Africa

OXFAM | G8 Big Heads | Oxfam activists posing as the G8 leaders revel in a game of high stakes poker over the future of Africa. Photo: Craig Owen / Oxfam.

Q-DRUM | The Q-Drum's simple design makes makes the transport of water a far less burdensome task. The innovative longitudinal shaft allows the container to be easily rolled while reinforcing stability.

JANE ALEXANDER | The Butcher Boys | Performers posing as Jane Alexander's Butcher Boys moved along the roof of the Lookout Centre in Khayelitsha, South Africa. The original Butcher Boys consists of three otherworldly humanoid-like creatures sitting on a bench, devoid of their senses. The controversial work has arguably become one of South Africa's most recognized anti-apartheid artworks.

Ishmael Beah on Child Soldiers and Hip-hop & Romeo Dallaire on Corporate Media

Yesterday I attended the Montreal book launch of Ishmael Beah's new novel, "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier," which is holding strong at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. The talk at McGill University, included an introduction by Senator Romeo Dallaire, who gave a power point presentation about child soldiers all over the world (the UN estimates there are between 250,000 and 300,000) and the need to put pressure on countries like the security council five (USA, Great Britain, France, Russia, China) to stop the production and dissemination of light weight arms, the key to making children effective instruments of warfare. Beah followed with first-hand accounts of being forced into warfare in Sierra Leone at the age of 12 for two years, his time as a sleep-deprived, drug laden child killer, his rehabilitation, and his focus on activating change in his home country and around the world.

Beah also spoke of "old school hip hop" and how that art of storytelling and meaningful music helped him survive his experience. Beah told the packed room that since the war has ended, that there has been a "music explosion" in Sierra Leone. He listed off a whack of groups currently tackling issues like corruption, healing and war through music. Here are just a few groups to check out on Beah's recommendation: Baw Waw Society, Eemmerson, Jimmy B, and the Jungle Leaders. The BBC has also produced an audio documentary, "The Beautiful Struggle" that looks at politics and music in postwar Sierra Leone...

Bamako Film puts the World Bank on Trial and Wins

This past February Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako was released in the UK and North America. The film is a searing indictment against the IMF and the World Bank, shot documentary-style with real lawyers, witnesses and family members, culminating in a fictitious mock-trial where African society "legally" challenges the World Bank. The direction is exceptional, but the dialogue is unflinching in its politics, where witnesses speak of the devastating effects that 20 years of structural adjustment policy by the G8 has had on the African continent.

The film launches a devastating, albeit rhetorical, blow to economic neoliberalism and the West's inability to intervene in the process of privatization. Witnesses give long speeches that connect the audience to the real lives lived in Mali - the country where the trial takes place - and to the socio-political realities of much of African society. The film is an emotionally-charged personal essay articulated by many, levied against the powerful and the affluent, and acted out in the courtyard of the director's family, where throughout his upbringing he was politicized through lengthy debates on Africa and the West with his father. Bamako is mostly potent speeches from African teachers and writers who expose the regressive and destructive nature of privatization, who point to the complete and utter failure of an imported economic strategy, and who tell stories of suffering and struggle caused by or exacerbated by such policy. Do not be fooled, there is little pity to be found in all this: the vigorous speeches set a fiery tone of anger, resistance and regeneration that should cause even the odd republican bow-tied banker on Wall Street to at least exercise the imagination in seeing numbers as real, lived consequences. Bamako is after all, a film that personalizes policy without pulling any punches.

The trial device is the central element of the film, with some snippets of stories acted outside of the courtyard, revealing "life-as-usual" day to day activities like weddings, work, family, and relationship complexities. However the heart of this film is an uncompromising investigation into the greedy, racist and neo-colonial economic policies of a self-concerned Western hegemony and the ultimately destructive policy effects on the continent of Africa. The problem's cause identified and indicted, the film also focuses on accountability and "sentencing" for the guilty. This adds up to a powder keg of calculated political attacks that places power in the hands of the oppressed, at least for two incredibly moving cinematic hours. It is an important piece of art that demands an especially Western audience, as it is after all the West's leaders who apparently act in the interest of the West's populations while pursuing the pillage-based policy of Africa. As Sissako says:

"...faced with the seriousness of the situation in Africa, I felt a kind of urgency to bring up the hypocrisy of the North towards the Southern countries."

