From a series by photographer Pete Miller (remember him?) of Dinka cattle raiders in Southern Sudan on TIME magazine's Lightbox blog. As Glenna Gordan comments on her blog, Scarlett Lion:

In addition to be technically superb photographs, what I really like about these images is the individuality and identity that each of the subjects has. And by viewing a series of portraits, I get a sense of a textured community of discrete individuals, rather than a sort of pre-historic and stereotypical horde of angry men with guns and cows. It’s difficult to make the same sort of sweeping statements all too common in media coverage when you as a viewer are offered the chance straight into the eyes of a young woman or check out a dude’s awesome aqua and pink shirt. These images aren’t of a “tribe,” but of specific people with specific personalities who make specific choices.

The old lion of Zimbabwean liberation music, Thomas Maphumo, and his band, The Blacks Unlimited, play Southpaw in Brooklyn next month on Wednesday, July 20. Get there. Samples of his oeuvre here.

From that same interview that I have been so liberally cutting and pasting from this week---in Comparative Literature--the Communist poet and intellectual, Jeremy Cronin, talks about the conundrum for black intellectuals after the end of Apartheid:

... For obvious reasons that I’ve already alluded to, a great premium is placed on unity and loyalty within the culture of the ANC-led liberation movement. In the days of illegality and repression, carefree individualism could be a deadly indulgence. Unity and loyalty are still important. But national liberation movements, pre- and postindependence, also have a problematic habit of identifying themselves as “the nation.” There are numerous examples crystallized in once-popular slogans: “CPP is Ghana, Ghana is CPP”; “SWAPO is the Nation, the Nation is SWAPO”; “the Kenyan African National Union is the Mother and Father of the Nation.”

I have never heard anyone quite say these things of the ANC, but there are strong inclinations in this direction. To be politically outside of the ANC is still often characterized as being part of the “enemy” forces. To differ with the majority line within the ANC is sometimes to risk being accused of “siding” with the “enemy.” Lenin was fond of quoting [Carl von] Clausewitz’s maxim, “War is politics by other means.” But Lenin (even Lenin) never claimed that politics is war by other means. He quite correctly insisted on the primacy of a political understanding of war. Politicizing the military is one thing; the converse is quite another. Unfortunately, militarizing politics (at least discursively, by regarding all opposition as the enemy) is a natural but ruinous habit in political formations, particularly those that have waged armed struggles.

...I know that in South Africa, many black intellectuals, in particular, have recently battled with the inner dilemma of disagreeing with the ANC government. There is a sense of betraying their own, of feeding the racial stereotype that black majority governments “are bound to fail.” The [former] vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town, a fine novelist and essayist, Njabulo Ndebele, wrote in 2003, “I increasingly experience the need to transgress but feel anguished by the thought that my transgressions, committed in the belief that they represent a process of democratic self-actualization, could be mistaken for the outmoded oppositions of old.” I would venture to say that increasingly among a wide range of black intellectuals and others, this sense of anguish is no longer so strong. Both from within the ANC-led movement and in other quarters, not least among a feisty new generation of black journalists and columnists, there are robust critical voices that are prepared to oppose government on many issues without being oppositionist for its own sake.

I have never quite shared Ndebele’s sense of anguish. Being simultaneously a member of both the ANC and its allied SACP (we are an interesting and, internationally, probably unique political alliance with overlapping memberships) has provided me with organizational spaces that are neither oppositionist nor monolithically univocal. Nelson Mandela, after I had unintentionally and unknowingly irritated him, and not for the first time, once told a comrade that he was convinced I had a “split personality”—good on some days, not good at all on others. In mitigation, I would argue that a bipolar disorder is a necessary attribute in our post- (or is it neo-?) colonial reality in which, to paraphrase Gramsci, we are living in a time when the old is dying and the new is still struggling to be born.

Source: Comparative Literature (You need a subscription and a password to read the full interview.)

