Photographer Glenna Gordon, no stranger to AIAC, is working on a new project in Staten Island, home to the largest population of Liberians outside of Liberia. I asked her if I could publish some of the work here. You can view the full set here. She also sent this note:

Most New Yorkers still think of Staten Island as working class Italian, but mainly due to the huge influx of West Africans from Liberia, Guinea, Ivory Coast and elsewhere, the black population of Staten Island has grown by 12 percent in the last decade. It’s hard to say how many Liberians and others live in Staten Island since many people haven’t sorted their immigration status. But there are plenty-o. I’m now splitting my time between New York and West Africa, and I’ve started a new photo project on Staten Island. I first went out there for a visit in mid-April. I attended a meeting of the Staten Island Liberian Community Association, which was a mix of formalities, community news, and a very loud argument between two old ma conducted in rapid fire Liberian English. I was invited to come back and photograph a special mother’s day program a couple of weeks later. And that’s how I found myself riding a white stretch limo around Staten Island on a Saturday night with a group of old Liberian ladies dressed in their fanciest lapa. I’m excited about working in New York for a change, and where this project might go.

Excerpt from Sharifa Rhodes Pitts' memoir of the black metropolis, "Harlem is Nowhere," which came out this week in the UK:

The Langston Hughes Atrium [of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture] is available as a rental facility, so that Hughes's resting place is also the location for receptions, conferences, and cocktail parties. Once I came up from the reading room to find a reception and conference taking place there. It was attended exclusively by Senegalese and was being conducted in French and Wolof. It seemed to be a conference focusing on business and real estate development in Senegal. I would have ignored it, but one of the many displays crowded into the space caught my eye. It showed the map of a vast city. I recognized its name, Touba. Along the stretch of West 116th Street called Little Senegal there is a shop called Touba Wholesale, whose business involves shipping goods to Africa. It is adjacent to a restaurant that advertises its dual specialties in “Jamaican and Southern Style Cuisine.” Several other African stores on 116th Street share the name Touba; it is also a brand of coffee sold in those same shops. The store windows are filled with shelves bearing cans of Touba coffee stacked in alluring displays, among other dry goods imported to supply homesick West Africans. The picture decorating the package shows a tall minaret rising from the mosque at the city's center.

Touba is the holy city of the Mourides, a sect of Sufis in West Africa. There is a concentration of Mouride faithful in Harlem's Little Senegal. Touba means “bliss,” referring to the eternal life afforded the pious. The city's mosque holds the shrine and burial place of the Mouride saint Cheikh Amadou Bamba. It is now the destination of a pilgrimage so grand that detractors charge it as blasphemous for attempting to compete with Mecca. During the life of the Cheikh the same land was a vast wilderness; it was the place where he launched his teachings on how seekers could keep to the spiritual path by emphasizing work and generosity, along with other teachings that made him an enemy of French imperialism. According to the conference brochures, a massive suburb was being developed in the neighborhood of Touba—un projet de réalisation de 12,000 logements à Touba—presumably allowing those Mourides who are both faithful and well heeled to dwell as near as possible to the resting place of their ascended master.

On another occasion, I visited the library and found that a large gathering was taking place in the auditorium just beyond the Hughes memorial.

It was a public hearing convened by the United Nations special rapporteur on racism, who was then traveling the country to take testimony that he would present in a report to the international body. The hearing went on for hours, with hundreds of people signing up to bear witness to historic and contemporary experiences of injustice, violence, and indignity. These ranged from the treatment of Haitians seeking asylum to inequalities in education and housing, and from the plight of mothers whose children had been taken by a sometimes draconian child welfare system to the difficulties faced by ex-convicts who wished to find work. Some speakers presented their testimony with the cool detachment of academics. Others, relating the more immediate horrors of their daily lives, approached the rapporteur as if he were endowed with the power of direct intervention. The rapporteur listened to them all, and when the hearing was done, he thanked everyone profusely but took great care to mention that his only power was to listen and then to submit a written report to the larger body. He said he hoped the facts would be taken into consideration.

Around the same time, the library hosted an exhibition in its gallery on the art of that Senegalese mystic sect whose saint's shrine is found at Touba. Their holy men minister with words. If you are in need of guidance or are in ill health, the priest will write out a prayer that is also a prescription. The ink is washed from the wooden board where he writes; you are cured by drinking the water that washed away the words. In other instances, he might write out the remedy on a cloth. You make a shirt from it and wear it till it falls apart, or wrap yourself in it and, while covered in this shroud, are healed as you sleep.

