I know we’ve been hearing about evil Erik Prince and his name-swapping mercenaries for years (Blackwater, Xe, my personal favorite Academi, and the latest, Greystone). But I only recently discovered how close all of this is to my hometown. Hell, from their “idyllic Dutch hamlet” in Holland (Michigan) the Prince family has formed and backed some of the biggest and most powerful militant Christian groups in the world. Just check out this interactive map.
Blackwater’s “Rwanda”
May 21, 2012 By 2 Comments
Art and assassination in Angola
May 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Benguela-based human rights group, OMUNGA, attracted international attention last year when it sponsored an international festival of urban art and culture. Organized by a group of Angolan artists and social activists, “Okupapala” was launched as an effort to create visible, collaborative responses to socio-political exclusion. This week, OMUNGA responded to the assassination of one of their volunteers in Catumbela. Their published statement (here in Portuguese) is brief: [Read more...]
19th New York African Film Festival: Shorts!
April 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Short films sometimes get a bad rap — they’re considered a “learning exercise” for film school students, or worse, they’re made synonymous with boring, pretentious art house… stuff. This year’s matinee trio at NYAFF had some fun with these stereotypes. Osvalde Lewat’s ‘Sderot, Last Exit’ is an experimental documentary that follows student filmmakers as they put together films on the fault lines of the Gaza War. There is some meta film commentary on the camera as a dream, which might be beautiful or tedious. But if you focus on its seamlessly shifting perspectives, it’s hard to deny the film’s elegant edge. Even when it gains a coherent narrative structure through realist montage, each new character seems to direct his or her own part of the story. ‘Sderot’ stands as an energizing invitation to consider how truth is made through mediated images. Kudos too, to the festival’s selection committee for highlighting the work of the Cameroonian director in Palestine. Smart curation gives breadth as well as depth to what we recognize as African filmmaking. [Read more...]
Interview: Director Frances Bodomo Talks About Her Film “Boneshaker” and African Globalization
April 16, 2012 By 2 Comments
“Boneshaker” — the latest film by Nuotama Frances Bodomo, a Ghanaian filmmaker based in New York City — follows a Ghanaian immigrant family taking a road trip to a Pentecostal church in Louisiana to cure their violent daughter. As the family journeys to a tent revival at the ends of the levee-less Louisiana delta, they discover the complications of trying to perform a traditional ritual away from home. Boneshaker is a short but ambitious film that focuses on feelings of homelessness, landlessness, and rootlessness that accompany migration. I spoke with Frances Bodomo at the start of the 2012 New York African Film Festival.
Jeffrey Gettleman’s continent
March 14, 2012 By 4 Comments
Chief among the debates (or what passes for debates on blogs, Twitter and in mainstream media) about #Kony2012, are these two questions: whether or not external observers should raise awareness or otherwise stage interventions in a conflict zone, and if so, how interventions should be carried out. While it is clear that Elliot Ross (on this blog last week) was not suggesting external observers should stand by and watch a gruesome war, his comment that effective activism is not about “Angelina Jolie or coloured wristbands or me” produced the most ire among supporters of #Kony2012 in the comments section of his post. And I don’t think it is because my generation was introduced to “slactivism” through Mark Zuckerberg, as Elliot suggested. There is something much more familiar about the angry reaction of so many commentators over the last few days. “At least we’re doing something” was the rallying cry we grew up with. We came of age when US Secretary of State, General Colin Powell, was talking about “a moral imperative” (forget the facts) to invade Iraq. But what is striking, is the way the Kony campaign has been framed in near exclusive negative terms. The goal is simply to take out Kony. As many critics have pointed out, Invisible Children does not really promise to do anything beyond raising awareness that people have suffered horribly.
The business of selling beer
December 15, 2011 By 5 Comments
In the last two decades, SABMiller become one of the world’s biggest beermakers by buying domestic labels and marketing them locally. They’ve hired anthropologists, historians, and sociologists to help sell ‘local intimacy’ for 200 plus brands in 75 plus countries and demonstrated that regional branding can be competitive on a global scale. Their domesticating efforts in African, Asian, and Latin American markets have given the London-based multinational a reputation for daring. But now that SABMiller has launched the first ever commercial cassava-based beer with its subsidiary in Mozambique, there’s just one question—why is Impala Beer’s branding so bad?
Translating Angola
December 5, 2011 By 6 Comments
By Megan Eardley
Rhett McNeil’s translation of Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes’s “The Splendor of Portugal” received a lot of attention from the literary world when it was released earlier this fall. And with good reason. McNeil has interpreted Lobo Antune’s thick, cruel prose beautifully. But so far English-language critics have focused on the technical challenges of translating Antunes, as though they were somehow isolated from the text’s socio-political and ethical questions. Overall, many of these critics miss the edge of McNeil’s translation, which turns on Antunes’s language in order to address the reproduction of colonial violence on a global scale. We might go further to question why certain kinds of war stories–such as Antunes’s–are embraced by critics, and go on to find an international audience, while other finely written stories do not.
