I'm in the suburbs of Toronto this weekend and I go to bed early nowadays (my one year old gets up at 6am), but for those in New York City tonight, go check out the monthly Made in Africa Party with Boima (remember he is also an accomplished DJ) and Lamin Fofana at CAFE NUNEZ at 240 W. 35th Street (between 7 & 8th Avenues) tonight (10pm onwards). They're featuring DJ Sirak from the New York-based Africology crew. Boima tells me that this will be the last time he'll be playing until September as he'll be off to West Africa for the summer on school business (so go see him), but they've got other guess DJ's lined up in his absence to keep things moving till then. More at the Made in Africa Facebook Page.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOiOkDRQv_w The video for "Go Getter," by Johannesburg's MB featuring Malika, which I saw playing once or twice on a TV in the background (TV's are always on in people's houses there) while in South Africa earlier this year. Pay attention.  Here's the refrain: "You need to let it go/go get it/go get it." Let it go? and go get what? That's when you notice that for the people they actually show, this sort of positivism may not be, er, realistic: the ice cream man, the street sweeper, and the people standing against the wall, checking the paper for...wanted ads?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUlyWkM8aAs Earlier this week ESPN won seven Sports Emmy Awards, including one for music during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, like the video--played at the start of broadcasts and during breaks from the studio in South Africa--featuring U2 (I prefer Bono when he sings, not when he wants to save Africa) and the Soweto Gospel Choir above and this one, below: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16PmpHNmA-w They also won a Sports Emmy for best feature for a short documentary insert, below, featuring rapper Nas, on the Liberian amputee soccer team.  Here's the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_gzJ8NuOqc And of course my personal favorite: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwzTTdEIrvs Source.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkDVUVosSgA From somewhere in American suburbia, the very frank, at times trite The Ten Minute Fix, a Youtube "talk show" series with an East African bias. Here's the raison d'etre: "This idea was born from the sheer fact that we have professionals around us, we have good equipment around us but most importantly we just like having fun around each other. We decided each time we meet up we will just let the camera's roll and let whatever happens, happen. What we capture we will post to share the light moments with our friends and the diaspora in general."

Glenna Gordon's photography focuses on a neglected angle of the Ivorian crisis--since the most recent episode of the crisis, more than 150,000 Ivoirians have fled to neighboring Liberia. Here and here.

In Cape Town this January, Ken Salo invited Jessica and I to presentations by summer abroad students from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They were presenting their findings on urban inequalities in the city. A group of students presented on the struggles of a group of residents in Delft, a working class township, who had been evicted from their council houses, subsequently built shacks on the street and had then been forcibly relocated to a transit camp consisting of tin shacks.  Their new home was named Blikkiesdorp (Tin Can Town). Some of the residents were in the audience that night. While talking to one of the leaders afterwards, I realized that a few months earlier I was sent the proofs of a book by and about them. The book, a collection of letters--written mostly in the residents own voices and with minimal editing--accompanied by photographs, is a testament to the residents' insistence on decent housing. Titled "No Land! No House! No Vote! Voices from Symphony Way," it is out now and is being launched in Cape Town tonight. You can buy the book here. Below, I am copying the foreword of the book by activist and writer Raj Patel, who lived and worked in South Africa for a while, and who captures well their conditions and struggle:

For those outside South Africa, particularly for the generation of activists who fought apartheid, it’s tempting to imagine that after Mandela was freed from Robben Island, and lines snaked outside polling booths in the first free elections, and after the ANC won, and the national anthem became Nkosi Sikelele Afrika, and after Nelson Mandela held high the Rugby World Cup trophy, that even while the Soviet Union collapsed and capitalism crowed triumphantly from the United States, all was well in the Rainbow Nation.

But despite the close-harmony singing and the holding aloft of leaders, South Africa isn’t The Lion King. It’s more like Animal Farm. Orwell ends ‘Animal Farm’ with a scene in which we see the pigs and the humans whom they displaced, sharing a meal together, and it being hard to tell pig from human. Over the past two decades, a few black South Africans have become very wealthy, as Steve Biko predicted in 1972:

"This is one country where it would be possible to create a capitalist black society, if whites were intelligent, if the nationalists were intelligent. And that capitalist black society, black middle class, would be very effective … South Africa could succeed in putting across to the world a pretty convincing, integrated picture, with still 70 percent of the population being underdogs."

For many, the struggle against apartheid never ended, because apartheid continues to live. The introduction of neoliberal economic policies have led to falling levels of social welfare for the poorest. In South Africa, human development levels are now lower than in Palestine.[1] The ascent of a new black capitalist class isn’t, however, the end of the narrative. The state itself, in trying to stamp out the uncomfortable appearance of poverty, and in behaving in ways similar to the Apartheid regime, has done much to fan the flames of dissent, and to continue the story of the fight against apartheid.

