By Abdourahman Waberi* Jeffrey Gettleman will not run the risk of being seen as ‘a nobody, a cockroach, a gangster,’ unlike the Somali pirates he depicted in the columns of the New York Times Magazine last weekend ('Taken by Pirates', Oct 5, 2011). In that particular piece of reportage, a totally asymmetric treatment is set from the beginning and accepted as an indisputable truth. The Chandlers, a British couple taken hostage by a group of ‘scruffy’ Somali pirates, are the real people the journalist is concerned about. But in the process, we the readers are, in our turn, taken  hostage by the journalist’s asymmetric  vision. We know from the very first lines that he is the omniscient eye and ear of the most powerful newspaper in the West and that he is reporting from the worst places on this earth. The fact of being there constitutes a badge of honour and a privilege he will not easily give up. Thanks to people like Jeffrey Gettleman, who continually shed their own kind of light on the tragedies and injustices in the Horn of Africa, my native region is routinely misrepresented. And the world has grown tired of the Somali story; Brave Jeffrey has not. He deserves my admiration. Better, I should thank him immensely for his courage and his dedication and praise his sense of observation. Even when the latter is more often than not approximate, if not fuzzy: ‘It wasn’t really a pretty night’, Rachel Chandler recalled… 'There was no moon, and the stars were shrouded by clouds… Within seconds, eight scruffy Somali men hoisted themselves aboard’. Jeffrey Gettleman seems to be a failed novelist (mentors’ list may include Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene). Having read and re-read his piece, I am tempted to give him some old-fashioned advice : ‘Shoemaker, stick to thy last… Better do supremely well one thing than many badly!’ * The piece was accompanied by this set of illustrations. This is Abdourahman Waberi's second post for AIAC.

http://youtu.be/igaiypLKVEE ... To New York City? By Ghanaian crooner M3NSA off his new album.

Here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrQGVqC8TJI "Judge Hatchett Discovers She Is Nigerian." She even does accents. The Hausa gets mangled in the process. So does Benin. * Found Objects is back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdh32XjNWTE The video for French-Ghanaian female MC, Lousika's "No Bee Aloo" says more about where popular culture (that stuff on TV and commercial radio) is heading on the continent than about the music itself.

A striking piece from "State of The Nation," a new project of Zimbabwean-born, South African artist Kudzanai Chiurai (remember him) which "focus[es] on youth culture and proposes a fresh way of looking at the socio-politics of our continent by juxtaposing the past and the present."  For the show in Johannesburg-- curated by Melissa Mboweni--Chiurai is collaborating with photographer Jurie Potgeiter and singers Thandiswa Mazwai and Zaki Ibrahim. Information

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2oymHHyV1M Spotted on Youtube yesterday before it went viral: A South African professional mountain biker is taken out by a buck at a game reserve in South Africa.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G34pW5S9Rx4 Mos Def (or Yasiin Bey) is on a roll. First the Stephen Colbert performance with Talib Kweli. Now this footage of him performing 3 songs Saturday with the Brooklyn Philharmonic in Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn: his own songs "Life in Marvelous Times" (video above), and  "Revelations" and, finally, a clip of his performance of "Coming Together," written by the American composer Frederic Rzewski a month before the 1971 Attica prison uprising. Sources: deebeezy.

The graphic above accompanied an opinion piece by Frank Bruni on gay marriage in Portugal in Sunday's New York Times. South Africa is the only African country of 10 worldwide to have national laws extending marriage rights to gays and lesbians. And as we know South Africa is not the most gay friendly countries. Here's Bruni:

It was only a little more than a decade ago that a country first legalized same-sex marriage, and that happened in precisely the kind of forward-thinking, bohemian place you’d expect: the Netherlands. About two years later, Belgium followed suit.

Then things got really interesting. The eight countries that later joined the club were a mix of largely foreseeable and less predictable additions. In the first category I’d put Canada, Norway, Sweden and Iceland. In the second: South Africa, Spain, Portugal and Argentina.

Why those four countries? People who have studied the issue note that that they have something interesting and relevant in common: each spent a significant period of the late 20th century governed by a dictatorship or brutally discriminatory government, and each emerged from that determined to exhibit a modernity and concern for human rights that put the past to rest.

“They’re countries where the commitment to democracy and equal protection under the law was denied, flouted and oppressed, and the societies have struggled to restore that,” said Evan Wolfson, the president of Freedom to Marry, a New York-based advocacy group, in a recent interview.

