Not personally in love with the song, and I get this feeling all the way through that I want to hear the music the dancers are actually moving to, but this is great slow motion footage of “street” dancers in Rwanda and Burundi.
July 1, Burundi, Rwanda and Somalia
July 1, 2011 By 1 Comment
The Rwandan Glass Ceiling
June 29, 2011 By 2 Comments
The second instalment of Dan Moshenberg’s weekly posts (his first here) on that place where gender, Africa and media collide.–Sean Jacobs
By Dan Moshenberg
Let’s talk about Rwandan women.
Last Friday, June 24, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko and her son Arsene Ntahobali, were found guilty of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, including multiple rapes of Tutsi women and girls. The two were tried at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, located in Arusha, Tanzania. The ICTR is a United Nations tribunal. Nyiramasuhuko was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Pauline Nyiramasuhuko was family affairs and women’s development minister in the administration of President Juvenal Habyarimana. By all accounts, Nyiramasuhuko, a Hutu, organized and led massacres, torture and mass rapes of Tutsi women and girls in the border town of Butare.
Nyiramasuhuko is the first woman to be found guilty of genocide by an international tribunal, and the Western news media had a field day: “Rwandan ex-minister becomes first woman convicted of genocide”: “Rwandan woman, a former govt minister, is first female convicted of genocide; son also guilty”. The BBC was particularly enchanted by the killer’s gender: “Rwanda genocide: Verdict due for female former minister”; “Profile: Female Rwandan killer Pauline Nyiramasuhu”. That’s one helluva glass ceiling.
When does being a Rwandan woman matter? When that woman is a killer, a rapist, a torturer, a `monster’. Not when she is an organizer and a healer.
Newt Gingrich goes to Africa
June 5, 2011 By 6 Comments
News that New Gingrich and his third wife, Callista, are going on vacation from his campaign to become the next US president in 2o12, reminded us of the time Newt and Callista went to Africa.
In the video, above, Newt talks about how when he was a boy, he wanted to work with the natural world. I had those same dreams. Mine were fueled by watching Richard Attenborough’s “Life on Earth.” But my hopes for the future didn’t include putting the animals into zoos.
Maybe that’s where Newt Gingrich and I went our separate ways.
Gingrich emotes (as much as he’s capable) here about his youthful dreams of becoming a vertebrate paleontologist, or a zoo director. (He’s visited over 95 zoos in the world.)
Perhaps part of a campaign to look less animal and more human, Gingrich and his current wife went on a whirlwind Smithsonian-National Geographic-San Diego Zoo joint trip to Africa that took them from Luxor, Egypt, to Rwanda (where he supposedly “hiked” in the Ruwenzori), the Serengeti (in time to see the annual great migration), Zambia (where his wife, Calista, walked out of the hotel room to shoo away a monkey in order to photograph a giraffe), Mali, “a very poor country,” and finally, Marrakech, which “surprised” them in its comparableness to “Italy” (and therefore a place he would recommend to anyone).
Throughout the interview, Newt can’t help doing the zoo-director-educational-bit: in Madagascar, they “spent time with the lemurs, which are “very early pre-monkeys” that didn’t evolve from their ‘primitive’ state because the island was isolated from the mainland.
In Cape Town, he saw actual people when he went to mass: there, the “Ho-sa community” sang Amazing Grace “in Ho-sa” (we think he means Xhosa). It reminded him of being in Beijing, where they heard the same hymn sung in Chinese. These two experiences culminated in profound thoughts about the “diversity” in the world – though to us, it seems more of an indication of the power that neo-Evangelical Christianity has to flatten diversity.
And finally, it comes out: he and Calista are “fortunate” to be working with “Citizens United” (watch out, the webpage opens to a creepy montage of shooting, explosions, and other war sounds). Citizen’s United landing page states that it “seeks to reassert the traditional American values of limited government, freedom of enterprise, strong families, and national sovereignty with security,” and seems to misuse French writer, Alexis de Tocqueville’s admiring-yet-wry critique of “American Exceptionalism.” In Newt and Calista’s hands, de Tocqueville’s analysis is wholly laudatory: America, as a ”new republic,” is a place where one’s social standing has no bearing on one’s potential, but a place where “liberty, equality, individualism, and laissez-faire economics defined the ‘American Creed,’” in which the American people rise “to great challenges — sometimes out of necessity but often out of the determination to create a better future.”
Values that couldn’t be more “African.”
The films of Kivu Ruhorahoza
May 7, 2011 By 7 Comments
The Tribeca Film Festival ended last weekend. I didn’t get to see any films. (Late April, early May is a busy time where I teach). Anyway, a quick glance at the 2011 schedule shows only four films with African themes. Two “from South Africa,” one from Egypt (made by Americans and Europeans) and one by a Rwandese. It is the latter film, “Grey Matter,” by Kivu Ruhorahoza that I really want to see. Tribeca hyped it as “… the first feature-length narrative film directed by a Rwandan filmmaker living in his homeland,” though Australia also gets credit for the film. If you’re wondering if he sounds familiar, he used to go by Daddy Ruhorahoza. We’ve featured him here before. In the video above, Kivu talks about the film. Different sources say the film and Ruhorahosa as a director is the real deal. For example, right after seeing it, Alexis Okeowo tweeted that “Grey matter” was “… incredible, beautifully written, acted, and directed. best film i’ve seen this year.” Last week the film won two awards for the festival: Best Actor in a Narrative Feature Film (for lead Ramadhan “Shami” Bizimana) and a Special Jury Mention for Ruhorahoza. The jury wrote of Ruhorahoza’s direction: “… For its audacious and experimental approach, this film speaks of recent horrors and genocide with great originality. We wanted to give a special commendation to this filmmaker for his courage and vision.” I promise to see it and report back.–Sean Jacobs.
