Source.

Fresh off its Euros prize from its €100,000 prize from the Dutch Prince Claus Fund, Chimurenga launched "The Chronic" yesterday:

Chimurenga’s new publishing project takes the form of a once-off, one-day-only edition of a fictional newspaper to be released on “Black Wednesday”, October 19th 2011 – a historic day in South Africa that marks the banning of numerous Black Consciousness organisations and independent newspapers by the apartheid regime. Please see attached for more details.

Titled the Chimurenga Chronic, the project is an intervention into the newspaper as a vehicle of knowledge production and dissemination. Editor Ntone Edjabe explains, “Knowledge produced by Africans is always curtailed towards simplicity because we are trapped in the logic of emergency. At Chimurenga we’re constantly trying to create beyond this shut hole of relevance. There is indeed famine and war but there is also life. There is also innovation, thinking, dreams – all the things that make life. Our project is to articulate this complexity.”

With over 90 contributors, The Chronic is a pan African production that locates itself directly inside the crisis of relevance by provoking and challenging mainstream perceptions, accounts, representations and narrations of history.

“The objective is not to revisit the past to bring about closure,” says Edjabe, “but rather to provoke and challenge our perception, in order to imagine a new foundation from which we can think and act within our current context.”

Here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk1zhZKpHFs Ethiopian pop from this past summer. Sayat Demissie is a former beauty queen. Her decision to embark on an acting and singing career divides the Ethiopian blogosphere.

Here.

You couldn't miss this trailer in front of The New School's West 12th Street building in the West Village last week:

The Ghana ThinkTank Mobile Unit is a custom-built teardrop trailer designed to journey into the so-called “First World,” where it collects issues of concern from various local communities. The collected problems get sent to think tanks in Ghana, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Serbia, Iran, Afghanistan and/or other countries, where strategies are developed. The trailer then rolls back into the previously visited communities, this time as a workstation, cooperating with community members to apply the strategies received from this global network of think tanks—whether they seem impractical or brilliant—for effected communities. Ghana ThinkTank thus reverses the customary flow of knowhow from “developed” to “developing” countries in playful and provocative ways.

Photo Credit: Amanda Ghanooni

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usksH8B07do Ghostpoet (government name: Obaro Ejimiwe) raps "in the bluesy, introspective tradition of Tricky and Roots Manuva". The video for his latest, "Liiines," came out last month. I actually prefer the video, above, and song for "Survive It," better.

This is also Found Object, Number 15 as Uganda's dictator Idi Amin Dada on his short-lived 1977 TV sketch comedy show on the American network channel, NBC. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AG9OvVYvviQ

One of the photographs in a new series "Children of the Mountain" by academic and journalist Howard French. The  children live in and near the Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique. French was there reporting a story on sociobiologist E.O.Wilson (now 82 years old) for The Atlantic. Wilson is working with an American billionaire, Greg Carr, and the Mozambican government to save the Gorongosa National Park, under stress during the civil war (more like proxy war by Rhodesia, South Africa and the United States) from 1976 to 1992 and since then by poachers and "locals setting fires to clear fields for farming and to smoke out wild edibles, from bushmeat to insect delicacies." Here's French's description of the park:

... the only largely intact rain forest in all of Mozambique, a semitropical country roughly the size of Texas and Oklahoma. Solitary and broad-shouldered, the mountain rises more than 6,000 feet above the surrounding plains, providing a local climate unlike any other for hundreds of miles around it. It draws its water from the warm, moist winds that blow in from the nearby Indian Ocean, kissing its cool upper flanks and sustaining a unique ecosystem of rare orchids, mountain cypress, and rich bird life like the green-headed oriole, along with any number of other species yet to be identified.

Here's the full set.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7tlcTtbPEA I just came across these videos: Number 13 in a humorous--and of course very ethnocentric--series of Youtube videos made in the UK entitled "World Cup 2010 Most Shocking Moments."

Artist Simen Johan  photographs a variety of plants and animals in natural preserves, zoos, farms, museum dioramas or his own studio,then "resituates them digitally into new environments constructed from images photographed elsewhere."  The new work, Until the Kingdom Comes, is on display from November 3 to December 23 at the Yossi Millo Gallery in Manhattan. For Johan, the images, " ... depict an unsettling natural world hovering between reality, fantasy and nightmare. Johan merges traditional photographic and sculptural techniques with digital methods."

While some photographs in the series reference Biblical motifs, Johan says that his choice of title, Until the Kingdom Comes, “refers less to religious or natural kingdoms and more to the human fantasy that one day, in some way, life will come to a blissful resolution. …In a reality where understanding is not finite and in all probability never will be, I depict ‘living’ as an emotion-fueled experience, engulfed in uncertainty, desire and illusion.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f845_v41YFo Nerina Penzhorn likes this. That means I should too. The very young singer, Lianne La Havas, walks the streets of Paris and sings.

The more we learn about Rick Perry--whose campaign for US President seems to be stalling--the more we're not surprised. This week we learn that Perry grew up in an almost all-white rural area in Texas where many referred to slingshots as "niggershooters." And last week we learned of his hunting buddies:

After Rick Perry stopped visiting his N----rhead camp, he still went hunting—with N word–using rocker Ted Nugent and a hunter whose best trophies came from what he calls “The Dark Continent” of Africa.

Source. H/T: Brett.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB8729TcngY The full video of the Open Society Institute in Manhattan's panel discussion on contemporary Rwanda is now up. Its a little more than one and a half hours in length and worth watching. The panel consisted of academics and journalists Howard French and Stephen Smith, the former Kagame confidant Theogene Rudasingwa, and, finally, Rona Peligal, deputy director of the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch. Peligal acted as moderator. The themes that run through the presentation are: conversations about Rwanda are driven by two impulses (guilt and fear); the continuities between Kagame and predecessor regimes in Rwanda;  Kagame runs "a transformative authoritarian regime" (in Smith's words); and that ethnicity is at the heart of state politics as well as that of exile. The panelists conceded that Kagame can take credit for rebuilding Rwanda after the 1994 genocide, but some noted that  "Rwanda has always been a well organized country." Check out the outburst near the end of the panel by Tim Gallimore, former spokesperson for the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. He was listed as "a  discussant." Gallimore, who is also a consultant to the Rwandan government, accuses the panel of "a double standard" when it comes to Kagame and that the debate was "laced with poisonous rhetorical questions" and "unsubstantiated charges."

Africa Unsigned, an Amsterdam-based website uses crowd-funding--a method which allow people to pool their money online--to raise money for African and Africa diaspora musicians that you cannot  be found inrecord stores, commercial radio or local versions of MTV. Here's a link to a report by Voice of America producer Ricci Shryock with Rina Mushonga, a Dutch-Zimbabwean singer, and Pim Betist, the site's founder. Most of the site's visitors are from Europe and America, but now Africa Unsigned is targeting the continent. They're targeting mobile phone users. Kenya is the first target. [audio=http://riccimedia.com/photoblog/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/10-10-11-SHYROCK-AFRICA-MUSIC.mp3] * While you're at it check out Ricci's photography.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Da7K3e0M8SI The video for Kampala rappers Sylvester & Ssavoo's "Akaseera" comes with a laid back groove. I am still celebrating Ugandan independence. Via Silkamb.