Source

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlXkKCa2yy0 Another Michael Kiwanuka tune.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOOCQiKlZ8w Cape Town's answer to Vanilla Ice . Only in Cape Town. Quite a White Ou (that's his name) even translates his lyrics for you.  It's a viral for a company promoting Xhosa language lessons. BTW, seems there is an obvious obsession with Vanilla Ice as performance art in South Africa. Here's comedian Deep Fried Man from earlier this year: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSpYg4GZ2UM H/T: Tony Karon, Stephen Coplan

Here's my semi-regular round-up of trailers for new African or African-themed films which I wish to get my hands on. It's a big continent, so I am not surprised at the output. Some of these are sure to make the rounds at film festivals or short runs in art cinemas or pop up on obscure cable channels. (I'm still waiting for that entrepreneur who'll start an African film Netflix. I'll be a customer.) So here they are: Migration is a big topic in these films. First up there's Swiss director Fernand Melgar's "Special Flight" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vL1PgyL0lk Film critic Leo Goldsmith writes  about "Special Flight" in Brooklyn Rail:

[Melgar] investigated a detention center for asylum-seekers in Switzerland; his new film concerns a group of foreign nationals at a rather darker place in the process. Many of the film’s subjects—a couple of dozen men, mainly originating from Africa and Kosovo—have lived in Switzerland for decades, working, paying taxes, and raising families. Now, at a detention center in Frambois, near Geneva, they sit in clean, gray institutional buildings, waiting to hear about the status of their appeals for citizenship, or else to be forcibly shipped out to their countries of origin, the “special flights” of the film’s title ... [The] degree of access occasionally gives the film a professional polish that makes it seem almost staged. Stills from the film, which resemble a slightly sunnier Pedro Costa film, made more than one non-Swiss festivalgoer I spoke to think the film was a work of fiction.) Stranger still is the interaction between the detention center’s staff and the inmates (whom the former prefer to call “residents”), which is cordial, warm, and often even apologetic. Members of the staff welcome the detainees, express remorse for their situations, and hear out their grievances sympathetically, forming relationships that border on friendship. And when the orders come down for deportation, staff-members carry them out with an odd mix of duty, helplessness, and regret.

