Lil Wayne raps about being ‘tougher than Nigerian hair’ (on his megahit “A Millie”), Wale brags about “smelling like fufu.” Who knows what he’s talking about? Probably Wale, the D.C. rapper beloved by mainstream hipsters (think Pitchfork, The Fader, Complex) and who guested on The Legendary Roots Crew’s “Rising Down” (this is a link to the video of that song). Other background: he also a minor hit with his “Nike Boots Remix”).
He’s the son of Nigerian immigrants. And he raps about it. MP3 and analysis via Cocaine Blunts.]
Categories: Music
Tagged: A Milli, Cocaine Blunts, Cuz I'm African, go-go, hip hop, Lil Wayne, Music, Nigeria, rap music, smelling like fufu, tougher than Nigerian hair, Wale, Washington D.C
New York Magazine is working for John McCain.
Italian Vanity Fair recently tracked down Barack Obama’s half-brother, George, who lives in poverty in Nairobi, Kenya. This gives New York Magazine the opportunity to act like they can predict what McCain’s surrogates can do with this information, while exposing their own racism in the process. The best part:
…[D]iscussion of the poor, distant brother remind older white voters that Barack Obama is really black (like, Africa black) …
You can’t make up this bigotry passing as cleverness.
Source
Footnote: This is weird since the magazine’s last issue contained an article that went to the heart of why some whites will vote for McCain.
Categories: politics
Tagged: Barack Obama, Barack Obama and the US media, Barack Obama is really black, David Brock type journalism, John McCain, obligatory Barack Obama references, US presidential elections 2008, You can't make this stuff up
A bit late with the news, but worth nothing: While India is the ‘market focus’ for the 2009 London Book Fair (20-22 April). South Africa is up next in 2010. More here.
Categories: Books
Tagged: 2010 Market Focus, Books, literary culture, London Book Fair, South Africa
From hipster clothing company American Apparel’s new Afrika Collection (yes, they spelled Africa with a K). What was Dov Charney thinking? Looks more like the kind of cheap, kitch stuff I saw around backpacker lodges in Southern Africa, whether in Maputo or the top end of Cape Town’s Long Street It’s the kind of fabric tourists grab on Greenmarket Square, where Africa is something you buy and take home with you on the plane. The less said the better. More embarassment here. [Shout out to READER, who alerted me].
Categories: Not just about Africa
Tagged: Afrika Collection, American Apparel, clothes, Dov Charney, fashion, Hipster Exotica, spandex for Africa, You can't make this stuff up
Open water swimmer Natalie du Toit, also the first female amputee to compete in the Olympics, has been getting a lot of love in the US media ahead of tonight’s women’s marathon swim at the Olympics. Here’s USA Today (the soapy claim in the title is from a story in this paper), The New York Times and CNN. I doubt she’ll add to the medal count — South Africa has one silver against the four of neighboring Zimbabwe in the nationalist-driven contest.
Categories: sports
Tagged: Beijing Olympics, Michael Phelps, Natalie du Toit, South Africa, swimming, The Michael Phelps of South Africa, women's marathon swim
Like everywhere else, Rastafari is big in South Africa complete with afftected Jamaican patois, annual festivals, and even incorporated into (predominantly white) surfer culture. It also played a central role in the anti-apartheid struggle, not just at the level of Third Worldist critiques of that system, but Rastas were at the center of political action. For example, one member of the “Guguletu Seven” — the seven innocent young men murdered by Apartheid police in 1986 (and the subject of the documentary “Guguletu Seven”) was a committed Rasta. And since the end of Apartheid and as nationalist politics runs its course (exposed as a narrow, ethnic-based class project), Rastas are found at the forefront of the new social movements in that country. Director Vaugn Giyose’s short film “Zion Youth Crew” was the first attempt to catalogue this new postapartheid Rasta. Now Kurt Orderson, a young Cape Town-born filmmaker, has documented the emergence of a “a new generation of Rastafarian youths rising in postapartheid South Africa.” Here’s the trailer.
Categories: South Africa · film
Tagged: Chant Down Babylon, documentary films, film, Kurt Orderson, Music, postapartheid South Africa, Rastafari
This film, first released in 2006, chronicles the struggles of three female hip hop artists in South Africa — MC Chi, DJ Sistamatic and graffiti artist Smirk. Information from the film’s myspace site. You can see the trailer (a little grainy) here.
