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Archive for October, 2007

Hip hop have always thrived on Cape Town’s Cape Flats; that vast expanse of coloured and African working class (and dotted with occasional middle class) neighborhoods on the periphery of the city’s mostly white and wealthy center.

Rap pioneers Prophets of da City (the subject of the new documentary by Dylan Valley and Sean Drummond), Black Noise (reinterpreting Afrika Bambataa back in Africa), and Brasse vannie Kaap (probably the closest thing to hip hop rockers; their song ‘Cape Flats’ a romp with reggae rockers Nine the best example) are all products of the Flats’ townships.

The success and visibility of these bands — in the days before Youtube, MySpace, MP3s, streaming and the partial democratization of technology — was tied down by legal apartheid or the uncertainty of immediate post-1994 music industry and dependent on television, radio spins, fanatical local followings (I saw Brasse in civic centers and school halls all over Cape Town), mainstream breakthroughts (playing at overwhelmingly white venues or festivals was the key to mainstream media pick-up) or international recognition (mainly in Europe). They often got plenty of attention (and got paid), but often struggled to be artists in their own right.

Artists like the late Devious present a transitional case: Attuned to the new technology (but with limited access), he faced up to a skeptical record company environment (kwaito’s bling guaranteed huge returns), but he was murdered before he could really take advantage of new opportunities.

The new artists and bands — as varied as Jitsvinger, Ben Sharpa, Konfab and Kallitz — may want all of that, but could care less. They can make music, despite and at the expense of record labels, commercial (and what’s left of community radio) or mainstream acceptance. For one, technology has changed. They’re all over Youtube, MySpace, Mp3, flickr.com — and some put all their music online for downloading, while others sell online to fans from Reukjavik to Brooklyn.

The most exciting exponent is Terror MC, set to emerge as the representative of the genre’s hard-core. Rapping over dancehall beats, full of braggadacio, and doing so in his mother tongue Afrikaans, this 21 year old MC from Kuilsriver, to the northwest of Cape Town, seems to have the farthest reach and a grasp of the technology and access to Cape Town’s mainstream and underground artistic set.

The best example is his track ‘Liberate Yourself’ produced by DPlanet and released on DPlanet’s Planetary Assault compilation). The video above is edited/produced/mashed-up by visual artist Mustafa Maluka (originally from Cape Town’s Bishop Lavis township, but now based in Berlin).

Recently I asked Mustafa about the video (the still images in the video are Mustafa’s own as well as the work of photographers Mikhael Subotsky and Scott Eric Williams), and about Terror MC:

Terror is someone who has gone through a lot for someone just aged 21. When I first met him, he was living in a shack with his mother and her boyfriend on the sandy dunes of Kuilsrivier. He was robbed of two years of his life after being sent from jail to reform school, back to jail and eventually escaped from a reform school. The charge: he beat up his mom’s boyfriend who had been abusing her. The case was eventually dropped after he spent 2 years in the system. None of his family members were willing to pay the low bail that was set each time he appeared in court.

‘He is currently finishing high school by attending night school classes. He uses money generated from the sales of his music to survive.

His independently released solo album will be released mid December 2007.

Keep checking his MySpace page for further details.

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Simon Kuper in the Financial Times reports on Luol Deng of the National Basketball Association’s Chicago Bulls .

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Awesome Tapes from Africa, a site that collects and streams obscure and familiar African music. Recently the site owner was featured on New York’s WFMU Radio). For background on the site and its owner, read here.

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‘The Ravaging of Africa, ‘… a four-part radio documentary series about the destructive impact of U.S. imperialism on Africa, featuring voices of African activists interviewed at the 2007 World Social Forum held in Nairobi, Kenya,’ that will not make the World Bank, IMF, African Union or various African governments happy, will be launched this week in Toronto, Canada.

It will then broadcast on at least 200 radio stations in the U.S., Canada, South Africa and Ireland (plans include to get CDs of the documentary to 45 community radio stations in South Africa.)

But you don’t have to be in Toronto or wait for it to get on radio. The entire series (episodes: ‘Militarizing Africa,’ ‘Economic War,’ ‘Corporate Plunder,’ and ‘African Renaissance,’ can be streamed here (scroll down).

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Columbia University Libraries Oral History Research Office has placed online a series of video interviews done as part of the Carnegie Corporation Oral History Project. Among these are interviews with South African political personalities, including the documentary photographer , former Robben Island political prisoner and postapartheid president of the Land Claims Court Fikile Bam, lawyer Geoff Budlender, president of the Constitional Court Arthur Chaskalson, human rights lawyer John Dugard, labor researcher Mary-Jane Moriri, medical doctor and political activist (and later deputy president of the World Bank) Mamphele Ramphele, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and economist Francis Wilson.

The excellent series (including biographical descriptions of the participants) — I have listened to some of these interviews — can be downloaded here.

* The image is by Omar Badsha.

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The Spring 2007 issue of Private Photo Review, the Italian magazine of ‘black and white photographs and texts’ focuses on African photographers.

The editors note in the introduction:

… Next to exogenous images of ourselves [meaning Westerners], which are relayed by media and advertising and threaten to surround and close us in archetypes, there are endogenous images waiting to burst out and express what [the French psychologist Henri] Delacroix calls the ‘chaotic world of sensations.’ … Mastering this split image is the role which photographers of African origin have assigned themselves, sometimes against their better judgement, in order to avoid misunderstandings…

Private Photo Review‘s website previews the issue (which looks better in hard copy).

I copied some of my favorites above (Yolande Snyders’ pictures of the Cape Town, South African based hip hop crew, Brasse vannie Kaap) and below:


Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi


Boubacar Toure Mandemory

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Martina Kudláček interviews Isaac Julien in the latest issue of BOMB magazine about his triptych of films about journing across continents and cultures – True North, Fantôme Afrique and Small Boats, a film about African immigration to Italy.

Small Boats can be viewed at Metro Pictures in New York City from 26 October through to 17 November.

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WPS1 Art Radio is the online station of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, in turn part of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

The station’s website reports that it interviewed Malian photographer Malick Sidibé, among others. You can listen to the interview at WPS1 Art Radio’s website. (The occasion was Sidibé being awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 52nd Venice Biennial.

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Docfest 07, the annual documentary festival of the Paley Center for Media (formerly The Museum of Television & Radio), kicked off last night in New York City and runs through November 1.

Aside from the general focus, the festival features a special ‘Focus Africa’ section. It is not entirely clear why the festival has an African focus (this is never explained on the Center’s website or the press statements they sent out).

It becomes clear quite clear though, as New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis (in an essay that proved the exception on African film writing in the US mainstream press) concluded earlier this year, that:

… [I]t is naïve to think that [American-made] films [about African subjects], including a fair share of the documentaries, are being made on behalf of Africa and its people; they are made for us.

The most obvious case is the film Darfur Now, which is part of the main program for DocFest 07, and which will premiere at the festival. The publicity material for the film includes the following:

Darfur Now profiles the struggles and achievements of six individuals seeking to end the genocide: a mother driven to join the rebel forces when her family is killed; a beleaguered U.N. aid worker whose food convoys are regularly hijacked; the director of an overwhelmed refugee camp; a tireless prosecutor from the International Criminal Court in The Hague; a grad student lobbying for legislation that will outlaw U.S investment in Sudan; and an actor and activist, Don Cheadle, who uses his fame to raise public awareness of the crisis.

If the film trailer is anything to go by you’d think Westerners are the only people doing something to stop the genocide in Darfur. The trailer focuses mainly on the four Western men of this group, including the actor Don Cheadle, and their efforts to save Darfur (even Arnold Schwarchenegger gets the rousing musical treatment and the association with Cheadle and Clooney).

You can watch the trailer here.

As for the three films included in ‘Focus: Africa’ section, all three are by non-African directors. Technically one of the co-directors — she is more a producer — of a film on HIV/AIDS in South Africa is from that country.

But this seems to be the norm nowadays when it comes to creative output about Africa featured in the West.

I am not saying American or non-Africans should not make films about Africa or that some of these are not good (in fact, Jamie Meltzer’s Welcome to Nollywood, one of the three films at the Docfest 07, is quite informative and entertaining), but often in the US you’d think Africans don’t make films unless you regularly check out festivals like the New York African Film Festival or scan obscure cable TV channels.

On Darfur, for example, the Sudanese filmmaker Taghreed Elsanhouri’s All About Darfur, actually makes ordinary Sudanese speak. The same can be said for the work of Abderrahmane Sissako, Jean-Marie Teno, Jihan El-Tahri or Dumisani Phakathi.

(This by the way seems to be the norm when it comes to creative output: whether it is opinion writing (the usual go-to-guys are Jeffrey Sachs, William Easterly who end up debating each other and forget about what what Africans think or want) or journalism (the recent Vanity Fair ‘Special Africa Issue’ featured only one African, for example.)

* The still above, illustrating this post, is from the publicity material for the documentary film, The Devil Came on Horseback in which ‘… a white, middle-class American from a military family, is the focus of a movie about a black-African catastrophe.’

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Last week Sathima Bea Benjamin, the South African jazz singer and one of my favorite artists, turned 71.

To celebrate her record company reissued her classic 1963 recording A Morning in Paris — that she had recorded with Duke Ellington, pianist Billy Strayhorn, her husband Dollar Brand (now Abdullah Ibrahim), bassist Johnny Gertze and drummer Makhaya Ntsoko — online: on iTunes, emusic and other online music retailers.

The reissue will only be available as a disk in early January next year.

The album resurfaced in 1996 when it was released on CD after many had thought the recording was lost.

Sathima’s career has definitely suffered from being in Ibrahim’s shadow. But interest in her is increasing. Separately I am aware that a documentary film — I don’t know the status of the production now — is being made about Benjamin’s career by South African based director Angie Mills.

* For more on the album and Ms Benjamin see her website as well as the blog South African Music and South African Jazz.

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