Dan Moshenberg has written guest posts for AIAC before and we've HT'd him a few times. But this posts marks the first of his weekly posts here on gender politics.  He'll keep the focus on Africa. Like today when he discusses Michelle Obama's South Africa trip. Dan, who has lived in South Africa (I've known him for about 16 years), blogs at Women In and Beyond the Global (go check it out);and is director of Women's Studies at George Washington University in Washington D.C.So watch out for it on Wednesdays--Sean Jacobs Dan Moshenberg What’s a young African woman leader, today, and who decides? Michelle Obama travelled to South Africa to talk to the Young African Women Leaders Forum, a forum organized and funded by “the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Embassy in South Africa, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the White House.” The Forum has three objectives: expression of “aspirations and values”; becoming “better partners in building a more just, democratic and prosperous future”; and, my favorite, “to help empower young African women”. Because, as we know, the empowerment and emancipation of young African women  begins at the intersection of the U.S. Department of State, USAID, and the White House, where African women learn to express themselves and become better partners. Amandla! Awethu? Irrespective, or not, of the funding circumstances, and setting aside the whole photo-op politics of the event, Michelle Obama gave a decent talk. Rousing, informative, engaging, and politically sharp. The United States First Lady mentioned a number of women, including Graca Machel, Baleika Mbete, Robyn Kriel, Grace Nanyonga, Gqibelo Dandala. She lingered over the memory and significance of Albertina Ma Sisulu’s life and lifework. In short, it was a talk directed at women, at young African women. However, if you were to read the reports of Ms. Obama’s speech, and of the Young African Women Leaders Forum, in the New York Times, you’d find … nothing.  Pretty much the same for the Washington Post. ABC News covered the event, sort of. They did mention Gqibelo Dandala … as a prop:

She pronounced all of their names with perfect local diction. The audience laughed and clapped when Mrs. Obama mentioned a woman named Gqibelo Dandala and used the click sound in the Xhosa language from which the name derived.

Is that all Gqibelo Dandala is? A prop? What did she actually do to be invited to the Forum? In 2007. Gqibelo Dandala founded the Future of the African Daughter project, FOTAD, which works with girls, 12 – 19, from rural areas and townships. Ms. Obama talks about Dandala’s work, but all that’s reported is that that African woman sure has a funny name, and that `articulate’ African American woman did a helluva job pronouncing it.  And the crowd went wild. The videos are no better.  For example, Britain's Channel 4 News chose a two-minute part of the speech that focused largely on HIV-AIDS, and then ended with, “You can be the generation to ensure that women are no longer second-class citizens, that girls take their rightful places in our schools. You can be the generation that stands up and says that violence against women in any form, in any place including the home –- especially the home –- that isn’t just a women’s rights violation. It’s a human rights violation. And it has no place in any society. You see, that is the history that your generation can make”. But how can this generation of young African women be that generation? In Michelle Obama’s speech, the charge somewhat makes sense. It has a context and a history. In the constructions of the US-based media, there’s no context, there’s no historical justification. There’s only good will and good intention. The Forum has brought together 76 young women from across the African continent. Every one of them has a name. So do their mothers, sisters, aunts, daughters. Every one of them has done something. But don’t bother to look for their names in The New York Times or The Washington Post. They’re not there.

Kathleen Madden, in Artforum, on Zwelethu Mthethwa's 2010 series "The Braves Ones," showing through July 17th at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London:

["The Brave Ones"] documents Zulu boys from the Shembe church wearing pink gingham or rich red tartan kilts with tribal hats, a mixed visual code that evokes the Scottish Highlanders who were deployed to the region in the late nineteenth century. The boys pose before the lush backdrop of the KwaZulu Natal, aka the “garden province,” making them appear timeless in an Arcadian landscape.

http://vimeo.com/20927993 Video for spoken word from Senegalese rapper Keyti--remember him? Keyti was one of the stars of Ben Herson's 2009 documentary film about hip hop and politics in the Senegalese capital, "Democracy in Dakar."  The video is directed by Magee McIlvaine. Via Nomadic Wax.

More from that 2008 Comparative Literature interview with my favorite Communist poet, Jeremy Cronin. Bua Komanisi:

... A sense of audience has always been important for me. When I write a poem, or when I go back to an old poem, I try to listen to it with the ear of someone else, perhaps an audience, real or imagined. One audience whose feedback and engagement I have always appreciated is the relatively small circle of fellow South African poets, critics, and academics teaching poetry. But I have also always wanted to write a poetry that is generally accessible to a wider audience.