Categories: Music · film
Tagged: Counting Headz South Africa's Sistaz in Hip Hop, DJ Sistamatic, documentary films, film, films about hip hop, graffiti, Hip hop in South Africa, Johannesburg, MC Chi, Music, rap music, Smirk
I kinda like Al Jazeera English. So much so that I download it on iTunes–subscription is free–to follow its news reports (the dominant US cable providers have been shy to carry it, though looking at its online viewer statistics, it certainly has a large potential TV audience stateside). I am a big fan of “Inside Story” and the media analysis program “Listening Post.” And I like the way they make Africa into an ordinary continent. For those reasons I can even put up with Riz Khan and Jeff Hannas interview styles (it’s bad). But more recently they seem to be losing the plot somewhat and slipping. Take the new feature “Africa Uncovered.” I watched what appeared to the first episode a few days ago: a sensationalistic program on albinos in East Africa (it’s in two parts). I thought it was an aberration. Then I saw the “Africa Uncovered” episode on the “end of the rainbow in South Africa.” I was excited to see a program that delving into the race and class politics of the “new” South Africa. I was also interested given that the video was uploaded on the Al Jazeera around the time Irene Grootboom passed away. If you forgot, Irene Grootboom is the working class Cape Town woman who 10 years ago sued the postapartheid government to make real the new Constitution’s promise of a right to shelter and won her court case. Last week she died still living in the same shack. She was 39 years old. Instead Al Jazeera offered a focus on the racist rants of of Eugene Terreblance, the leader of the Afrikaanse Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), a fringe group of Neo-Nazis who briefly. The insert also focused on the families of white, right-wing political activists in prison for bombings. Somewhere in there was a discussion about Afrikaners’ (as a group) “marginalized status” in postapartheid South Africa. I had seen enough once I saw Terreblance predictably hamming it for the camera as he rides a horse (he did not fall off this time), driving his bakkie (pick-up truck) with black workers sitting at the back, reading bad poetry and making idle threats.
If you want to watch it, see here.
Categories: politics
Tagged: Africa in Western media, Africa Uncovered, Afrikaners and media, Al Jazeera does South Africa, AWB, Boeremag, coverage of South Africa in foreign media, Eugene Terreblance, media, Neo-Nazis, rightwing politics
Books always give me an excuse to talk about sports. On Saturday, South Africa’s national team, the Springboks, was soundly defeated by the New Zealand All Blacks in Cape Town. They are now bottom of the Tri-Nations (the other competitor is Australia). But more than a decade ago, after returning and fielding its first representative teams, the game was in much better shape as South Africa won the Rugby World Cup at its first attempt in 1995. That tournament, especially, the final, has now been consigned to lore. But its significance beyond sport is still talked up as the New York Times’s former South African correspondent Bill Keller reminds us in his review of British journalist John Carlin’s new book Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation (soon to be made into a movie with Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon).
BTW, Keller can’t resist either repeating inaccuracies and slurs. He writes, for example, that “[rugby] was a sport that most blacks considered–if they considered it at all–’the brutish, alien pastime of a brutish alien people.’” The myth of rugby as a white sport with blacks first starting to play the game at the end of Apartheid is now thoroughly discredited. As for the stereotype of Afrikaners as a “brutish alien people” that’s something I’ve seen more in foreign correspondents’ writings. I’ll add to it Keller’s man-crush on Francois Pienaar, the South African captain, later in the review as “a 6-foot-4 model of Afrikaner manhood.”
Categories: Books · South Africa
Tagged: 1995 Rugby World Cup, book reviews, Books, Francois Pienaar, Nelson Mandela, Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation, New York Times Book Review, rugby, South Africa, sports, Springboks
Under Apartheid South Africa’s Chinese community were variously classified as ‘Asiatic,’ ‘coloured,’ as well as ‘the Chinese Group.’ Some Chinese South Africans even successfully applied to be ‘reclassified’ as ‘white.’ In late June this year Chinese in South Africa won a class-action lawsuit to become officially become black. But the real material issue is affirmative action. I know it all sounds confusing. The reverberations of that decision is still being felt, including among Johannesburg’s Chinese community. Full story from Time magazine. [BTW, Japanese were 'honorary whites' under Apartheid. I'll explain another time].
Categories: South Africa
Tagged: affirmative action, China, China and South Africa, Chinese and Apartheid, South Africa, the politics of race, Time magazine, when the Chinese became black
