Late last month the English goalkeeper David James wrote in The Observer that he was surprised at the accusations of racism against his national teammate John Terry. The latter was accused of racially abusing an opponent, QPR player Anton Ferdinand. James also claimed racism has been rooted out of the game a long time ago. James suggested that racism was now limited to a small number of fans.
New Zealand is often sold to prospective (mostly white) South African immigrants as “South Africa 30 years ago” (wink, wink). That version of an Edenic idyll is not entirely what a young South African found New Zealand to be recently in a local version of Occupy Wall Street in Dunedin. In a scene captured by amateur video (which made the rounds last week on the internets), an angry drunk protesting the protesters threatens to break down tents and generally makes a nuisance of himself. One of the vocal protesters–our equality-and-justice-minded South African immigrant–leads a chant against the intruder, and then decides to reason with the drunk. “You’re a South African … What’s your story?” asks the drunk. Perhaps he is appealing to some kind of shared kinship: privilege, siding with capital or power, or disdain for protesters. Saffers and Kiwis. Maybe, the drunk New Zealander is just confused about why a white South African would be protesting capitalism’s evils, when one of the finest versions of all that capitalism engineers was what the South African republic was founded upon. Or maybe he’s wondering why so many white South Africans seek refuge in what the man deems to be his country, and now, wants to protest …what?
Whatever.
No, this is not about the anxieties of Niall Ferguson.
Anthropologist John Comaroff spoke at The Graduate Institute in Geneva about the themes that lie at the heart of (the introduction to) the latest book he co-wrote with Jean Comaroff, and which carries the same title as the lecture: ‘Theory from the South: Or, How Europe is Evolving Toward Africa.’ (Keynote starts 5 minutes into the recording; there’s a Q&A in the last third, including some words about Lionel Messi.)
Everyone loves an African animal story.
People get terribly upset when African animals are declared extinct (as was the Western Black rhino, last week), but when we see this video about saving the black rhinos, using helicopters, massive amounts of tranquilizers, and WWF’s mighty funds, we get that lovely heart-warming feeling.
And we can’t but go gaga over cute pet hippos who get to come into the kitchen and are treated to an aromatherapy massage, when the cat isn’t even allowed in the lounge (warning to those who have a “I Dream of Africa” reveries and plan to copy these owners: a farmer in South Africa, 40-year old Marius Els, an army major, was bitten to death by the 1.2 tonne hippo he christened Humphrey and tried to domesticate on a farm in Free State province. And our family’s pet monkey sat on a tree and threw mango seeds at visitors, while my pet whydah bird pooped on my sister with remarkable accuracy).
But more than all the animal folklore from Africa, we really love a gay African animal story.
In a story that has been dubbed “Brokeback Iceberg,” the Toronto Zoo attempted to separate two male African penguins, who seem to have a penchant for homosocial interaction (keep in mind that African penguins do not live on icebergs, but on Southern African seashores swept by freezing Antarctic currents). People went berserk when the zoo announced that it had plans to wrench Pedro and Buddy “from each other’s flippers and lock ’em up with females until they nest and take one for the team.”
Now, due to “gay activists [in Canada] and abroad [who] have questioned how Toronto, which led the way in North America on gay marriage, could treat this pair of two-legged waddlers so badly,” they’ve decided to forgo the concerns about conserving an endangered species.
AIAC is all for animal conservation–but not when penguin love is involved.
During the recent Africa Day in The Hague, Holland, BrandOutLoud* director Judith Madigan took part in the second Oude meesters, jonge honden [old icons and generation 2.0] debate on emergency aid in Africa. She spoke about the image of aid provision to the continent and asked whether aid organisations can still ‘sell’ Africa? And she wrote a column about the above video they made: [Read more...]
Senegal-born, Kuwait-raised musician and artist Fatima Al Qadiri just premiered her new EP, “Genre-Specific Xperience,” in New York. The project consists of 5 songs each with corresponding video. Above is “Vatican Vibes” which features “Gregorian trance.” As Jody Graf writes in Clustermag, Al Qadiri’s introduction to Gregorian trance “… came in the passenger seat of her cousin’s car as they drove through a desert of burning oil fields towards the Kuwaiti border.” The “violent conflation of apocalypse and heaven” that she witnessed is also reflected in “the dark-Catholic-videogame aesthetic” of the accompanying “Vatican Vibes” video.
H/T: Boima
Remember the Mapping Stereotypes Project and the Afrographique project? (The former maps popular national stereotypes from around the world, while the latter turns any set of data about the continent into a graphic, including a series of maps.) A reader of this blog points us towards this “map” of stereotypes that’s been circulating online among Brazilians.
Here’s a translation for those who don’t speak Portuguese.