Buy it here or here. * Thanks to the publishers and Sharifa Rhodes Pitts for granting permission to use the excerpt. Photo Credit: Beatrice De Gea

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fABDPF3yG8k "Wooye" by Ugandan crooner Maurice Kirya.  

From May this year: "... an unrehearsed, first-take cut" of Nicolas Jaar's remix (recorded in London) of Abdullah Ibrahim's jazz track "Ishmael".

The famine in the Horn of Africa has revived the debate about "starvation photography." The blog of the Irish NGO, Dóchas, has compiled the different viewpoints in one place. * Related: What groundbreaking images of ‘Africa’ can we expect this year from The International Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan, France?, asks Duck Rabbit. Sadly, more of the same. *  Jonathan Faull sent in this item on parachute journalism at its "best" featured on CNN's website: "Photographer captures 'unbreakable spirit' in West Africa"

Photographer "Thomas Nybo has captured images of some of the toughest issues facing Africa, from child mortality to access to education" presumably during his indepth understanding of the continent gleaned from his extensive understanding of the "five countries he recently visited in 11 days."

Nybo also takes the obligatory photo of himself posing with children. (What is it with foreign correspondents posing with children all the time. The adults don't like you?) As Jonathan remarked: Watch the video for some spectacularly patronizing nonsense. * Mohammed Keita, Africa coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, writing in Washington D.C.'s political newspaper, The Hill:

In a White House meeting last week, President Barack Obama praised four recently elected heads of African states as “effective models” for democratization who are “absolutely committed” to good governance and human rights. Yet, as the New York Times noted, ambitious promises and lofty rhetoric in Washington glossed over troubling, but all too familiar, reports of coup plotting, an assassination attempt, and fresh human rights and press freedom violations.  With the exception of President Boni Yayi of Benin, three new African leaders, Presidents Mahamadou Issoufou of Niger, Alassane Ouattara of Ivory Coast, and Alpha Condé of Guinea, have each been in office for less than a year after emerging from some of the most contested ballot tussles on the continent. Yet, in their short time in office, two of the leaders Washington has most embraced in “building strong democratic institutions,” Ivory Coast President Ouattara and Guinean President Condé, have already been implicated in rights abuses.

* More democracy: The Morroccan King may be reconsidering the annual"King's Allegiance Day Parade." The people keep turning up and telling him he has no clothes. * South African culture blog, Mahala.com has two must-read posts about what's considered normal in South Africa: white writing (what's out for our longer post on Monday on this) and white insurance. * And staying with whiteness: white advertising executives in Cape Town heart each other. * Brooklyn Rail--which a while ago featured a shortlived series about African immigrants in New York City--have two articles with continental themes in the latest issue. First editor Theodore Hamm's account of protests in Senegal (he was there with his small child and wife who was doing research) and a second by Hawa Allan about child soldier lit. * CNN on the growth of radio stations--including in Pidgin--in Nigeria. * The New York Times has a story listing all the people charged in Zimbabwe with insulting President Robert Mugabe. The latest perpetrator:

... A security guard faces up to 12 months in jail because of remarks on the Zimbabwe president's health and a taunt over a snack of biscuits and a fruity milk drink. After years of acute shortages of food and confectionary, the guard allegedly told a colleague that President Robert Mugabe ruined the economy and empty store shelves were only restocked by the former opposition party with cookies and soft drinks that his pro-Mugabe colleague ate for lunch.

* Remember in 2008 when New York Magazine's annual "Reasons to Love New York" included  (at no.17) the story of King James Oladipo Buremoh, a Nigerian King who moonlights as a Gray Line tour bus driver in New York and is a former pro-wrestler? New York Magazine's editors were of course more into novelty of King James' life. But now the King is the subject of a short documentary film that takes him more seriously: http://vimeo.com/26825658 * Rhodes University academic (and decent writer) Richard Pithouse in CounterPunch on the case of the "Kennedy 12" * Al Jazeera English has a new series about African immigration to Europe: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rnZ3gNhZzw&w=600&h=373] * Some hipster humor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmb4z8zqLU8 * Talking about hipsters. Reggie Watts now sells chickens for South African fast food giant, Nandos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOBUu4VoapM * Oh and blogs/tumblrs to #FF: Uganda Be Kiddin' Me! (her real job), The Africa They Never Show You and A Spare Thought. * Finally, some good hip hop to ride out the weekend: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBuTrpSwGIU H/T's: Kiss My Black Ads, Duck Rabbit, Jon Jeter, Sophia Azeb, Ntone Edjabe, and many others we can't name or did not want to be namechecked. See you Monday.

