In an astoundingly ambitious new series of 12 feature-length documentaries titled The Price of Kings (available to watch online) the British production company Spirit Level Films challenge the perception of leadership in provocative and imaginative ways. Through a creative counterpoint between historical ‘truth’ and memory, and supported by powerful archival material, the series thoughtfully and powerfully critiques often intractably difficult political histories. Melding archival footage with interviews with some of the most prominent (and controversial) politicians and activists alive, the series delves into the careers of divisive characters in recent political history, starting with Yasser Arafat.
Documentary: ‘The Price of Kings’
March 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Nelson Mandela (Hollywood; plural)
February 15, 2012 By 1 Comment
Rumours are circulating on various Hollywood gossip and film blogs that Stringer Bell also known as Idris Elba — the East London boy made good in Hollywood — is next in line to play Nelson Mandela. Surfing on the mammoth success of his character in The Wire, his relatively popular series Luther on the BBC (but so shocked were we that he actually has an English accent it was difficult to concentrate on the rest), a brief role in Thor and the excited buzz (and fear) of Ridley Scott’s upcoming Alien prequel Prometheus, Elba is rumored to be the chosen one for an ‘official biopic’ of Mandela’s life. If the rumors are true, our beloved Stringer, the towering be-tracksuited crime underboss turned businessman will join a line of famous black actors who have attempted to incarnate the great Mandela. But do they incarnate, or impersonate? Lets have a look at their efforts. [Read more...]
February 11, 1990
February 11, 2012 By 2 Comments
Today, 22 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked free from a prison outside Cape Town. Four years later, in April, the ANC won South Africa’s first democratic elections and in May 1994, Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa’s first black president. These were, however, only 22 years in the 100 year history of the ANC and in the long history of colonialism, Apartheid and now brief freedom in South Africa. Last month the ANC held a massive party in Mangaung, the place where it was founded in January 1912 by a small group of activists. Hundreds of thousands people headed to the capital of the now Free State province. But this is also a different ANC. Its legacy is not so clear cut anymore and we have covered the personalities that shape it as well as some of its calamities on this blog. Amongst the thousands at the ANC celebrations in Bloemfontein was Prexy Nesbitt, a trade unionist, college professor (he’s taught for years at Columbia College) and leading figure in the US anti-apartheid movement as well as the liberation struggles in Angola and Mozambique between the 1960s and the 1980s. He has a long association with Southern African freedom movements. When Prexy returned to his home in Chicago, he jotted down his impressions of the celebrations, of the ANC and South Africa. With his permission we republish it here. We think it is a fitting reflection on the commemoration of a momentous day. –Sean Jacobs [Read more...]
Mandela and the ANC
January 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment
* Melissa Levin will write occasional posts about Canada’s media for AIAC. Her very first post, on media representations of the ANC’s centenary can be found here.
One of the recent tweets at @GSElevator, the anonymous Twitter profile that claims to record conversations overheard in Goldman Sachs elevators concerns Nelson Mandela: “#1 If I got fired, I’d take a couple years off and sit on my ass. #2 Mandela didn’t do shit for like 25 years.” Apart from displaying the arrogance and rightwing politics of Wall Street, it also reflects the divergent, incorrect and unrealistic reactions Mandela evokes among his detractors and supporters. The tweet also reminded me of an opinion piece I read in The Toronto Star last weekend about how the ANC centenary this year suffered from the absence of Mandela.
This is Freedom
September 30, 2011 By 3 Comments
So three of Nelson Mandela’s grandchildren will star in their own reality television show for South African television. The show will go on air in 2012. The main characters will be sisters Swati Dlamini-Manaway (34), and Zaziwe Dlamini-Manaway (32), and their cousin, Dorothy Adjoa Amuah (27).
The three held a press conference in Johannesburg announcing the show.
One journalist likens the show to something resembling “… the Kennedys, with a dash of the Kardashians.” I can’t even imagine what that is.
One of the stars, Dorothy Amuah refers to herself as part of “a new middle class of intellectuals” and was quick to play down the comparisons: they’re definitely “not the African Kardasians.”
The Nonviolent Transition in South Africa
September 27, 2011 By 1 Comment
The American philosopher Lewis Gordon, in an essay on affirmative action:
There are those who praise South Africa for making the transformation to a supposedly post-Apartheid society nonviolently. Without violence? The many blacks (in the Black Consciousness conception) and their supporters who were killed, tortured and imprisoned; the many protesters harmed; the tanks; the guns; the dogs; the 3 AM knock on the door; the many instances of trauma, none of them count? What is hidden in this misguided notion, as with what is suppressed about racism and sexism in the anti-affirmative action rhetoric of reverse discrimination and qualifications, is this: in a white supremacist state, violence is only recognized if it is waged against whites.
So, the hysteria about crime, about insecurity in South Africa is, as no doubt everyone knows, similar to the same in the United States. Even when the actual figures of violent crime declined, incarceration of blacks was high, because there was, in effect, the criminalization of a people. As violent appearance, black visibility was criminalized.
An odd feature of post-colonial states is that criminalization of black populations doesn’t require white institutional leadership. In so-called black countries, the phenomenon is there and it is color dependent, where darker-skin blacks are the most criminalized. The reasons for this are manifold, but most amount to the near isomorphic relationship between closed social options and skin color as a legacy of racialized slavery and colonialism in the midst of post-colonial environments heavily invested in keeping capital in the hands of the former governing population.
Happy Birthday Nelson Mandela
July 18, 2011 By 2 Comments
South Africa’s first democratic president is 93 years old today.
The artwork is a collaboration between the two Dutch artists Anton Corbijn and Berend Strik. (Via: ZAM Magazine)
* It would be appropriate to click through to our February 11, 2010 post “Songs for Nelson Mandela” (on the 10th anniversary of Mandela’s release of Mandela). Here.
‘The little black fella’
July 4, 2011 By Leave a Comment
From a review of the English, former professonal footballer Paul Merson’s new autobiography (his second) which is full of his exploits with drink and gambling:
In South Africa we were introduced to to this little black fella with grey hair. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked Kenny Sansom [his Arsenal teammate]. ‘It’s Nelson Mandela, Merse. He’s one of the most famous people in the world.’
Source: When Saturday Comes.
