Africa Is a Country

sean-jacobs

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Sean Jacobs

Sean Jacobs, Founder-Editor of Africa is a Country, is on the faculty of The New School.

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How to read Africa is a Country

A few people have emailed us about the not-so-new layout here at AIAC; mostly about finding old posts on this new layout. The main complaint: "When I am on your home page, I can't find a way of accessing any recent posts older than 'Latest posts' or hope they're in 'Top posts'." (Only the last posts appear on the main body of the front page along with a 'Featured' post.) True. Here's some advice: Click on the 'More...' button at the bottom of the front page. That will take you to a blog version (dates descending) of AIAC. Or click on the 'Archive' widget on the right and choose a month, say 'January 2012', and all the posts for that month will appear in chronological order (by date descending). The other option: If you're looking for a specific post, just use the 'Search' option at the top of the page in the header. Or, if you're looking for the work of a specific blogger, click on her/his name. Hope that helps and keeps you reading.

World famous in South Africa

The history of popular music in South Africa continues to interest documentary filmmakers. Of recent offerings two films stand out: "Punk in Africa," about the history of the genre in Southern Africa since the 1970s (word is it's a bit unfocused), and Daniel Yon's beautiful film about jazz singer Sathima Benjamin, "Sathima's Windsong." I've just gotten word of "Searching for Sugar Man," about a 1970s Detroit-based Mexican-American musician, Sixto Rodriguez, who was unknown at home, but became very famous among young white South Africans at the time. Rodriguez had staged his suicide on stage after he had released two albums with little popular success and had vanished from the music scene. Meanwhile, in South Africa, his music had developed a cult following, especially among white conscripts fighting Apartheid's wars in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. (It also turns out he was popular among suburban high school kids in South Africa the 1990s.) Below is an interview with Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul by Sundance TV around the time the film made its US debut and was picked up by Sony Classic Pictures (despite some critics' doubts ) for distribution. Bendjelloul and the film's PR is prone to exaggeration: The music did not resonate with all South Africans or galvanize a movement against Apartheid (that's news to me), but I suppose they won't let that get in the way of a good story. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXJS1faBK5g AIAC blogger Tom tells me he had never heard of Rodriguez -- that is, not before hanging out with former South African conscripts, white men in their early 40s (as part of his PhD project) but agrees with the director: Rodriguez’ albums are masterpieces (at times on par with some of Bob Dylan's work). Here’s Rodriguez playing one of his songs, "Inner City Blues": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjRAprz5fq8

Louis Moholo’s drum

On a recent trip to London I was hoping to catch a performance by Cape Town drummer Louis Moholo Moholo, the last surviving member of the famed jazz bands, The Blue Notes and The Brotherhood of Breath. Especially with the release of "Before the Wind Changes," a live recording of The Blue Notes on tour in Belgium in 1979.

The Afrikaans movie template

http://youtu.be/mCXpFDYxw1A The creatives at South African satellite TV channel Kyknet -- which also produces movies now -- not only blatantly rip off American romantic comedy plotlines, but inhabit a South Africa where there is not a single black face to be seen. On the other hand, maybe they're being honest.

Film: “Imagining Emanuel”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVezOglRkWA Leo Goldsmith and Rachael Rakes, film editors at Brooklyn Rail, write about the documentary film "Imagining Emanuel" (trailer above), which recently played at the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight in New York City:

The displaced man at the center of "Imagining Emanuel" [has a] passivity [stemming] from never having had the smallest thing handed to him, and not expecting any better. Director Thomas Østbye examines Emanuel’s situation in an almost parodically clinical manner that only underscores its hopeless ambiguity. Against a black TV-studio backdrop, Emanuel calmly tells his story of stowing away on a boat to Norway, after first escaping civil war in Liberia as a child, and then eventually losing his mother, his only remaining known family, after relocating to Ghana. In Norway he is immediately delivered to immigration authorities, who not only do not believe his story, but are not able to successfully find out any contradicting evidence. Emanuel has no papers of any sort, and no government anywhere that could corroborate or disprove his identity. He waits, interminably, in in a stifling immigration prison while Norwegian agents oscillate over ways to make him another country's problem. With no education, no resources, and no ties to family or history, Emmanuel proves as slippery a subject for Østbye's mock-anthropological approach as he does for the grinding bureaucracies of immigration services, and ultimately ... it's his lack of place that becomes his defining characteristic.

Source.

The University of Gnawa

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kTJ4LFfVCM The new video for the song "Alf Hilat" by Moroccan lute player and singer Aziz Sahmaoui (he made his name playing jazz with the late Joe Zawinul), off 'University of Gnawa', his album (it came out late 2011) of "African" sufi devotional music from the border regions of Morocco and Algeria.

South Africa broke photographer Eve Arnold’s heart

From Financial Times profile of Eve Arnold, the brilliant American photographer who died in January 2012:

One of her toughest assignments was in South Africa, in 1973, where she saw apartheid at its worst. She sneaked inside hospitals where black children were dying from malnutrition and disease; she witnessed the separation of black families, the men forced to work in mines or in cities living in compounds hundreds of miles away. When she got back to London she was ill for months: her doctor said it was not a medical ailment, it was caused by what she had seen; he diagnosed it as heartbreak.

The three little pigs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xIgq13mX3A No, they're not Africans. It's just a great TV ad campaign for The Guardian newspaper.

Tuareg Nationalism

A quick survey of Western media suggests Tuareg nationalist claims don't carry the same weight as Malian, Nigerian or Algerian claims on Tuareg territory. For example, the current violence in Niger and Mali are covered as either a humanitarian crisis (sympathy for Tuareg refugees), Gaddafi's legacy (rumored weapons support for the rebels from his fallen regime) or through the prism of the War on Terror (armed Tuareg groups get conflated with Al Qaeda in the Maghreb). Meanwhile, if you're still wondering about who the Tuareg is, you have sort of been already introduced to them via the music of Tinariwen, who are unashamed about their nationalist politics. In a recent interview, Tinariwen's Alhousseini Ag Abdoullahi says:

[W]e are military artists! In 1992, we saw that we would be much more useful to the cause by spreading our culture around the world. Today, if we see that our brothers need us armed rather than as musicians, we will go to the front line because we are always ready to answer the call of the preservation of our land, our values and our culture. This is what we do through music and we will do it again with weapons!

Most recently, Tinariwen won a Grammy for Best World Music Album and collaborrated with TV on the Radio. And when you -- if you live in the US -- were blinking they were discussing their time in Gaddafi's training camps on Colbert Nation. * For those in or traveling to New York City: They're performing around here on April 12th.