In this I have not always succeeded, of course. The failing is not just personal; there are many objective challenges. There are, for instance, eleven official languages in South Africa, and while English is the major lingua franca, writing poetry in English is not necessarily an advantage. Afrikaner nationalism, with all of its reactionary tendencies and faults, was centrally a cultural and language-based movement, and poetry was (and still is) cherished amongst a broader Afrikaans-language public. This has never been the case with the often pseudo-cosmopolitan, white, English-speaking community into which I was born. Major English-language South African writers—like the two Nobel laureates, Nadine Gordimer and John Coetzee—tend to be much better known outside of South Africa and tend to write, one suspects, with a European or North American audience in mind. For me, oral performances, particularly in contexts which are not narrowly poetical (a trade union meeting, or a political conference, for instance), have been a very important means for reaching a wider, more diverse audience.

Source: Comparative Literature.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2I9D2yDCfc&NR=1 Rapper Stalley, late last year, channels Muhammed Ali. He could have done without the racial epithet.

This Facebook group page is worth visiting. The administrators collect photographs, including video and sound bytes, "... depicting scenes and people from Nigeria between 1960 and 1980." Here

The daily word of inspiration (cut and pasted from Contemporary Literature) from my favorite, comtemporary Communist, Jeremy Cronin:

... At present I am inclined to make my poems much more actively disruptive within themselves, to foreground contradiction and paradox, to enact interruption, to celebrate the parenthetical, to make manifest the unresolved. In the first post-1994 decade of democracy in South Africa, public discourse was overwhelmed with the notions of harmony and self-congratulatory contentment. We had achieved a “political miracle,” we were a “rainbow nation,” we had finally “rejoined the family of nations,” we were “a winning nation,” internationally we could “punch above our weight,” we were at the cutting edge of a global “third wave of democracy,” our own achievement heralded an “imminent African renaissance.” Of course, there is much to be proud of in the South African democratic transition. The public discourses of the time were certainly flattering to all of us in the new political elite (myself included). But the tendencies towards excessive contentment and therefore closure have been even more helpful to the old, the well-entrenched economic elite in the mining houses and financial institutions, the very entities that helped to shape a century of racial segregation and apartheid. They were perfectly happy with a message that said the black majority has got the vote now, uhuru (independence) is upon us, the struggle is over, a luta discontinua!

To my discomfort, some of my own earlier poetry, written in the spirit of a counterhegemonic project, risked being anthologized into the discourse of this shallow, postcolonial triumphalism. A poem like “To learn how to speak / With the voices of the land . . .,” which I performed frequently in the 1980s, and which was intended as a relatively defiant expression of unity in diversity (in opposition to apartheid’s diversity in unequal diversity), is all too easily decontextualized in the present.

However, the present also has other dangers and temptations. Many South African intellectuals, novelists and poets among them, have slipped into the individualistic comfort zone of “speaking truth to power.” I say “comfort zone” because the political power reality to which the truth is supposedly spoken is a relatively benign and often disorganized power reality. Recently I was asked to participate in a television series on dissident artists from around the world. I declined: I like to think of myself as being critical, but I don’t think of myself as a South African dissident—although that’s exactly how some of my ideological opponents within the broader ANC would be happy to label me and other like-minded left activists.

During the apartheid period we were not endeavoring to speak truth to power, as if we were petitioners. We were trying to contribute, in small ways, including through poetry, to forging an alternative hegemonic power. Surely the struggle, then and especially now, is not so much to speak truth to power as to make truth powerful and, the hardest of all, power truthful ... I think that the strategies deployed in my post 1994 poetry are somewhat different to those in the preceding period, but there is still the same ultimate, aspirant trajectory towards trying to build a sense of a collective “us” in my poems. I want to be part of a democratic hegemonic project, not a prophet in the wilderness.

Source: Contemporary Literature.

Simon Kuper in the FT Weekend, takes shots at "the news," maybe also at his own newspaper:

... [N]ews has become news about rich people. Today’s economic inequality is reflected and driven by inequality of news.