Think, for instance, of over one hundred families living in backyards across Delft, who thought that Christmas had come early in 2007. They received letters from their local councilor inviting them to move into the houses they had been waiting for since the end of Apartheid. They left their backyard shacks, to occupy their new homes along the N2 highway. For a brief moment, all was as well as can be expected. The quality of housing on the N2 project is an ongoing scandal, but at least the homes were theirs. Then the families received another notice. They were to be evicted. The original letters authorizing them to move into their new homes had been sent illegally. The local councilor who sent them suffers the modest indignity of being suspended for a month. The N2 residents are treated altogether more harshly. They are kicked out of their homes with nowhere to go – their former backyard shacks having been rented to new families the moment the old ones left. The city tried to move them to the temporary relocation areas, many kilometers away from the communities they have grown up with. The units that pass for housing here are tin shacks, ‘blikkies’, ramshackle blocks of metal in the sand, wind and baking sun, sealed in by armed police yet beset with crime. The evicted families refused to move to ‘Blikkiesdorp’. They organized, setting up a temporary camp on the pavement of Symphony Way. The government threw its might into the legal system, extracting an eviction order that, by October 2009, soon after the letters in this book were written, moved all 136 families to the sandy wastes of Blikkiesdorp, in time for the tin shacks to bake in the summer heat.

Apartheid ends and apartheid remains.

The squires of the new order bicker among themselves for the spoils.

The poor, who fought and died for justice, wait for it long after its arrival has been announced. Movements arise to hasten the day when apartheid’s remains can be swept away. The movements are crushed. At the beginning of 2010, when this preface is being written, the South African government has gone on the offensive against organizations of poor people across the country, from refugee camps to mob attacks against the leadership of the Kennedy Road Development Committee in Durban, to the residents of Symphony Way in Cape Town.

So why should you care about the pavements of Symphony Way when there’s no one there anymore, just in time for the 2010 World Cup tourists? The readiest answer is that while the government can take the people out of Symphony Way but they can’t take Symphony Way out of the people. As the residents themselves announced, “Symphony Way is not dead. We are still Symphony Way. We will always be Symphony Way. We may not be living on the road, but our fight for houses has only just begun. We warn government that we have not forgotten that they have promised us houses and we, the Symphony Way Anti-Eviction Campaign, will make sure we get what is rightfully ours.”

This book is testament to what it is to be Symphony Way. Written toward the end of the struggle on the pavements, this anthology of letters is both testimony and poetry. The power of the words comes not simply from confession, but through the art with which these stories are told. Every struggle has its narrators, but some on Symphony Way are wordsmiths of the highest order. When Conway Payn invites you to “put your shoes into my shoes and wear me like a human being would wear another human being,” he opens the door to a world of compassion, of fellow-suffering, that holds you firm.

The letters do not make for easy reading. Lola Wentzel’s story of the Bush of Evil, of the permanent geography of sexual violence, will haunt you long after you close the pages of this book. In here you will find testimony of justice miscarried, of violence domestic and public, of bigotry and tolerance, of xenophobia and xenophilia. There’s too much at stake shy from truth, and the writers here have the courage to face it directly, even if the results are brutal. Amid this horror, there is beauty, and the bundle of relationships between aunties, husbands, wives and children, of daughters named Hope and Symphony. All human life is here.

A few visitors have seen this already. Indeed, Kashiefa, Sedick, Zakeer and Sedeeqa Jacobs remark on the cottage industry of visitors, students and fellow travelers who visit — “Everyday there is people that come from everywhere and ask many questions, then we tell them its not lekker to stay on the road and in the blikkies.” But this book isn’t an exercise in prurience. It’s a means to dignity, a way for the poors to reflect, be reflected and share with you. This book is testimony to the fact that there’s thinking in the shacks, that there are complex human lives, and complex humans who reflect, theorise and fight to bring change. This book is a sign of that fight, and in reading it, you have been conscripted. Mon semblable, mon frère[3] – you are addressed, reader, not as a voyeur, but as a brother or sister, as someone whose eyes dignify the struggle.

If your tears fall from your eyes as did from mine, you have will have been touched by the idea, the incredible realization!, that the poor can think for themselves, write for themselves, and will continue to fight for their humanity to be recognized. Whether or not you’re going to the 2010 World Cup, come to this book with open eyes, and you’ll leave with an open heart.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGIHzkWwxVg

It's the socialist National Football League (of America's) Draft in New York City this week and one of the two local teams, the New York Giants (they actually play in New Jersey), picked Prince Amukamara, a cornerback from Nebraska, who grew up in the suburbs of Glendale, Arizona. His name and family history (his grandfather was a Nigerian king), and of course a certain wedding in London, was enough for some New York media to go heavy on cheap royal references. Here's a few lines from New York Post (that's their back page above) columnist Steve Serby:

He coulda been King of the City. And the Giants picked a Prince instead. Prince Amukamara ... A short-armed cornerback whose family comes from royal bloodlines in Nigeria. Whose grandfather was the king of the Awo-Omamma in Imo State of Nigeria, whose father Romanus was chief. ... I’ll be honest, I might know Prince Amukamara from Prince William if I saw them together.

New York Post Reporter Paul Schwartz:

There’s little not to like about Amukamara, who comes from royal Nigerian bloodlines. His grandfather was a local king and his father, Romanus, was a chief.

I'm not sure how being a prince helps you on the field. The Daily News wasn't any different with its "Royal Wedding! Giants select a Prince" headline and a similar photograph of Amukamara and some of his family members. More sober was The New York Times. Buried in a long piece about football tactics, player comparisons, etcetera, was this:

His first name is derived from a family of royal Nigerian bloodlines. His grandfather was the king of the Awo-Omamma in Imo State of Nigeria. His father, Romanus, once held the title of chief. He could have been next in line to be chief, but “a lot of stuff would have to come into play. I would have to live there to be chief, basically," Amukamara said.