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...]
Art and assassination in Angola
May 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Goldman Sachs’s Angolan interests
April 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment
The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating Cobalt International Energy, a Houston based company with investments in the Angolan oil sector, for possible violation of anti-corruption legislation. Last week the Financial Times reported that three Angolan officials – the same three officials named in muckraking journalist Rafael Marques’s case now waiting before Angola’s Supreme Court – “confirmed to the FT (…) that they and another general have held shares in Nazaki Oil and Gáz, the local partner in a Cobalt-led deepwater venture launched in early 2010.” The Financial Times is no slouch of a newspaper. When they commit an entire article to topics Angolan it nearly fills my Google news alert for a week.
‘Africa’s first* transgender music star’
April 5, 2012 By 10 Comments
African governments don’t want us thinking that “homosexuality” is within the realm of their “traditional values”. So these leaders, even Nobel Peace Prize winning ones, use that as an excuse to justify the persecution and lack of protection for some of their most vulnerable citizens. Well, it seems that the Angolan government who currently seem to have their hands full (of money?) can’t be bothered to check whether or not popular Kudurista*, Titica, fits within that value system… and we’re glad for that! Now, I don’t know the frame through which Angolans are seeing Titica. A little forum and youtube scrolling reveals a divided public (as always). Since I’m not there, I’m not going to write a drawn out post on LGBT issues in Angola. I do have to say that Titica may just be as much of a “challenge” for some New York audiences as ones in Africa, so I’m proud to say that she will be visiting us next Monday night at Bembe in Brooklyn for the iBomba party! New Yorkers, come say hi and give your support. [Read more...]
Disco Angola (in New York City)
April 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Stan Douglas. "A Luta Continua, 1974" (2012)
The photographer Stan Douglas’s new project “Disco Angola,” a work in progress, is on display at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York until April 28, 2012. The New Yorker announced the show in Goings on About Town with the image above. What’s amazing is that Douglas has not been to Angola, though from what I read in this interview with Monica Szewczyk he has done a good bit of studying up. [Read more...]
Brand Kuduro
April 1, 2012 By 4 Comments
Photo: Jorge Antonio, director of "Kuduro: Fogo no Museke"
Kuduro has already received some attention on AIAC. (Is this Cabo Snoop clip intra-continental cultural colonialism?) Kuduro means ‘hardass’ or ‘in a hard place’ in Angolan Portuguese or a mix of Portuguese and Kimbundu, depending on how you parse it. And unlike most kinds of Angolan music it has garnered something of an international audience over the years, quite independent of the formal commercial channels of music promotion, be they national or international.* This new video by MC Sacerdote and Dama Linda “Xé! O que falaste!” (Hey! What did you say?) is a good example. [Read more...]
Angolan politics online
March 16, 2012 By 1 Comment
It’s been a busy week for Angolan politics. Elections are precisely six months away. On Wednesday, the long-time second-generation UNITA politician Abel Chivukuvuku officially split with his party to declare his candidacy for the presidency and his formation of CASA (meaning home in Portuguese) — short for ‘Ample Convergence of Angolan Salvation’. That same day, investigative journalist Rafael Marques testified before Angola’s Supreme Court in his case against seven Angolan generals for human rights crimes in the diamond mines in Angola’s eastern region. On Monday, DNIC, the National Department for Criminal Investigation took computers from the offices of the independent paper Folha 8, whose editor has been in hot water for a mock-up photo of the president and two generals that circulated on the internet. [Read more...]
Music Break. Cabo Snoop
February 29, 2012 By 3 Comments
An older Cabo Snoop tune (kuduristas in Angola and elsewhere have been dancing to ‘Zagala’ since 2010) but it comes with a new video in which he gets away with dropping his name (and record) among the Kenyan Maasai, while effortlessly branding the South African clothing label Amakipkip in a next shot.
Reverse Colonization
February 28, 2012 By 9 Comments
NPR’s European correspondent Sylvia Poggioli filed this piece on Friday. Titled “Portuguese Seeking Opportunities in Former Colonies” it takes a breezy look at how the economic crisis in Portugal has sent the Portuguese to the shores of former colonies in search of employment. A number of such articles have circulated in the international press in the last year. Like the others, Poggioli’s article settles for the easy irony of angry everyman opinion in place of in-depth analysis. It makes for a quick, four-minute piece with provocative sound bites (and why should I complain, it gave me something to post about?) but lacks anything but the most superficial sense of history. Enough of my blathering. Let’s just dig right in, shall we?
Introducing: Angolan singer Aline Frazão
February 13, 2012 By 1 Comment
Angolan music has its share of famed female voices. Belita Palma, Lourdes Van Dunem, and Dina Santos from the golden years of semba in the 1960s and 1970s, Nany and Clara Monteiro from the 1980s, as Gingas do Maculusso from the 1990s, and in the 2000s Yola Araujo, Yola Semedo and Perola, among a long list of other contenders. The most recent debut, Aline Frazão, draws deeply from the earliest generation and from a wealth of other sources, trans and circum-Atlantic. Unlike her predecessors, she was born in Luanda but currently resides in Santiago de Compostela, in Galícia, Spain.
Her first CD, Clave Bantu, is an independent production of eleven songs, all but two written by Ms. Frazão. The other two, Amanheceu (Dawn) and O Ceu da Tua Boca (The Roof of Your Mouth) were written by the highly regarded Angolan writers Ondjaki and José Eduardo Agualusa, respectively. With Frazão on guitar and vocals, Carlos Freire (Galícia) on percussion and Jose Manuel Díaz (Cuba) on bass, Clave Bantu evokes and returns to patterns that structure the rhythms of African musics and those of the African diaspora.
This video is for the first song on the album Assinatura de Sal (Salt’s Signature). Shot in black and white, it nicely underscores the clarity of the arrangement and the brightness of Frazão’s voice and the percussion:
