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Archive for November, 2008

South African TV just debuted this commercial, below, for a popular chicken fast food chain. It features the character Evita Bezuidenhout, a kind of South African Dame Edma played by satirist Pieter Dirk Uys. My hunch is it will be well-received as with much of Uys’ satire and comedy (he even got a free pass [...]

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“Show we a factory in the DRC that produces AK 47s. They don’t exist,” a UN colonel tells reporter Benjamin Pauker in this short PBS Frontline news piece on the source of the arms in that regional war (it implicates Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda) in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since 1998 at least 4 [...]

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Posted with vodpod “Buraka Som Sistema has become a European sensation, thanks to their unique take on kuduro, a strain of dance music from Luanda, Angola. Most recently, the band has worked with M.I.A. to produce the song “Sound of Kuduro,” currently making the rounds on YouTube and their newest album, Black Diamond. Kuduro originated [...]

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Video for her single “Fire on the Mountain.” Posted with vodpod Sample her music here.

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“You Think You Know Me…” Jazz Broadcasting Under Apartheid Gwen Ansell Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor, Columbia University Fall 2008 In 1955, the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s controller of ‘Bantu Music,” Dr. Yvonne Huskisson, had declared that the aim of official cultural policy was to wean Africans away from jazz. By 1969, however, she was praising [...]

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Front page of The New York Times today: A new study by Harvard researchers estimates that the South African government would have prevented the premature deaths of 365,000 people earlier this decade if it had provided antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients and widely administered drugs to help prevent pregnant women from infecting their babies. The [...]

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Pianist Abdullah Ibrahim talks to Philippa Kennedy in (the Adu Dhabi-based) The National about musical education: “… Ibrahim spends so much time in schools and colleges talking to young music students … He wants them to feel the music, not just play it. He talks about music as a holistic process that takes in body, [...]

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[Gary] Player’s website declares that he is “the most successful international golfer of all time.” But there is something extravagant about Mr. Player’s self-promotion, and not just because U.S. stars such as Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus have won more majors. His claim of supremacy outside the U.S. must also be qualified … During the [...]

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Sebokeng jazz. Funk. Soul. Poetry. Sesotho. Sankomota’s children. Posted with vodpod Sample their music here

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A number of people have forwarded me the URL for the trailer and website of “Black Adam The End of the White Guy,” a film about whiteness in South Africa. I even recognized a few of the people in the trailer. Posted with vodpod The point of the film, according to its website, is to [...]

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