The Very Best--a collaboration of Esau Mwamwaya and Radioclit--has a new mixtape. It came out a few weeks ago. It is still good for Africa Day. Download it here.

If you're tired of the nonsense published in The New York Times or on the BBC website about yesterday's local elections in South Africa or can't bear the spin that will come from ANC (this points to widespread approval of its current leadership) or Democratic Alliance spin doctors (tripling your vote from 2% to 6% among black voters is an achievement), see below the insights of Steven Friedman, still one of the few good political analysts out of South Africa. With his permission I took these from Steven's Facebook page; he had posted them throughout the morning:

"... We have had tons of analysis but still do not know exactly how this is going to end because most of the township vote is not in yet. Trends so far suggest the ANC will indeed win all metros except Cape Town and that the DA has not made any great inroads among township voters but let us see whether that is confirmed when the big votes come in. So far this has gone as I thought it would!

... Turn-out is interesting - it seems it is actually quite a bit higher than last time. What effect that has on the final vote is something we must wait to see when the township vote comes in.

...On COPE, so far the evidence is that, if your party splits down the middle, you take around half the vote you did last time! That said, I do find the commentary which talks about COPE's implosion nonsense. The results do suggest that the COPE voters who support Lekota have remained loyal to the party and that COPE will remain a factor in our politics. I find it irritating that cliches become a part of mainstream analysis because people can't be bothered to think through an issue.

... Race is still an immensely important factor for all voters - we always hear how black township voters are influenced by race but no-one mentions that white suburban voters are too. The key issue in this campaign is that the DA made a massive pitch for black voters. My sense is that they did not make serious inroads. Race will remain important to South African voters for a long time to come.

... I haven't seen anything in this election to suggest that [a situation in which the ruling party really has to worry that the opposition could beat it in a national election] is now thecase. The DA has run a very effective campaign but they still cannot attract majority black voters in any numbers. The ANC will face a serious threat at the polls only when it splits again and faces an opposition which comes out of the ANC.

... [The DA] may be getting a little too excited about results thus far but they should certainly get over 20% and 25% is not impossible. I think this comes from a consolidation of the opposition vote - the DA has persuaded more opposition voters to come out and vote and to vote specifically for it - and from the fact that some ANC voters have stayed away. So part of the DA's gain is not because they have won more votes but because the ANC has won less.

... On opposition parties, both we and they should acknowledge that parties can play important roles even if they are not the government: I know of democracies where parties are in opposition for 100 years and they still play a role. Opposition parties should work out what they can do to represent their voters - being in government is not the only way they can do that. Of course, if the ANC splits again and we have very competitive elections, opposition parties may play a role in coalitions but no-one knows when that will happen.

I think the ruling party has two problems. It hasn't found a way to deal with its internal conflicts and it is becoming alienated from many of its voters who feel that leaders don't take them seriously. Any ground it has lost are a result of those two factors.

... My sense is that the ANC has not made any inroads this time into the 'white' vote. A key reason for the DA's gains is that they have increased their support among whites and other racial minorities. You may have noticed that, at first, the ANC was way behind in the major metros - it is still behind in Johannesburg. That is because the results which come in first are those from the mainly white suburbs.

... I don't think we should automatically assume that rural people [still voting for the ANC and not for opposition parties] are less informed. But if you look at the results, it is still clear that race is a much more important issue than rural or urban. In general, South Africans vote their identities - they vote for who for who they think speaks for people like them. Race is very important but so are all sorts of other identity factors including tradition - who your family has supported through the years. Unless the opposition comes out of the ANC it cannot persuade most voters that it shares their identity."

Learn more about Steven here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqgZEklDuF8 Some catchy, and barely tolerable, pop from JR--remember him from the kwaiti/dance hit 'Make the Circle Bigger'--featuring the anti-Waddy and very unserious rapper, Jack Parow, as well as a hook from a singer of the Afrikaans pop group, Die Heuwels Fantasies.

South Africans vote for new local councillors today. Once the spin and the electioneering clear, we'll try and make sense of it as well as of the media coverage around here.

Benedicte Kurzen's often graphic images of the recent (April 16) presidential elections in Nigeria and its aftermath--the elections were won by Goodluck Jonathan. At last count, more than 200 people were dead and nearly 40,000 people displaced in post-election violence. The full series here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLDAuXE2DiM A lot of people dismiss Dominican-American pop singer George Lopez Jr, also known as Twin Shadow, as a hipster who packages new wave nostalgia. Maybe that's true. But there's something about this tune--which came out late last year--that I like.

Information.

A long, long time ago when there was still Apartheid, I needed a passport to travel by bus from Cape Town to Durban in South Africa. That meant going through the "independent homeland" of Transkei in South Africa's Eastern Cape. If you forgot that's where the state banished surplus black people and from where capital got its cheap labor.  I can still remember the farce of crossing the "border" and having our documents checked by Transkei police in brown uniforms and ten gallon hats. Then last week, before a short trip to Toronto, Canada, I received this message from Delta for South African citizens visiting Canada:

Additional Information: - Passports, identity or travel documents of Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, Transkei and Venda are not accepted.