‘Making Rwanda a more tragic place than it needs to be’
April 4, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Stephen Smith in The London Review of Books:
I am not arguing that we should all know everything there is to know about Rwanda. My point is that we don’t seem to want to know what happened in 1994, or what’s happening now. We’ve learned the wrong lesson from the organised massacre of 800,000 people, which we failed to prevent. Eager to pay off our moral debt, we’re blinded by guilt. The near total lack of media coverage of the ICTR [the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in neighboring Tanzania] trials and findings suggests that we’re happy to waive our best chance of grasping the inner workings of the genocide. We clamour for international justice but the detailed proceedings of the tribunal don’t interest us. At the same time, the denial of freedom and rights under the previous regime in Rwanda impels us to shower [Paul] Kagame with leadership awards and aid money even as he denies them again. We are hypnotised by the 1994 genocide, and oblivious to the atrocities of a regime we regard as exemplary. Aid, we say, must be conditional on good governance – but post-genocide government is an exception. La Francophonie is at best ridiculous and at worst a vector of France’s influence, but the Commonwealth is honourable as it embraces a dictator who favours English over French. Democracy is a precondition of peace – but not in a post-genocidal state. Justice, truth and reconciliation heal – but not the wounds of exterminatory hatred. The invasion and plunder of eastern Congo are criminal – but not when they’re carried out by genocide survivors. Hutu power is bad, but Tutsi chauvinism is acceptable. We hold these opinions not because they’re right but because they put us on the right side. This makes Rwanda a more tragic place than it needs to be.
‘The Media-Savvy Autocrat’
April 3, 2011 By 3 Comments
Adam Hochschild, in the New York Times Book Review, writing about Jason K Stearns’ new book, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa:
Stearns is somewhat easier on Rwanda here than he has been elsewhere, for example, in a United Nations report he contributed to. But he does quote the Rwandan strongman and current president Paul Kagame as calling his military intervention “self-sustaining,” and cites an estimate that the Rwandan Army and allied businesses reaped some $250 million in Congolese minerals profits at the height of the second war. Such figures are backed up in abundant detail in a series of United Nations reports, and ultimately led Sweden and the Netherlands to suspend aid to Rwanda.
Not so the United States. It has supported Kagame for years, contributing indirectly to Congo’s suffering. How this media-savvy autocrat has managed to convince so many American journalists, diplomats and political leaders that he is a great statesman is worth a book in itself.
Is Hochschild calling out Philip Gourevitch?
What’s Kenya Got To Do With It?
March 17, 2011 By 4 Comments
That was our second question. Our first was, “What is this?” The answer to the latter is Music for RAIN (Replenish Africa Initiative), a Coca Cola-backed project described as the “music community’s response to the problem of access to water in Africa.” By the music community, they mean Solange Knowles, Chris Taylor and Twin Shadow. As you can probably guess, our third question was “Who?” No matter, for this is Africa.
Which bring us back to our first question.
BBC: “Is Homosexuality Un-African?
March 11, 2011 By
This weekend the BBC World Service (on satellite TV and its radio service) will broadcast an edited version of a debate on gay rights in Africa. The debate was taped in Johannesburg, South Africa.” The key focus of the debate was: ” Is Homosexuality Un-African?” We know the answer to that question: No it is not.
The pre-publicity for the debate suggests the host and panelists would tackle more useful questions:
Tit for Tat
February 10, 2011 By 1 Comment
What happens when journalists attack? To find out, look no further than the pages of this month’s “Columbia Journalism Review.” The story begins with “One Man’s Rwanda,” Tristan McConnell’s feature on American journalist Philip Gourevitch, most famous for his best-selling book on the Rwandan genocide, “We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families.” As McConnell notes, the feature is “an exploration of the debate over how Paul Kagame and his Rwanda are represented in the Western press, a debate approached through the frame of one Rwanda’s best known chroniclers.” McConnell’s point, which I don’t dispute, is that as the dominant narrative about Paul Kagame has begun to change, Gourevitch’s writing and reporting has failed to change with it. This, despite the release of high-profile documents implicating Kagame and his government in serious crimes, including most recently the UN mapping report, and signs of growing repression within the country. It’s a fair piece, which in the end, also reveals that almost 17 years after the fact, no one has yet to figure out how to talk about Rwanda, least of all Gourevitch.
Gourevitch, of course, responded by doing his best Alex Perry impression. You’ll remember fellow American journalist Alex Perry’s freakout last year over criticism about his coverage of the Congo, or as Perry likes to put it, “the sucking vortex where Africa’s heart should be.”
