Africa Is a Country

sean-jacobs

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Sean Jacobs

Sean Jacobs, Founder-Editor of Africa is a Country, is on the faculty of The New School.

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Give that man a Bells

There's a commercial for Bell's, a popular South African whisky ("Give that man a Bells"), that is currently doing the rounds on the Interwebs and has a lot of people weeping on Twitter and Facebook. The ad was released as part of Super Bowl Weekend. No there's no Super Bowl in South Africa--it was just a marketing gimmick on the part of the creative team. The ad revolves around an elderly black man, clearly of some social standing and means (he doesn't seem to be poor) who happens to be illiterate and learning to read so he can read his writer son's book. And have a drink with his son. Watch here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VteDp3IK-60 The whole thing reads as contrived (middle class black man can't read) and ridiculous (nothing new, one might say, in the world of liquor advertising), but this one attempts to elide obvious economic realities, idealizing generational upward mobility of black people in South Africa (largely a fantasy if social indicators can be trusted), while propping up other racial fantasies by including some odd racial politics (the people who teach our heartwarming protagonist or give him books are white women). All this sentimentality is trotted out in order to promote drinking. The ad will literally drive you to drink. These kinds of ads that appeal to hopeful but completely unrealistic egalitarian fantasies are a dime a dozen in South Africa BTW. Which brings me to another commercial that also relies on sentiment, but which I found more relatable: an ad for parastatal Telecom's mobile service, 8ta. The ad features Jomo Somo, the Pele of 1970s South African football (let's not debate that now) who has had a colorful life as a footballer in the 1970s and 1980s (starred at Orlando Pirates, the most storied club in the country; was a teammate of Pele and Beckenbauer at the New York Cosmos and played for the Colorado Caribous; and bought his own football club in 1980s Apartheid South Africa*). Sono also coached South Africa at the 2002 World Cup. Anyway, the ad--one that is up for an award*--reconstructs the story of Sono and his wife, Gail's wedding day. No need to summarize. Just watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSn4YH08mwo * After Jomo Sono came back from playing in the United States, he bought Highlands Park (the club in the video), and renamed it Jomo Cosmos. Yes, the story of Jomo Sono still needs to be told. Other contenders for best ad at the South African Sport Industry Awards this week are a bunch of less striking and more conventional ads, including one for sports channel Supersport featuring the hilarious dad of London Olympics gold medal swimmer Chad le Clos; another of those rainbow sports nation ads for beer Castle Lager; for bank ABSA; and, finally, one featuring wooden acting from members of the national rugby team.

The ‘Born Free Generation’

The Fader (yes, they're still around) has been putting up a series of posts from Johannesburg (Obey You Collective: South Africa) that focuses on "artists, trail-blazers, and bright young talents from South Africa." (The series is paid for by soft drink company Coco Cola.) Much of it seems to be filmed around the part of the city marketed as Maboneng. In the latest instalment, they published an interview with Tarryn Alberts, part of dance crew, V.I.N.T.A.G.E. (If you remember, Zach Rosen interviewed them for AIAC, here). Anyway, the interview includes this illuminating passage about the Catch 22 for young black people after Apartheid:

“Happy Africans”

It's unclear how big the Gun Owners of America are (the NRA predominates in the numbers and in terms of influence), but it's important enough that the organization's lobbyists write bills for congressmen, calling for no gun control, and these usually get passed in the US House of Representatives. We're also not all that surprised when GOA leaders say dumb things, but there are times when we're left speechless. Take these latest random comments by the group's executive director, Larry Pratt (that's him in the pic above taking aim), on a radio broadcast. The show, "Gun Owner's News Hour," was discussing the "differences" between Africans and African-Americans, the passing of Nelson Mandela, South African Apartheid, and how George Zimmerman is being persecuted in a way comparable to Apartheid South Africa. The show's host is Selwyn Duke. You can listen to them talk this offensive nonsense, here and here. But here's the gist in summary form. First, The Rawstory with those comments about "Africans from Africa":
"... Generally the African from Africa is a very pro-American person, a very happy person," Pratt opined. “I know several. And they are always just happy with a joke, pleasant smile on their face. And they clearly don’t identify with the surliness that’s all too frequently the attitude of their fellow African-Americans here.” “And they’re very conservative politically,” he continued. “The country of Ghana, it’s still illegal to commit an abortion, it’s illegal to be a homosexual. Very conservative social laws and very free market oriented as well.” Duke agreed and pointed out that the types of Africans that could afford to come to the U.S. were of “a better stripe.” “They tend to be educated, they tend to be a little more upper class than a lot of the Africans who can’t get here,” Duke said. “It’s the way we used to run our immigration system altogether,” Pratt replied. “These are folks that stand apart and hopefully they can approach some of their fellow blacks and say, ‘Hey, buddy, you got this all wrong, let me explain to you how the world really works.’”
They also discussed Apartheid South Africa (this summary from Right Wing Watch):
The two also touched on the issue of apartheid in South Africa, which both claimed wasn’t all that bad. Pratt lamented that Dutch and English settlers “neglected to evangelize the blacks,” so that now “there aren’t common values, there is certainly no Christian ethos in that country.” Duke, for his part, equated the “supposedly racist” apartheid regime with George Zimmerman. “South Africa was sort of the George Zimmerman of the geopolitical stage,” he said. “It was a situation where you had black on black crimes that were rampant and brutal that the media ignored, but this white-on-black so-called crime was disseminated far and wide … simply because it accorded with the politically correct agenda.”
It felt like hanging out in the comment sections of News24 posts.