For more information visit the Bamako site.

K'naan Snags BBC World Music Award

K'naan, a Somali-Canadian hip-hop artist whose political lyrics often take us to his war ravaged homeland, has won a music award from the BBC. The broadcaster's annual Radio 3 Awards, designed to celebrate the best in "world music", have selected K'naan as "best newcomer" of the year. This honour comes close to two years after his first full-length record, The Dusty Foot Philosopher was released in 2005.

Wynton Marsalis Continues the Project of Jazz and Politics with a New Album

Prolific American jazz musician Wynton Marsalis has released one of his most political albums to date with "From the Plantation to the Penitentiary." Mixing his traditionalist jazz technique with spoken word delivered in angry and powerful bouts, this album is a one part indictment of a history of racism that continues in America against its African descendent population and one part call to arms for that population to rise up. Bluenote describes the album of as "uncompromising" and one that offers "looks at the cracks in America's facade of prosperity and happiness. A BBC Jazz review by Matthew Rogers sums up the album best:

Marsalis releases his fury with American culture with the first note of his solo in the title track, seemingly saying: 'sit up and and be righteously angry at these injustices.' By the final cut, “Where Y’all At?”, where a soulful chorus is interrupted by a sharp-tongued Wynton interjecting spoken-word rants before the album’s abrupt end, you'll be shaken. This is powerful stuff.

What is most refreshing is that Marsalis continues to provoke and push the boundaries of jazz - blending his knowledge of classical and traditional jazz with trumpet sounds that pierce the night and punctuate the complacency and inequities that he continues to battle to this day. Marsalis has been a prolific performer with 16 classical albums and over 30 jazz albums to his name, and has matched these efforts with his dedication to civic involvement in politics, most recently emerging as one of New Orleans's most outspoken and outstanding civic leaders in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

To read up on Marsalis, visit his site, or the Wikipedia page on him. To pick up his album, visit bluenote's site.

Letter from Joe Richman of Radio Diaries, from South Africa

A letter from Joe at Radio Diaries arrived in our inbox late last night:

Dear Friends of Radio Diaries,

I'm writing to you from South Africa where we are on the last leg of Thembi's AIDS Diary tour. I had not planned to send an email update, as most of you live in the US. But our two week tour of this country with Thembi and Melikhaya (Thembi's boyfriend) has turned into the most valuable thing Radio Diaries has ever done. Thembi has talked to thousands of people - in person and over the airwaves - from a high school in Soweto, to Constitution Hill in Johannesburg, to a clinic in a squatter camp on a former municipal dump, to a small village with no electricity or running water.

Thembi has been giving out her cell phone number in radio interviews and at events, and dozens of people have been calling her everyday - a woman looking for the nearest clinic, a young girl wanting to know how long she should stay a virgin. Thembi has become the host of her own cell phone call-in show.

Please see Thembi's blog. It is amazing. There you will also find info about our final Cape Town events, and hear Thembi's AIDS Diary entries.

As always, thanks for listening,

,
Radio Diaries is a not-for-profit organization

Fight To Win: Femi Kuti talks to Socialist Worker

The current issue of Socialist Worker features and interview with the hard working Nigerian afrobeat star Femi Kuti, talking about his music, colonialism, Live 8 and African independence.

“What I do is communication,” he told Socialist Worker. “My music says the struggle is not over. Africa still has a very long way to go, but the fight is on.”

The full article can be read here.

Website Review: The NFB's Filmmaker-in-Residence

Are you comfortably sitting in front of your computer? Cup of hot tea coiling bergamot steam from beneath your winter-cooled nose? Relaxed and ready? Good. Now take a deep breath and go instantly to the National Film Board of Canada's (NFB) newest political multi-media offering and prepare to be comforted, engaged, inspired, enraged, and informed as a tapestry of rich music, video, photography, text, graphics and sounds cajole you into the world of the NFB filmmaker-in-residence program. Political documentary filmmaker Katerina Cizek is the current auteur at the center of this initiative which seeks to reconnect with the groundbreaking and globally imitated Challenge for Change(CFC) project that sprung from the wells of the NFB in 1966. Only this time, things look a little more crisp and the cameras are a little lighter.

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