Kenyan artist Rabbit is working hard to get the word out about his new album Orutu Ya Masudi. The music video for ‘Yesterdays’ (and The Main Ingredient’s inspiration) will help.
New films roundup N°1
March 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Here’s my latest list of new films with African topics. From now on I’ll number them. So this is N°1. My plan is to become more systematic and regular about it and drop a list of 10 at a time. I also hope to do it once a week. (If I can’t, I am hoping Basia will pick up the slack.) First up, is “The Ambassador” classed as a documentary film by Danish comedian/film director Mads Brügger as a fake European ambassador in central Africa. I recently watched his last film, “The Red Chapel”, on Netflix. It is a rambling trickster movie where Brügger and two disabled actors of South Korean descent (adopted by Danish parents) travel to North Korea in an attempt to outwit his hosts’ censors. The result is tedium, driven by his droll delivery style. In the end, I was less interested in Brügger’s antics (even his two co-conspirators tire of him), so I am not sure what to make of this new project. Here’s the trailer:
‘Maasai Cricket Warriors’
March 16, 2012 By 11 Comments
The Maasai bear the weight of being one of the original noble savage dream tribals that the British and the Germans salivated over (in India, the Sikhs play the role of the exotic, animal protein-loving warriors, whose aggression got recruited into the Crown’s loyal service). The Maasai are such a standard-bearing cipher for all that ‘modernity’ regards as unadulterated, wild masculinity that a recurrent news story in Northern Euro/Brit tabloids is one where some random white European woman visits East Africa, meets the fabulousness that is the Maasai/Samburu warrior, and takes him back to her cold homeland. Then, there’s the inevitable photo of him bagging groceries at the local Aldi or Tesco (and his whole masculine juju is gone.) But here’s something different: the British newspaper The Telegraph, and US magazine The Atlantic (online) are running photographic galleries of strapping “Maasai Warriors” in full beads-and-braids regalia playing cricket. [Read more...]
‘Kenyan Water Project’
March 7, 2012 By 4 Comments
You have developed an online web conferencing and meeting tool. You need to build a brand for it and get people to use it. Fair. You then shoot an ad campaign to show how people can use the technology. How about a storyline about how a bunch of disparate people can come together to solve a problem … in Africa. That’s the GoToMeeting brand strategy across digital and traditional media with this ad campaign above.
Mutombo’s 375 kilograms of gold
March 2, 2012 By 4 Comments
The Houston Chronicle was first to cover the bizarre story of former NBA star Dikembe Mutombo’s botched gold job (after the UN published a report on it in December). Now The Atlantic also has a piece. The main players are Mutombo himself, a Houston businessman, a former West Point football player and Congolese army general and war criminal Bosco Ntaganda. Like all accounts about the ‘trading’ of minerals in Eastern Congo, it gets messy. [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.
The Whitney Soundtrack
February 14, 2012 By 1 Comment
Written by Guest Blogger Keguro Macharia
I grew up listening to Whitney Houston. Not simply in the sense that she was famous as I entered adolescence, but that the affect-world she created saturated and colored my sense of what it meant to live in the world. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was fun, Prince was nice to like, New Edition appealing, but Whitney’s “Greatest Love of All” felt transformative. Along with my best friend then—I claimed him as a best friend while he tolerated me—I memorized and sang the song, performing it, if memory serves, for a school assembly. I might be misremembering this. I do remember how affirming it was to believe, as a child, that children were “the future,” and how, as I entered my non-rebellious adolescence as a very religious person, I embraced the possibilities of living “as I believed,” determined not to “walk in anyone’s shadow.” [Read more...]
50 Cent goes to Somalia
February 10, 2012 By 13 Comments
So rapper 50 Cent (accompanied by American journalists) was in Somalia and Kenya this week to visit people living in refugee camps displaced by the civil war with Islamic militants. Expect lots of ’50 in Somalia’ reports on US television. 50 Cent, who joins a long line of celebrities helping Africans (he is being touted as the 21st century celebrity humanitarian already) handed out food and danced with the children. He also had enough time to pose for what looks like a movie poster shot with children (above) and a soldier (below), and to promote his energy drink Street King. If his Facebook page receives 1 million “likes” by Sunday, 50 will donate an additional one million meals. And he’ll sell more Street King in the process. We’ve also learned something about Somalia in the process.
[Read more...]
Trouble at the Global Fund
February 1, 2012 By 2 Comments
As Brett pointed out at the end of 2011, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB & Malaria (GFATM) recently had to cancel a new round of grants because funding has severely declined, and commitments made by donor countries have yet to materialize. As a result of the lack of funding, progress in many countries against the three diseases will be crippled until GFATM has the resources it needs. According to Medecins Sans Frontieres, 500 people marched in Nairobi on January 30th to protest the lack of funding for GFATM, which will directly impact people in Kenya. The Executive Director of the Global Fund, Michel Kazatchkine (in the picture above), also resigned last week.
2011: The Year of the Woman
December 21, 2011 By 11 Comments
It was a great year, maybe one of the best ever, for direct action in-the-streets in-your-face pro-democracy movements, and they were largely pushed and pulled by women. Starting with Tunisia, food uprisings spread quickly to Egypt, Algeria, and elsewhere across the continent. Sometimes, big men were pushed out.