The “Apartheid-era Robin Hood”

I wrote a long piece on Zola Mahobe, a Soweto businessman who died last December (two weeks after Nelson Mandela) and who is credited with transforming Mamelodi Sundowns. The team is currently one of the "big three" South African football clubs and is owned by Patrice Motsepe, the best example of a postapartheid oligarch: he owns a football club. I had a lot of fun writing this and talking to friends about it.  The piece was published on The Far Post, a co-production between travel site Roads and Kingdoms and Sports Illustrated to publish a new feature on global soccer culture every other week until the World Cup in Brazil Here are the first few paragraphs:
On December 5th of last year, South Africans bade farewell to Nelson Mandela. In general, the new republic's founding father was remembered as a principled, but pragmatic political leader. Some media coverage, however, reduced him to a one-dimensional figure, at odds with the larger South African struggle. That Mandela advocated armed struggle and formed alliances with communists was downplayed by all sorts of political causes and personalities whose politics Mandela would have opposed while he was alive, but who now claimed him as one of their own. Mandela was also favorably compared to his former wife, Winnie Madikizela. His time in prison, presented as character-building, was contrasted with her increasing radicalism and criminal actions in the 1980s. Most black South Africans, however, were not scandalized by Mandela's one-time celebration of violent struggle or his communist leanings, or by Winnie's complicated, but flawed, legacy, which was formed in a more compromising, violent outside. As Stephen Smith concluded in the London Review of Books recently: "If any one person can stand in for the country, it's surely Winnie, half 'mother of the nation' and half township gangsta, deeply ambiguous, scarred and disfigured by the struggle." Most South Africans get this full, complicated understanding of their recent history. Zola Mahobe is another such complicated figure, part gangster, part hero. Mahobe, a legendary soccer club owner in South Africa during the 1980s, died nine days after Mandela. While his death quite rightly did not receive the same attention that Mandela's did, his life was shaped by many of the same forces. For some, Mahobe was a symptom of what was wrong with South African professional soccer. Others viewed him (and still do) as a brilliant entrepreneur, a sort of Apartheid-era Robin Hood, and a visionary that would help reshape the dimensions of South African soccer.
Keep reading here.

Boss Player

The BBC news presenter Komla Dumor, who passed away this weekend from cardiac arrest, was an exceptional broadcaster; read Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie's obit here. Everyone loved him. He was probably the most stylish newscaster also, and was well on his way to becoming the first globally recognized superstar news presenter originating from the continent. Dumor took journalism seriously. Just watch his last big interview where he took on Rwanda's Ambassador to the UK about that country's habit of murdering opposition figures. Dumor, known as Boss Player, also loved sport, basketball (he had skills), and, above all, the beautiful game. He especially loved his Ghana's Black Stars. Like here during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, when Superman style, he ripped his shirt open to reveal his true identity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMHG11iwUYg Or last November when he celebrated Ghana's qualification for Brazil 2014 by donning a lekarapa. And he seemed genuinely happy--like a fan--around footballers; like when he met Victor Moses (Liverpool and Nigeria) or thanked Sulley Muntari (AC Milan and Ghana) for the signed shirt for his son. But it is this video, below--when Peter Okwoche, the BBC Focus on Africa sports presenter, challenged Komla to a game of keepie-uppie--that is my favorite memory of the Boss Player: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XDVjSra-sg RIP Boss Player.

File Under: Mahmood Mamdani on South Africa’s much vaunted Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Because the (South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission) focused on perpetrators and overlooked the beneficiaries of mass violations of rights abuses – such as the pass laws and forced expulsions – it allowed the vast majority of white South Africans to go away thinking that they had little to do with these atrocities. Indeed, most did learn nothing new. The alternative would have been for the TRC to show white South Africans that no matter what their political views – whether they were for, against or indifferent to apartheid – they were all its beneficiaries, whether it was a matter of the residential areas where they lived, the jobs they held, the schools they went to, the taxes they did or did not pay, or the cheap labour they employed.

Happy New Year!

We're taking a well deserved break. Back on January 11th. Meanwhile, go crazy in our archive.

The Emperor’s Son

The decision by Spain’s national football team to go play a football friendly in its former colony, Equatorial Guinea, has spotlighted how the latter country is run.