Two Africa is a Country contributors–Neelika Jayawardane and Kathryn Mathers–have pieces in the latest issue of Transition, the Harvard creative writing magazine. That’s the cover above with the theme “Blending Borders.” Neelika’s article “Everyone’s got their Indian,” (you need a subscription) is on racial politics in postapartheid South Africa. Though she’s been meaning to write about this topic for a while, I know this visit to South Africa let to the piece. Kathryn’s has a similarly provocative title, “Mr Kristof, I Presume.” (Hers you can read in full. The link takes you a PDF of the article.) Here, before you click away, is the first page of Kathryn’s article: [Read more...]
Shameless Self Promotion
February 9, 2012 By 5 Comments
Even the Elephants Fled to Kenya
March 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Josephine Ablang, the very young Minister of Finance, Trade, and Industry from Eastern Equatoria State in South Sudan, and Zeinab Yassim, Special Advisor to the Governor of Eastern Equatoria on Gender and Human Rights Issues, are in the US, on a mission to sell their new country. They arrive hours later than planned at the college where I teach–we are told that they were late because of “different international systems” (a polite way to say that they are on “African Time”). When Her Excellency Ms Ablang takes the floor, she is quick to correct: we are not late because of “different international systems” – but because she is feeling quite sick: it is a matter of different weather systems.
T.I.A. (at Victoria’s Secret)
December 4, 2010 By 8 Comments
Hmmm. Afro-Maori fantasy? With Brazillian wax. (Oh, if you missed out T.I.A. stands for This is Africa)–Neelika Jayarwadane
Kanye West’s Nigerian Inspiration
October 25, 2010 By 1 Comment
Neelika Jayawardane
Looks like Kanye’s decision to enlisted the expertise of choreographer Yemi Akinyemi to mobilise the sinews in his 35-minute film, Runaway, will position this surreal fantasy with the best of Nollywood and Noir. The black swan dance – accompanied by Pusha-T’s rhymes, and Italian performance artist Vanessa Beecroft’s Art Direction - is mesmerising, especially the expert leg work of the two principal ballerinas.
Mandela in the Cross Hairs
October 14, 2010 By 2 Comments
By Neelika Jayawardane
A lesser man may relish, cultivate, and aid the construction of living icon-hood (see Out of Africa Redux). But in Conversations with Myself, the “sequel” to Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela reveals “anxiety about how his life as leader of the anti-apartheid struggle affected relatives”, insistent that the public should not, in fact, mistake him for a mythical hero:
One issue that deeply worried me in prison was the false image I unwittingly projected to the outside world; of being regarded as a saint. I never was one, even on the basis of the earthly definition of a saint as a sinner who keeps trying.
The book project began with an extraordinary mandate: “Take my personal archives, and do what you want with them,” says Bob Simon of 60 Minutes. Verne Harris, chief archivist at the Mandela Foundation was charged with presenting former president “warts and all”: Mandela told Harris, “You don’t have to protect me,” and to use material from personal notebooks without asking “Is this too personal … potentially embarrassing?”
Given such a mandate, what a pity that Yuill Damaso, whose re-mix of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulip” (1632)–in which the South African artist painted Mandela in flat planes of desert browns, dead and undergoing an autopsy–created such a fuss back in July this year: for doing a bad painting that was meant (in the artist’s own words) to get South Africans to see Mandela as a human being – warts and all.
The Security Guard
August 2, 2010 By 4 Comments
To call Jane Alexander’s “Yield”, a montage of her sculptures from 1997-2000, is to reduce the power of her work. The sculptures, arranged in one of the inner rooms of Michael Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town (South Africa), include 1000 machetes, 1000 sickles, red industrial strength rubber gloves (the kind worn by people working with corrosive matter), and high-explosive anti-tank ammunition boxes from the Angola-South African war, and fifteen humanoid figures – two, three, four feet tall, some bearing perfectly formed hands, individually sculpted toes, and male (human) genitalia.
Cheryl Koralik’s Heat of Darkness
July 26, 2010 By 2 Comments
Cheryl Koralik’s images of Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, and Burkina Faso are a panoply of black and white – containing a beauty that is hard not to find deeply alluring. “Masques,” Koralik’s series of twelve images from Francophone West Africa, and “Notes from Africa” offer a range of full ceremonial dress, masks, dust, and wondrous sights, transforming the viewer–if not the gaze.
