Malaika Brooks Smith Lowe and her team is seeking contributors in the new developmental stage of the Groundation Grenada blog. From a small start in 2009 theyhave organically grown over the years and now has 295 subscribers with more joining the virtual village everyday. Now they are officially putting out the call for Groundation Writers. Groundation Grenada want to create a platform for the diverse voices of youth from across the Caribbean (including the diaspora), and encourage contributions from budding and established writers, poets, artists, farmers, musicians, educators, students and anyone passionate about share their vision of the world.
Photography by Nadia Huggins
Groundation Grenada is committed to being a safe space, valuing each person, irrespective of sex, race/ethnicity, religion (or ‘lack’ thereof), sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, abilities or background. All contributions will require writing, even visual/audio pieces will need to include a statement/reflection/critique. You can make one contribution or become a regular Groundation Writer. They encourage innovation and initiative, and fully welcome your ideas. Here are a few ideas that would elevate the blog, just to get your creative juices flowing.
Perhaps pose a particular question, the answers to which, will form a series of posts. For instance:
Who are the faces of the emerging music scene in your community?
What historical photographs/documents/letters/music can you find & what are the story behind each?
What are some badass blogs/websites that people should know?
Who are some of the people in your village/school/club that inspire you?
What are some innovative approaches to economic/social/agricultural development that you see as viable?
What is a youth perspective on local/regional/intl politics?
Photography by Nadia Huggins
Why become a Groundation Writer?
Impact…Inspire…Ignite!
An opportunity to be published globally
Audience of 295 subscribers and growing daily
Share your own projects & links in your bio
Get quality traffic on your blog/website
Build your credibility
Develop your writing
Add experience to your resume
Grow your Voice!
Who is Eligible to become a Groundation Writer?
Grenadian youth (self-defined) living anywhere in the world
Any Caribbean youth (self-defined) living anywhere in the world
Budding and established writers, artists, musicians, farmers, researchers, students, activists, educators and community members.
How to become a Groundation Writer?
Please read their manifesto and vision (on right sidebar) as well as peruse articles so you know ‘wha they ’bout. If Groundation sounds like it is the space for you, start thinking about your ideas for contributions. Then contact us:
Kuduro pioneer Sebem (fresh out of prison; he was in for repeated traffic violations, from what I understand) has a new video out (above); the clip’s rural setting is surprising, given kuduro’s over-all urban flow. Next, a Senegalese collaboration between Djibril Diop and Aida Samb:
Kenyan Jeraw draws inspiration and images from local blockbuster film ‘Nairobi Half Life’:
A new video for Belgian-Congolese (but mostly Bruxellois) rapper Pitcho — taken from his new album Rendez-Vous avec le Futur:
If you troll the fashionable Internets as much as we do, chances are you’ve stumbled across these two finely dressed gentlemen and wondered who the heck they were. It turns out they’re two fashion-loving Afropolitans based in London.
Shaka is an artist and photographer and Sam is a fashion stylist. So where did they get their impeccable style? “My father was a tailor, so I had my first bespoke suit at the age of 5 like most African kids did; this was Sunday attire,” Sam recently told the Sartorialist.
In 1986, the South African photographer Santu Mofokeng decided to document “train churches” — the culture of mobile worship by working class black South Africans on the country’s commuter trains that continues till today. Mofokeng was traveling daily between his home in Soweto and his work as a dark room assistant at an Afrikaans newspaper in Johannesburg. At first he was annoyed by the practice — he preferred to nap — but soon warmed to its significance: “It captures two of the most significant features of South African life: the experience of commuting and the pervasiveness of spirituality.” Mofokeng’s photographs were taken when traveling long distances from isolated and dusty township homes to domestic and gardening jobs in white suburbs was the norm — residential Apartheid was enforced by law. Leaving in the early hours of the morning and returning to their families late at night, most had no time to attend church, and had no choice but to take God with them on their long train rides. Though legal Apartheid these days is a thing of the past, residential Apartheid — now enforced by economics — is still the norm and most black people still commute to mostly white suburbs for work. The culture of mobile worship continues to this day.
Today, the sounds of the gospel (accompanied by worshippers hitting the sides of the train and ringing portable bells) are still an invitation to come to church. Often heard from the side of the platform as the train pulls in and out of different stations, this signal helps believers to find the congregation while warning non-believers to stay away.
I remember as a child how irritated I used to get when I found myself in one of these church carriages. I felt like I was being bullied into Christianity; my right to remain atheist was being violated on my way to school. As I got older, these ways of doing things started to fascinate me. I remember always wanting to do a photo story about this kind of worship, ever since I knew I wanted to be a photographer and long before I knew who Santu Mofokeng was.