Much of this news about rich people is produced by just a few English-language sources. A wire service will put out a story, a newspaper will get a scoop or BBC.com will run a headline, and within seconds the “news” gets parroted by websites, TV channels and newspapers from Warsaw to Waikiki. It saves them hiring their own reporters. Lady Gaga sings at a gay pride rally in Rome and the whole world simply reprints the story.

And so news becomes news about a small global elite of athletes, entertainers, royals and politicians ...

These celebrities are overwhelmingly Anglophone. Only stories in English get duplicated around the world. People who write in English prefer celebrities who speak English. In Forbes magazine’s recent list of the “World’s Most Powerful Celebrities”, the highest-ranked non-native-English-speaker was Cristiano Ronaldo at number 43, and even he had created his brand while playing in England.

The global elite has grown fantastically rich in recent decades: the average person on Forbes’s list pocketed an estimated $45m last year. Consequently, we’re forever reading about rich people. Indeed, being rich has become almost the criterion for being newsworthy. A sportsman or artist who isn’t rich is not counted as successful and therefore not given airtime. And if you get airtime, you can generally convert it into more money through endorsements, speaking fees or reality TV (the future for New York’s Congressman Anthony Weiner). Everyone in the news is rich, or soon becomes so. (Cognoscenti call this the Sarah Palin Effect.)

... [W]e forget the poor. They may always be with us, but not in the media. The perhaps 2.5 billion people with less than $2 a day get ignored, due to the triple whammy of being poor, non-white and non-Anglophone.

For instance, there’s a new treatment that stops the spread of Aids, but rich countries are reluctant to fund it. This has generated a few worthy editorials in highbrow publications, but otherwise is considered too boring to tweet.

Even the white Anglophone poor struggle for airtime ... When poor people did get airtime, it was often as objects of derision on Jerry Springer-like shows ...

At best, the poor get covered as a faceless group: young Spanish demonstrators, or foreclosed Americans in tent cities, or African Aids orphans. Rich people appear as individuals, and are therefore more vivid. Even when we depict them as “fat cats”, they are the story. In fact, we’ve become exactly the media that an unequal world requires.

Source.

Jeremy Cronin is my favorite Communist. Astute, intellectual and a poet. Cronin is a former political prisoner and now ANC member of Parliament in South Africa. "Even the Dead" is still my favorite poem. I recently chanced upon a 2009 interview he did with the academic Andrew van der Vlies (featured on this blog here) in Contemporary Literature. (You need a subscription or access to an academic database to read it.) Much of it is about Cronin's poetry (more for diehard literature types), but in-between the interview contain some great insights about political life and political art in South Africa now. I'm going to cut and paste a few of them here. For starters:

... [I]n the present South African situation, it is particularly important to reconsider many things in the light of the new reality. The ANC-led movement is no longer a persecuted formation; it is in power, at least in political power. Walter Benjamin writes somewhere that fascism systematically introduces aesthetics into political life. It marshals art into what he describes as “the production of ritual values.” He suggests that we should respond to fascism’s rendering politics aesthetic by politicizing aesthetics. I certainly do not think that we are on the brink of fascism, not even remotely. But the dangers of the aesthetic, including poetry, now being pressed into the service of a lulling complacency, a ritualistic sentimentalism that loses the zip and edge of the collective self-emancipatory struggles of the previous period, are very real. The aesthetic runs the danger of becoming anesthetic ...

Source.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzbvPa5npmo&w=560&h=349] UPDATE: This video, "I wanna be a Nigerian so freaking bad," by a group of American high schoolers focusing on Nigeria in an AP Comparative Politics class, is a minor Youtube hit. The song is a tongue in cheek rip-off of "Billionaire" by Travis McCoy and Bruno Mars. Why Nigeria? "Our teacher has gone to Nigeria multiple times and helped create the documentary Sweet Crude."  (A few lazy blogs, cutting and pasting, kept writing that they were Russian.) The video has had more than 10,000 views since it was posted on June 6.  Some decent political insights, but what's with the guy in the loincloth? On that, one of the students who made the video has responded on Youtube:

... the guy in the "diaper" has nothing to do with the video more of a way to make our class laugh. We know there are not all villages it just fit with the original song ... This video in no way was meant to offend or make fun of Nigerians or their culture. We are sorry to all we offended.