Africa Is a Country

John Akomfrah is Brilliant

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John Akomfrah is Brilliant

By
Sean Henry Jacobs

British filmmaker John Akonfrah will be artist-in-residence this Spring at New York University's Institute of African American Affairs.

British filmmaker John Akonfrah born in Ghana and raised in Britain, is a brilliant filmmaker. He has made almost 20 films (including on Martin Luther King Jnr. and Malcolm X).  Try and see his 1986 film “Handsworth Songs,” about racism and racial violence in 1980s Britain; a masterpiece. There’s also “The Last Angel of History/Mothership Connection” (1995). I have also heard great things about his most recent film, “Mnemosyne.”

Take “Handsworth Songs,” it went on to win seven international prizes, including the prestigious John Grierson Award for Best Documentary from the British Film Institute.  Here’s Pam Cook’s review in Sight & Sound when it was first released:

Variously described as a ‘documentary’ and a ‘film essay’ on race and civil disorder in Britain today, Handsworth Songs, as its title suggests, in fact owes more to poetic structures than to didactic exposition. Familiar TV and newspaper reportage is juxtaposed with opaque, elusive imagery, newsreel and archive material is reworked, and sound is pitted against image to release a multitude of unanswered questions about the underlying causes of ‘racial unrest’. The result is a powerful combination of anger and analysis, of lyricism and political strategy, elegy and excavation.

Akomfrah will be artist-in-residence this Spring at New York University.

He will be joined by the Ethiopian-American musician Meklit Hadero. The institute has several events planned around these two with the theme “The African Diaspora And/In The World.” They’re described as being “at the forefront of … [the] politics of new Pan-Africanism formations.” The institute’s website does not say much else as to what that implies (nor do the email notices I received about Akomfrah’s visit), so we’ll find out over the next two months.

It is the first time I hear of Hadero, but

At various points Akomfrah and Hadero will be joined by filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bekolo (from Cameroon), academic and poet Fred Moten, some of the participants of the Black Portrait Symposium, Ethiopian-American musician Danny Mekonnen, and artist Coco Fusco.

Details here.

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.

Energy for whom?

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.