When I was asked by my photography mentor about what I would shoot if I had an opportunity to do my first body of work, the answer was simple. I wanted to take pictures of people preaching and singing in trains. A few days after our conversation I got on a 17:45 train from Brackenfell on route to Cape Town station with my heart racing and my mind thinking up answers to the questions I was sure to get as soon as I pointed the camera.
I didn’t even do research, I had all the research I needed from taking trains to school for most of my school life. My plan was to shoot first, answer the questions, apologize and delete any unwanted photographs. It was as simple as that. After at least two days a week, for three weeks on that train I had a lot of pictures, and I had gained new friends and a new point of view of what had always been part of my day to day life.
A few days later I went back to Santu’s body of work and I realized the similarities between us. Little has changed since he did his “train church” in 1986. The trains are still in the same condition. It is still the gardeners, the domestic workers, the cleaners and the black unemployed that crowd the trains en masse in search of a better living in the cities, even after 18 years of a new and democratic South Africa.
The prayer’s theme is still the same. To go home to a liveable house and to be able to make sure the family has something to eat. The only thing that has changed is that school kids now have phones that can play music and they’re not afraid to use them. As soon as the bibles come out, the earphones soon follow.
* Asanda Kaka is a Cape Town-based photographer who also works as a video editor for a news channel. To see more of her work, visit her Tumblr.
I tweeted earlier today about my horror regarding the shootings in Newtown, CT, and my connections to the community. I grew up nearby and have friends who attended the school where the shooting took place.
I logged onto Facebook this afternoon, terrified of what I would read. I grew up near Newtown, Connecticut, and went to high school in Danbury, Connecticut. A close friend spent her childhood at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the school where a shooter killed at least 26 people today, police said, most of them children.
Police reports are still coming in, and we are only beginning to grasp the scale of this tragedy. Friends are describing their panic as they try to reach their children in schools that are on lockdown. One of my high school classmates is trying to support her best friend, whose daughter was one of the children killed.
My Facebook timeline is filled with expressions of relief for those who escaped the violence, sorrow for those lost, and prayers for recovery. It’s also filled with friends demanding that America take action on gun control. Their calls are answered by others who protest that this is a time to mourn, not a time for politics.
A tragedy like today’s shooting demands we both mourn and take action.
Predictably, for a post about the difficulty of having open dialog about gun control in the US, it’s generating thoughtful and reasoned debate. Here’s one of the carefully reasoned tweets engaging with my argument:
Editor's note: Ethan Zuckerman directs the Center for Civic Media, based at MIT's Media Lab. He lives in Lanesboro, Massachusetts, and blogs at http://ethanzuckerman.com/blog
(CNN) -- I logged onto Facebook this afternoon, terrified of what I would read.
I grew up near Newtown, Connecticut, and went to high school in Danbury, Connecticut. A close friend spent her childhood at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the school where a shooter killed at least 26 people today, police said, most of them children.
Police reports are still coming in, and we are only beginning to grasp the scale of this tragedy. Friends are describing their panic as they try to reach their children in schools that are on lockdown. One of my high school classmates is trying to support her best friend, whose daughter was one of the children killed.
My Facebook timeline is filled with expressions of relief for those who escaped the violence, sorrow for those lost, and prayers for recovery. It's also filled with friends demanding that America take action on gun control. Their calls are answered by others who protest that this is a time to mourn, not a time for politics.
Ethan Zuckerman
A tragedy like today's shooting demands we both mourn and take action.
In April of this year, One L. Goh shot 10 nursing students at Oikos University in Oakland, California. In July, James Holmes shot 70 people in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. In August, Wade Michael Page shot 10 people in a Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. With today's tragedy, 2012 is likely to be the worst year for mass gun violence in U.S. history. It follows a year in which a mass shooting killed six and critically injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. And on Tuesday two people killed when a gunman opened fire at a shopping mall in Oregon.
Outside of these mass shooting incidents covered by the media, 2012 is likely to be a bad one in terms of "ordinary" shootings. The CDC reports that 30,759 were treated in hospitals for gunshot wounds in 2011, a 47% increase over 2001. Homicide rates in the U.S. are going down while incidences of shootings are increasing, because doctors are now so experienced at treating gunshot wounds that they are saving more lives.
Yet conventional wisdom argues that the U.S. is too polarized and divided for any meaningful changes to our broken and inadequate gun laws. The National Rifle Association and other lobbying groups are too well-funded and powerful for politicians to stand behind even modest gun control measures, like Sen. Frank Lautenberg's proposed ban on high-capacity magazines, which lapsed in 2004.
Americans who follow the gun-control debate have stopped expecting change in the wake of events like today's shooting for the simple reason of precedent: If Aurora, Oak Creek, Tuscon and Columbine haven't changed the politics of gun control, why should we believe the tragedy in Newtown will have a different outcome?