Who even traveled or still travels with such passports? Is it because I was traveling to a country that offers refugee status to white South Africans from democratic rule in South Africa. BTW, Toronto--where I was for the Canadian Association of African Studies annual meeting--actually turned out to be worth it. I was on a panel with Neelika Jayawardane, and Tsitsi Jaji, in English at Penn.  Other highlights: I went to a screening of academic and filmmaker Daniel Yon's beautiful new film on Sathima Bea Benjamin (review forthcoming); went to visit some exhibits of the Contact Photo Festival downtown (reviews and a possible interview on its way); drove around the Toronto suburbs and went for some cheap, very good Tamil food; met scholar and activist John S. Saul (video of John talking about his new book forthcoming on AIAC), and watched Canada's version of FOX News.

Timothy Burke, Swarthmore history professor--he's written a book on commodity culture in Zimbabwe--and blogger, has a great post about 'memoirs from Africa.' Basically he was asked to prepare a year-long reading list of books about Africa for school alumni. Burke decided to only include memoirs or first-person perspective accounts from the last 30 years or so. He acknowledges that he's end up with "... a surplus of certain kinds of books that I find tedious because they follow such a strong template and are so driven by market fads: memoirs of white women who grew up on African farms that followed on Alexandra Fuller’s great memoir of life in Rhodesia and now memoirs of child soldiers and survivors of Darfur." Anyway, his list is interesting for what it says about who publishes memoirs in and of Africa and what's available outside the continent. Some of the titles that made it onto his initial list are familiar, but there are also some surprises. Here are samples with Burke's mostly spot-on comments:

Alexandra Fuller's Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: "It’s so distinctive in stylistic terms, and so unsentimental and unapologetic, that it still unsettles a kind of complacently do-gooder liberal expectation about what reading about Africa or white settlers ought to be like." Samson Kambalu's The Jive Talker: An Artist’s Genesis: "Great fun, fascinating, and a real cure-all for the endless parade of memoirs by Africans about their experiences of war, genocide and violence." Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: "There are other travel accounts by African-Americans that I like, but some are out of print (Eddy Harris’ Native Stranger) and some I don’t like (like Keith Richburg’s Out of America) but Hartman’s is really distinctive and fiercely resists compression or reductionism." Aidan Hartley's The Zanzibar Chest:  "I actually like this less for the early more standard colonial-nostalgia stuff on white settlers and more for Hartley’s honest accounts of his work as a journalist and rootless traveller and the kind of scruffy hedonism that he got caught up in in between covering war and genocide." William Kamkwamba's The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: " God, this is so well-meaning and sincere that I feel a bit like I’ve just watched a marathon of The Waltons when I read it. But again, the last thing I want is a year full of genocide and war."

Anyway, you can read the rest of the list and the back and forth between Burke and his blog readers here.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWjlPiJlihE&w=500&h=307&rel=0] Zim Ngqawana (b. 1959), a key member of the second generation of South African jazz musicians, a student of Darius Brubeck, Yusuf Lateef, Max Roach and Archie Shepp and a major influence on the next generation of artists like Kyle Shepherd, passed Monday. Ngqawana, a Muslim, was to be buried today in Johannesburg. Obituaries here and here.

A 13-year-old South African girl is the latest victim of "corrective rape," in which men rape lesbians to "cure" them of their sexual orientation in South Africa. As The Guardian reports 31 lesbians have been killed because of their sexuality in the past decade, and more than 10 lesbians a week are raped or gang raped in Cape Town alone. "Last month, a 24-year-old woman who belonged to a gay and lesbian rights group was stoned to death after an apparent gang rape." Why do some South African men do this? The Guardian quotes Dean Peacock, co-founder and co-director of the Sonke Gender Justice Network, an organization that works with men and boys:

... [S]ome men described feeling threatened by gender transformation, including the assertion of women's and children's rights ... When you compare South Africa with other countries, what distinguishes it is gang rape: a performance of masculinity, young men proving themselves to each other and saying to a woman: 'We're not prepared for you to assert that kind of autonomy, especially sexual autonomy' ... [S]ome men in post-apartheid South Africa occupied a "dangerous nexus" of patriarchy, masculinity, poverty, radical disappointment with the government, profound feelings of insignificance, and a sense they can act with impunity. But they were still individual agents able to make choices, and nothing could excuse horrendous violence against women ...

Source.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8QYVXqdSmg We've featured Dutch R&B singer, Ntjam Rosie, here before. We had to do it again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbhplk5rljc With a nod to the 1990s, one of our favorites, DJ Premier, presents "A New Female MC," Dynasty.