The trailer for “Otelo Burning,” a new feature film set in Durban, a coming of age story set against the backdrop of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison about a group of young black teenagers, living in a township, learning to surf. It will open next month’s Durban International Film Festival.
I. want.to.see.this.
H/T: Akin Omotoso.
Dan Moshenberg has written guest posts for AIAC before and we’ve HT’d him a few times. But this posts marks the first of his weekly posts here on gender politics. He’ll keep the focus on Africa. Like today when he discusses Michelle Obama’s South Africa trip. Dan, who has lived in South Africa (I’ve known him for about 16 years), blogs at Women In and Beyond the Global (go check it out);and is director of Women’s Studies at George Washington University in Washington D.C.So watch out for it on Wednesdays–Sean Jacobs
The documentary film, Blacks Without Borders: Chasing the American Dream on Foreign Soil (2008, directed and produced by Stafford U. Bailey. Co-produced by Judy Thayer-Bailey)–which tells the story of a group of African-American professionals who immigrate to South Africa right after the end of legal Apartheid–is now on Youtube in its entirety. (It’s been since February last year). You can watch it in seven parts. Here‘s a link to part one. Anyway, when the film first came out 3 years ago, I was asked to review it. This what I wrote:
On Monday a new book on Malcolm X by the American intellectual and historian Manning Marable will come out. On Friday night Marable passed away. Though Marable, based until his passing at Columbia University, is less well-known outside the US, he started his career with a PhD dissertation on the South African political leader, John Dube (“African Nationalist: the Life of John Langalibalele Dube“, University of Maryland, 1976) and had an internationalist outlook (I remember interviewing him in Cape Town. I found him compelling and engaging. He was there on the invitation of Idasa (my former employer) for a comparative conference and research on racism in Brazil, the United States and South Africa.) The videos, above, and below were shot as marketing for his book, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (excerpted here), and point to some of the new research uncovered by Marable . Before his death Marable had also set up a tumbl blog and a website for his Malcom X Project which are worth visiting. Here and here are links to two obituaries. R.I.P.
I was hoping it would not come to this.
The Nelson Mandela Foundation has launched an “international clothing line.”
Backed by global-search-giant Google Inc., the foundation of aging South African leader Nelson Mandela is putting thousands of documents on the Internet, from a 1977 letter smuggled out of prison to his membership cards in the Methodist Church.
Google said Tuesday that it was providing a $1.25 million grant to the Nelson Mandela Center of Memory, part of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, to help preserve a trove of photographs, letters, calendars and journals through digital technology.
I strongly recommend reading the Chilean American writer, Ariel Dorfman’s Mandela Lecture–reproduced in The Nation Magazine in late January–that is also doubles as a review of Mandela’s new memoir “Conversations With A Myth.” (For one it gets the facts right.)
Here’s a sample:
It’s unfortunate the New York Times Book Review handed the appraisal of three recent books about Nelson Mandela–including Mandela’s own new book–to J.M. Ledgard, identified as “the Africa correspondent for The Economist.”* The books are Richard Stengel’s Mandela’s Way, David Smith’s Young Mandela, and Conversations with Myself by Nelson Mandela.
First, there are the factual errors–at least three leap out. First, Julius Nyerere’s name is spelled incorrectly. Then Ledgard writes: “… Mandela met with the head of the apartheid intelligence service, Niel Barnard, in the 1980s. Two other Robben Island prisoners were delegated by the A.N.C. to talk with Barnard: these were the future South African presidents Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma.”
But Thabo Mbeki never served time on Robben Island.
The Liberty Bell, a symbol of the American Revolution, is housed in a complex on Market Street in Philadelphia, reminding us of liberties gained and liberties denied. It’s one of the few historical exhibits I’ve seen that explores and expresses the contradictions in American history clearly, including explicit references (rather than a vague skip-over) of those “freedoms denied.”
If you’ve got four minutes, here’s the trailer for the highly anticipated (that’s debatable) biopic of Winnie Mandela, starring Jennifer Hudson as the title character and none other than Terrence Howard as Nelson Mandela. It looks cheap and they could at least have gotten the accents right.
This may be the most time I’ll be according this film.