The NRA's most powerful weapon against gun control isn't postcard campaigns, primary battles or political advertising. It's silence. So long as we assume gun control is impossible, we don't talk about gun control. So long as we don't talk about gun control, gun control is impossible.
The NRA fights any attempts to control firearms, no matter how common-sensical, because their greatest fear is public debate over any controls over guns. Once we begin discussing whether it's reasonable for civilians to be able to buy unlimited amounts of ammunition without a background check, we've moved gun control from the realm of the unthinkable into the possible.
It sounds reasonable and compassionate when New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie responded to the Aurora shootings by demanding, "This is just not the appropriate time to be grandstanding about gun laws. Can we at least get through the initial grief and tragedy for these families?"
Christie, and my friends on Facebook who demand we mourn apolitically, have the best of intentions, but they are missing a simple truth. Moments like today's tragedy in Newtown remind us that the U.S. suffers from anepidemic of gun violence, a pattern that's does not exist in other highly developed nations.
Moments of crisis, like the shooting in Newtown, tend to produce brief spikes of popular interest in gun control. My research on media attention suggests these spikes are extremely short-lived, and that they may be decreasing in intensity. There was less popular interest in gun control, as measured by Google searches, after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting and the Aurora killings than after Virginia Tech.
There were almost no spikes of popular interest in gun control after "smaller" mass shootings, like that in Oak Creek. To have any chance of combating the NRA's campaign of silence, gun control groups have to seize moments of media attention to push for change.
When the story about the Newtown shooter comes out, it is likely that we will hear about a disturbed and deranged shooter and about "senseless violence," as if to distinguish it from more sensible gun violence. This language turns mass shootings into natural disasters, as unpredictable and preventable as hurricanes and tornados.
Human behavior is unpredictable, but gun violence is not. In Chengping, Henan, China today, a deranged man slashed 22 schoolchildren with a knife. None died. School shootings in America are a product both of mad people and bad laws.
As we learn more about the young children killed in Newtown today, we will hear calls not to "politicize" their deaths. I urge you to ignore those calls. There is no better way to mourn these senseless deaths than to demand we change our laws and our culture so that the killing of innocent children truly becomes unthinkable.
If there’s a signature photograph to emerge out of today’s horrific school shooting in Connecticut, it’s this one.
Beyond the news value of these children being led safely away from the scene in emergency formation, it’s not hard to tell why. Mainly, it’s because of the heart breaking expression of the girl in the center of the picture in the turquoise shirt. Whereas the other children remained focused on the task at hand, this poor girl looks completely traumatize and emotionally distraught.
As well though, there’s the sense of this single file as almost a line of prisoners, not just because of law enforcement but by the way the boy second-in-line is being led by the police woman with his hands captured crossed just-so. That’s only relevant, however, to the extent it felt today — given the year’s, and the season’s number of gun rampages — like Americans have become hostages to a culture of violence.
(photo: Newtown Bee, Shannon Hicks/AP caption: Connecticut State Police lead children from the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., following a reported shooting there Friday.)
In the aftermath of the horrific mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut the immediate question was who had gunned down nearly thirty people, most of them children, before taking his own life.
Early reports, citing Connecticut law enforcement sources, identified the shooter as a 20-something from Newtown named Ryan Lanza. A Facebook profile fitting that description was easily accessible, and social media users—from professional reporters to online onlookers—immediately assumed they had discovered the Facebook profile of the gunman who had perpetrated the mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. News outlets including Buzzfeed, Mediaite, Gawker, and Fox News speculated that the account belonged to the shooter. Journalists from Slate, Huffington Post, CNN, and other news organizations tweeted links to the Facebook profile.
But it was the wrong guy. Press reports are now identifying the shooter as Adam Lanza. Ryan Lanza, identified as Adam's brother, has reportedly been questioned by police. According to the Associated Press, "a law enforcement official mistakenly transposed the brothers' first names." The result was that, for a few brief hours in the middle of the day, based on press speculation about the suspect's identity, social media users brought out the digital equivalent of pitchforks and torches, vilifying the alleged shooter's brother and haranguing Ryan Lanzas all across the intertubes.
Political cartoonist Matt Bors, who was Facebook friends with Ryan Lanza but didn't actually know him personally, was inundated with Facebook messages and friend requests as a result. "I was getting messages from people saying, why are you friends with a monster?" Bors says. Looking at Lanza's page, he saw desperate messages posted denying any involvement in the shooting, and posted them to his Twitter feed. "Fuck you CNN it wasn't me," Lanza's post read.
Meanwhile, other people named Ryan Lanza with Twitter feeds were deluged by followers and tweets. Facebook exploded with pages devoted to Ryan Lanza with screenshots taken from his profile. Several of them were some variation of this:
Or this:
But these are far from the only ones:
Very far from the only ones:
Lanza appears to have taken down his Facebook page.
