinary ways.
Commentators have focused on the fact that they represent the polar opposites of global political and gender categories: a predatory and powerful male against a powerless and virtuous woman, one rich the other poor, Jew and Muslim, White and Black, European and African, French and American immigrant, a manager of vast wealth and a hard working cleaner who was there to pick up his tissues and wash his sheets.
The affair seemed to personify the great dialectical oppositions of race, class, and gender. What brings this affair to international notice, however, is not just their difference but that fact that both operated in global markets, each successful in their own terms.
DSK was the head of the International Monetary Fund, while the Guinean hotel maid was an international multiple fraudster. According to the reports in the press, she had faked her appeal for asylum status by memorising a tape that she had bought from a man who specialised in sad stories of abuse and trauma.
These were not just any sad stories, but stories that Americans, and American immigration officials in particular, would believe. Her story revolved around being a devoutly religious woman who had been gang raped by out-of-control African men in the violence-torn streets of yet another African failed state.
The apparent back story is that this is where terrorist train and hide from American forces, but where good women who fear god, but who can also change bed linen and run a vacuum cleaner, also live in precarious balance with the forces of evil.
In a continent where HIV/AIDS prevention programmes pour hundreds of millions of dollars into promoting sexual abstinence, a masculine gang had forcibly raped her. By seeking to escape this antithesis of morality and good government, and by bravely standing against the oppression suffered by all women, she stood out as a beacon of what is called ‘hope’. Except she didn’t.
For at least 3 years now South African photographer Lizane Louw have chronicled the lives of the people of Blikkiesdorp (translation: Tin Town), a temporary relocation camp in Delft–not to be confused with the Dutch town and one of the poorest townships in Cape Town, located about 30 km from the city center.
Life there consists of daily humiliation for the camp’s residents who face no, or little, protection from violent crimes, rape and robberies. (Some residents, though, have organized themselves.) For city officials, run by the Democratic Alliance, the camp is at once a temporary and permanent solution to housing problems. Lizanne speaks of the city planning to erect another 200 structures in Blikkiesdorp.
Lizanne decided first photographed residents of Blikkiesdorp 2 years ago. In February this year she wanted to publish some of the pictures, including one of a 92 year old grandmother, Ouma Magdalena. When she went back to ask Ouma Magdalena for permission to publish the image, she found the old woman had passed away. She had TB. “Ouma is a big inspiration for this project that I am currently doing. I would like to use her story to make a change in this community. I don’t think it is ethically and morally acceptable that people that are poor must live in such challenging and substandard living conditions. Something needs to be done and we need to seriously reflect on ourselves as a society, when these things happen in your backyard without us attempting to do anything about it.”
All the photos are available on the project’s Facebook page.
Below Lizanne talks us through some of the images.
South Africa’s first democratic president is 93 years old today.
The artwork is a collaboration between the two Dutch artists Anton Corbijn and Berend Strik. (Via: ZAM Magazine)
* It would be appropriate to click through to our February 11, 2010 post “Songs for Nelson Mandela” (on the 10th anniversary of Mandela’s release of Mandela). Here.
All that stuff we could not blog–we have real jobs–or were too lazy to put up.
First, up a rough cut of “Quel Souvenir,” a new film (currently in post-production) about the new Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline is screening on July 27 at the DocuClub in Manhattan. Here is the trailer. Here’s the description by the director, Danya Abt: “… The Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline was the largest investment project ever made in sub-Saharan Africa, a 600 mile pipeline from the oil fields of Southwestern Chad to the beaches of Cameroon. ’Quel Souvenir’ follows the pipeline through the the many communities it touches, who ask ‘If the land is rich, why are we so poor?’ and frames the project withing a larger context of growing oil exploitation in Africa.”
* I have fond memories of the Africa Center in Covent Garden–a building housing a restaurant, bookstore and basement bar/club–from my short time as a graduate student in London. So I was sad to read in this weekend’s The Financial Times it may not be no more, taken over by a property developer “with South African roots” (I can only imagine what that means) who has turned everything else in the neighborhood into “high-end retail shops and restaurants.” Anyway there is a last ditch attempt to still keep it open. I doubt the nearby Springbok Bar has difficulties getting patrons or sponsors. More here.
* Nuruddin Farrah, the Somali writer who still (?) lives in Cape Town, compares the Mogadishu of his childhood with its violent present.