There's also Belgian filmmaker Nicolas Provost's "The Invader" which focuses on the travails of an African migrant in Brussels. The film has a brilliant opening scene. See Tom's post later today. Another feature film with African migrants washing up on the shores of a European island at the heart of it; this time the Canary Islands: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzXRKLZ4LXU The very talented Akin Omotoso (somebody give him buckets of money to keep making films) directed "Man on Ground," a film about xenophobic violence against African migrants by black South Africans in Johannesburg. Here's an early review and here's an interview with Omotoso. Here's the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7syzEXy2ZM "The Cardboard Village" about an Italian priest and illegal immigrants who take shelter in his church.  Bonus: it stars "Blader Runner" star Rutger Hauer. (I don't know what to expect from that casting choice.) The trailer doesn't make much sense, but here it is anyway: http://youtu.be/gEjp5R__aHw And here--in its entirety--is a new short, "Counterfeit," about West African migrants selling counterfeit watches and fake handbags in Chinatown in New York City: http://vimeo.com/17602593 And also a 12 minute short about racism and the border between Dominican Republic and Haiti (no surprises from which side the racism emanates): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61ky5aICIXE "Always Brando" part fake documentary, part drama about a Tunisian filmmaker's obsession with the famed American actor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKqWR68MXwo Another North African film. This time Moroccan director Faouzi Bensaidi's "Death for Sale" about 3 young petty thieves: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG3dzT26XFk Then there is, "Les Hommes libres," a period piece about an Algerian black marketer in Nazi-occupied France (also by a Moroccan director). The lead is played by Tahar Rahim who played the lead in the prison film, "A Prophete." (I'm assuming this is in the same vein as the excellent "Indigènes," which aimed to set the record straight about the roles of blacks and Arabs' in the liberation of France during World War II): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHsjuXuWuy4 "The Rhythm of My Life," a documentary film about the Miami rapper Ismael Sankara who travels to Gabon to visit family and sort of figures out his life and career: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LfTZbWORG8 A number of German films have recently explored their country's relationship to the African continent. (Remember "Nowhere in Africa," "Sleeping Sickness" and "At Ellen’s Age."  Now there's "The River Used To Be A Man" about a German actor finding himself in some open African space.  Here's a clip (what's with  trailers that don't mean or say much?): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpMWiaY_kwA The trailer for director Aki Kaurismäki's "Le Havre" (France) about the relationship of an elderly working-class couple in the French port city of the title with a a young, lovable African illegal immigrant they're harboring and the police inspector searching for the stowaway. This film is loved by every mainstream critic who has reviewed it. The trailer suggests it has obvious tropes which appeals to American and European audiences: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpAFPgNyxmc Talk about films with cute children. "Lucky" is film about a young South African child and the AIDS epidemic there (remember "Life Above All" directed by Oliver Schmitz and which had a limited release here in New York City in the Spring).  The director of "Lucky" is Avie Luthra, an Indian national. In "Lucky" there is a nice twist though; unlike most AIDS films he is not saved by a saintly white person: the lead character ends up in Durban with unscrupulous relatives, but is helped by a South African woman of Indian origin. As far as I know, apart from Leon Schuster's racist caricatures (Disney just gave him guarantees to make more of that nonsense), "Lucky" might be the first time you have an Indian South African in a major role in a film coming from that country. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_FBdPcV6PM Back to documentaries: "Last Call At The Oasis" about the global crisis about water which affects us all: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lq5yy0pYoQ Films about the unfinished Egyptian Revolution our coming out fast. Take "Tahrir 2011: The Good, The Bad And The Politician." The film is divided into three chapters; the first focuses on activists, the second on the police and the third the dictator Hosni Mubarak: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjA2XbUCcz0 Then, Italian director Stefano Savona's "Tahrir: Liberation Square": http://vimeo.com/26904025 There's also the music-focused "Microphone" by Egyptian director Ahmed Abdallah: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlkqSAGkToE The trailer for Columbia University art historian Susan Vogel's film, "Food, Crumple Crush," about the famed Ghanaian artist El Anatsui who lives in Nigeria: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr0sSCV2UDg There's a few others for which I can't find trailers: * The film version of Albert Camus' final, unfinished novel based on his childhood in French-occupied Algeria, "The First Man." * "The Education of Auma Obama" about Barack Obama's sister, Auma, which includes home video of the young Barack Obama on his first ever visit to Kenya in the late 1980s.  (Here's a link to a post-screening Q&A with director Branwen Okpako and Auma Obama at the 2011 Toronto Film Fetsival.) Then a film, I have at the top of my wish list. "Indochina, tras la pista de una madre" (Indochina, Traces of a Mother) is the story of an Afro-Asian man (the son of a Vietnamese woman an and African soldier) who goes back to Vietnam. His parents met when his father, from Benin, was conscripted by France to go and resist Vietnamese independence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZrXCh9mf1I * A new film about the struggle around AIDS in South Africa (by veteran director Jack Lewis): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnhJ4po_5Ho This film will definitely not make a commercial cinema screen here. The Senegalese director Mamadou Sellou Diallo films the pregnancy of his wife and the birth of his daughter. It's also a film about womanhood in Senegal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqFFJ4lsz4M *  There are also some films about the descendants of Africans in America: Director Diana Paragas and writer Nelson George's "Brooklyn Boheme," about black life in late 1980s and 1990s Fort Greene, Brooklyn, is finally here. (That's my neighborhood for the last 10 years). Here's the first 5 minutes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-f5gww1laY There's a documentary about black punk rockers Fishbone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChXk4R0mGNw A profile of foul-mouthed, ageing rapper Blowfly; in daily life the mainstream musician Clarence Reid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCOBGotTMmM "White Wash," a documentary about black surfers (which reminds me of the film, "Taking Back the Waves," about Apartheid racism and surfing in South Africa): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iNE4Qeye70 "Angel," a documentary film directed by Sebastiano d'Ayala Valva, about a former Ecuadorian boxer, lately a transvestite prostitute in France, traveling back to his homeland: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n36e9cA9WbE Helene Lee, who wrote a book--"The First Rasta"-- about Leonard Howell, who is considered the founder of Rastafari in Jamaica, has now made a documentary about him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BK4D8WpgaA *  Finally, a couple of short films you can watch in full: Johannesburg filmmaker Palesa Shongwe--whose work reminds me of fellow South African Steve Mokwena--has a short film (in full below) "Atrophy (and the fear of fading)" about nostalgia and youth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-dJNYHARbQ And, American Allysa Eisenstein's film on homophobia in Uganda based around interviews with gay rights activists and the bigotry and hate they encounter: http://vimeo.com/14204295

http://vimeo.com/30085559 Short video piece on Jelani Gibson, a 16-year-old protester who traveled with his grandmother from Pontiac, Michigan to New York to join the protests Wall Street. He also has a 4.0 GPA.  He had never slept on the street before.  Tell that to US media.