This isn't the first, nor sadly will it be the last time, that journalists and the masses jump to conclusions in the aftermath of a tragedy based on personal details from social media profiles. Shortly after the shootings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado in July, ABC reporter Brian Ross speculated on air that the suspect in that shooting, was the same person who had a profile on a tea party website. It turned out they were two different people who merely shared a common name. Ross was pilloried by left and right alike, and eventually apologized for "disseminating that information before it was properly vetted." Then another mass shooting that captured the nation's attention occurred, and lots of other people made the same exact mistake. The temptation to break the news of the shooter's identity overwhelmed the need to make sure they had the right guy.
Adam Serwer is a reporter at the Washington, DC, bureau ofMother Jones. For more of his stories,click here. You can also follow him onTwitter. Email tips and insights to aserwer [at] motherjones [dot] com.RSS|TWITTER
This clip is a brief excerpt of 15 hours of recordings that document the lives of 4 generations of American women. They are my paternal mothers -- The Sanders Women. Their story begins near 1845 in Shreveport, Louisiana. This historically significant narrative moves off the slave plantation, up the Great migration, through Chicago's Jazz band scene, the roaring twenties, into the Great Depression in Harlem and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's.The sisters, passing for white at will, glided between the chorus lines of the Cotton club uptown to the Zeigfield Follies on Broadway. Included on the recordings are stories of ommunist recruitment meetings, J. Edgar Hoover's 'other' life and the American Negro Theater in Harlem.
"The School of Badu" is a mix (compilation) inspired by one of the sexiest encounters I've had to date. Amazing what a deep soul connection with another human being can do to and for an artist. The heart is a beast. Take a ride through some of my favorite live performances and studio songs that, in my opinion, exemplify Erykah's work as the multi-dimensional, soul stirring and body moving performer that she is. Listen carefully, then pass it along. Dallas, stand up. Badulovers, embrace....
Stop and Look is an anachronism, a sound out of place in today’s sonic landscape that fits in so well that when placed alongside a video of breakers it doesnt seem odd.While listening to the 1st single from Adrian Younge Presents The Delfonics, 2 things came to mind: classic soul and Wu-Tang. Interestingly enough Adrian Younge is presently working with Ghostface on a project and if the sound is comparable, we can expect a masterpiece from the pairing.
A prize of $2,500 and publication by the Poetry Society of America is given annually to a poet over 40 who has published no more than one book. Submit two copies of a manuscript of up to 10 poems or 20 pages with a $15 entry fee by December 22. Send an SASE or visit the website for complete guidelines.
Poetry Society of America, 15 Gramercy Park South, New York, NY 10003. (212) 254-9628.
A prize of $1,000 and publication in Gemini Magazine is given annually for a poem. The editors will judge. Submit up to three poems of any length with a $5 entry fee by January 3, 2013. Send an SASE, call, e-mail, or visit the website for complete guidelines.
Gemini Magazine, Poetry Contest, P.O. Box 1485, Onset, MA 02558. (339) 309-9757. David Bright, Editor.
Today, the sounds of the gospel (accompanied by worshippers hitting the sides of the train and ringing portable bells) are still an invitation to come to church. Often heard from the side of the platform as the train pulls in and out of different stations, this signal helps believers to find the congregation while warning non-believers to stay away.
I remember as a child how irritated I used to get when I found myself in one of these church carriages. I felt like I was being bullied into Christianity; my right to remain atheist was being violated on my way to school. As I got older, these ways of doing things started to fascinate me. I remember always wanting to do a photo story about this kind of worship, ever since I knew I wanted to be a photographer and long before I knew who 
When I was asked by my photography mentor about what I would shoot if I had an opportunity to do my first body of work, the answer was simple. I wanted to take pictures of people preaching and singing in trains. A few days after our conversation I got on a 17:45 train from Brackenfell on route to Cape Town station with my heart racing and my mind thinking up answers to the questions I was sure to get as soon as I pointed the camera.
I didn’t even do research, I had all the research I needed from taking trains to school for most of my school life. My plan was to shoot first, answer the questions, apologize and delete any unwanted photographs. It was as simple as that. After at least two days a week, for three weeks on that train I had a lot of pictures, and I had gained new friends and a new point of view of what had always been part of my day to day life.
A few days later I went back to Santu’s body of work and I realized the similarities between us. Little has changed since he did his “train church” in 1986. The trains are still in the same condition. It is still the gardeners, the domestic workers, the cleaners and the black unemployed that crowd the trains en masse in search of a better living in the cities, even after 18 years of a new and democratic South Africa.
The prayer’s theme is still the same. To go home to a liveable house and to be able to make sure the family has something to eat. The only thing that has changed is that school kids now have phones that can play music and they’re not afraid to use them. As soon as the bibles come out, the earphones soon follow.