http://vimeo.com/27181692 He's not just a blogger. This Sunday, August 7, at Lincoln Center DJ Chief Boima, who has been traveling in Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone this summer,  will warm up the crowd--along with Ahficionados--between sets by Iyadede, Spoek Mathambo and Blitz the Ambassador. It's free. If you're in New York City (I'm in Massachusetts till August 14), and this hype video by the organizers doesn't not convince, then there's something wrong with you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHORG4L8Od8 Nneka--a AIAC favorite--performing an acoustic version of her song, "Do You Love Me Now?" for the French website, NowPlayingMag.com.  

Photo Credit: Doreen R [soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/19741147"]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywfyv5fdgM4 Your Music Break: from Nairobi. Via Kate Bomz

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjyibxWzWkA&w=600&h=373] Your Music Break: Simphiwe Dana, live, singing in Xhosa, accompanied by another South African singer, Mthwakazi, in Johannesburg. H/T: Nerina Penzhorn (again).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1jFThFnGTY&w=600&h=373] Last week in Bolinas, CA, my friend, Kora McNaughton (she lives in Santiago), got me onto the music of Chilean rapper Ana Tijoux.  (Interview--in English--from 2010 here.) I have her new album (a gift) to prove it.  Too bad I won't be in the city Monday night when Ana Tijoux performs at SOB's.

* Philip Gourevitch, of The New Yorker, probably still healing from the mauling he got over his admiration for Paul Kagame (and probably regretting losing his cool), decides it's may be better to write about Rwanda's national cycling team for the magazine. (Hint: It's Tour de France month so let's publish a piece about Africans and cycling.) Read it here. And here listen to Gourevitch talking about it. * Rapper 50 Cent gets ambitious. *  You know of the Zambian reality show for 'former prostitutes', aimed at teaching them baking and general cookery, so that they can find a husband? Winner has wedding paid for. Seriously. * People get book deals for this kind of nonsense: First World Problems. Remember Stuff White People Like? * "Four elderly Kenyans who say they were tortured by the British during the Mau Mau uprising have won the right to sue the Government. The decision is expected to encourage people around world to seek compensation claims against Britain for atrocities carried out under colonial rule." And spare me the talk about reconciliation. * Black people apparently don't  go to Museums, tip, see a therapist or agree on what black people don't do.  Apparently. * The New York Times tries its hand at reporting cricket. Good publicity for new film, "Fire in Babylon," about the victorious West Indies cricket team that dominated test and one day cricket between the mid to late 1970s and the mid-1990s.  The obligatory Joseph O'Neill quotes. But then the illustrations. That's not Viv Richards in the picture.  I've been having a back and forth with fellow South Africans Jonathan Faull and Tony Karon about this and we agree that's someone else.  I think it is Gordon Greenidge but they disagree. Cricket people? * On film itself, this is what a Bajan told me: "...  On one hand it was great to see all that classic footage of West Indies cricket domination and I'm so happy that someone captured that remarkable time...I loved the segment on West Indies tour to Australia in 1976 and the [Kerry[ Packer years and the new team that emerged. That stuff was gripping. But most of it felt surface and obvious and I'm not sure if that's because I know so much of the material already or because it was surface and obvious. There wasn't really a problem to explore and it's convenient how the history of the team ends before the abysmal plummet that any current fan of West Indies cricket is grappling with. There's definitely a Part 2 that begs the question What the Hell Happened Next ("Who Killed King Cricket?") which is what really consumes West Indians, the few who still care. I mean we couldn't even get anyone to go see India play in Barbados this current test series." * If you don't already, sign up for alerts from the Committee to Protect Journalists' Africa researcher Mohamed Keita.  Here * "Who's created Mofongo?": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNTMwCs5-Sc * The "development-induced" displacement of the Ogiek people in Kenya (from Survivor International): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItU88k9bJKI * The documentary film, "War Don Don," about the trial before the International Criminal Court of an infamous Sierra Leonean rebel soldier has been nominated for two Emmys: For "Outstanding Continuous Coverage of a New Story--Long Form" and for "Outstanding Editing." Remember the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBOH-hG-Jug H/T: Our Stories, Neelika Jayawardane, Tony Karon, Jonathan Faull, and many others.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHK308_MTiU&w=600&h=373] A satirical film made by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1986. Worth seeing again.  It should also be the dvd you pop in at your colonial-themed wedding.