VIDEO: Amel Larrieux

Amel Larrieux
Amel Larrieux performs and interviews @ The Shrine, Chicago, IL

Video By:
Cam Be
Jamaar J

Interview By: 
Andrea Oppan

Audio By:
Justin Jackson
Cam Be

 

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Sweet Misery 

 

<div style="background:#000000;width:540px;height:334px"></div><div style="font-size:12px;">Amel Larrieux - Sweet Misery (Official Music Video). Watch more top selected videos about: Amel Larrieux</div>

 

 

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The Blisslife of Amel Larrieux

from Groove Theory & Sweetback

BY MY SMALL STORY

Today’s temperature was uncomfortably hot and humid but I perked up when I bumped into R&B songwriter Amel Larrieux at Broadway and 10th street. She has just returned from a vacation in the Bay area. We walk along 10th street and she shares the excitement about having her daughter in her band which comes out later this year on Blisslife Recordsr; her love of taking walks and “daydreaming in New York”; her definition of knowledge/wisdom and advice for going after dreams.

Amel Larrieux, was born in New York City’s, Greenwich Village, her mother was a dance critic and professor named Brenda Dixon Gottschild. She was always a creative minded person since a tender age, and fortunately was surrounded by talented family members and inspiring artists.

 

>via: http://mysmallstory.wordpress.com/2011/06/09/amel-larrieux-the-beautiful-voic...

 

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Something Wonderful

 

 

PUB: Internews Health Journalism Fellowship (Kenya) > Writers Afrika

Internews Health Journalism Fellowship (Kenya)

Deadline: 18 August 2011

Journalists interested in health issues are invited to apply for a health journalism fellowship at Internews in Kenya.

The eight-week long fellowship is designed to improve coverage of health issues, with a focus on family planning, maternal health and HIV and Aids.

The programme offers early- to mid-career print and broadcast journalists an opportunity to take time out from the newsroom to enhance and polish their health journalism skills while engaging in high quality, high impact health journalism.

As a practical and customised programme, this fellowship focuses on both craft and content. Through one-on-one mentoring, discussions with top journalists, travel grants, as well as interactions with health experts, policy makers and communities, fellows will be well-grounded in the principles of health journalism. They will also develop myriad sources and story ideas and the capacity to examine the health, cultural, socio-economic, and cultural ramifications of major public health issues.

Fellows will also be exposed to new trends in new media, including multimedia storytelling.
The journalists will be required to publish their work during the time of the fellowship and after they return to their news organizations.

Who is eligible?

The fellowship is open to print and broadcast journalists with at least three years of experience working for or contributing to mainstream media in Kenya. Applicants should be able to demonstrate a deep interest in health journalism.

Fellows will be selected largely on the basis of previous work and the applicant’s demonstrated commitment to health journalism.

Awards

During the course of the fellowship, fellows will be given grants to cover travel and research costs relating to specific topics of their choice for publication and broadcast.
Journalists are expected to negotiate for permission for time away from their places of work.Internews will pay the salary of the journalist (equivalent to their current earnings) for the duration of the fellowship.

How to apply

To be considered, email or hand-deliver the following items:

* A cover letter describing your reasons for applying, qualifications and career goals.
* Curriculum vitae.
* A personal statement detailing your experiences, why you deserve the fellowship, what you aim to accomplish if it is awarded to you. Include specific topics you would like to explore.
* Details of previous awards or fellowships.
* At least three samples of published health stories.
* Two letters of support, one from a senior editor and another from a referee familiar with your work. Freelance journalists should send a letter of support from an editor or producer familiar with their recent work.

Where to send application

All communication regarding the fellowship should be addressed to Dotieno@INTERNEWS.ORG. The application package can be dropped at Internews Offices on the 13th Floor of I &M Building on Kenyatta Avenue.

Deadline:

The deadline for application is 12:00 p.m., 18 August, 2011.

Contact Information:

For inquiries: Dotieno@INTERNEWS.ORG

For submissions: Dotieno@INTERNEWS.ORG

Website: http://www.internewskenya.org

 

 

PUB: The Thoughts Bubble: August Flash Fiction Contest! ~ Heatwave

August Flash Fiction Contest! ~ Heatwave ~

 

From now on, The Thoughts Bubble will hold a monthly Flash Fiction contest!

 

The Grand Prize will be a $20.00 Amazon Gift Card which will be emailed directly to you electronically.

 

The Rules are simple:

 

  • Write a short story, poem, thought, letter, etc that is no longer than 300 words.
  • This piece of fiction must be based on the theme for the month.
  • Submit your flash fiction into the comment to THIS blog post by the 15th of the month.
  • Top 10 submissions will be voted on through this blog.
  • Winner will be announced on the 1st of the month.
  • Collect your prize :)
Since it is blazing hot outside, the theme for August will be "Heatwave" take it however you would like. So get out there and write, and don't forget to comment with your submission by August 15th!

 

Look forward to reading your masterpiece!

 

- Lev


 

3 comments:

 

mercedes jade said...

"Over the Balcony" by Mercedes Lopez

The space between her legs was small and safe and I found its slight diamond shape equally as mesmerizing as sacred and thus, untouchable. Perched on delicate sugar cookie toes, Rebecca Shapiro placed her hands on the balcony railing. Straight mahogany hair fell over the round of her right shoulder: fair exposed skin meant for butterfly kisses. She rose off her feet: balance shifting, her head dipped forward. Her petite heels—could’ve fit into each of my cupped palms—parted as they rose. I followed the negative space upwards from her ankles. The white Baltimore sky shone bright around her edges. The planes flattened, becoming all foreground, making her heavenly. My forefinger drew the lines around her onto the arm of my chair.

I’d traveled to the place behind her knees: I could’ve fit my hand perfectly around each. I imagined every situation that had us sitting side by side. My hand found its place upon the flat of each respective knee. I wanted to tie her to every chair and hold her knee all night in every alternate universe.

Rebecca raised her head and seemed to look headlong across the roofs of red and brown buildings, cream rowhouses, an entire city below her. She had fallen back onto her heels, the diamond had disappeared. I waited for her to lean over the ledge again, considered that I had never noticed it before, wanted to bear witness. Rebecca’s hair fell, her weight shifted, calves tightened, knees buckled, thighs tensed, I felt involved, intimate, the crease underneath each cheek emerged, curved, like two perfectly rounded scoops of butter pecan. I was shameless, considered my understanding of depth and spatial relations, having one perspective, I wanted three-hundred-sixty degrees. A hot summer day on a balcony, I wanted some ice cream.

Marlena Cassidy said...

Candied Ginger - Marlena Cassidy (Late to the party but still in time for the cake.)

The heatwave stretches on, turning weeds to golden brown and sun kissed decks into faded glories. The heatwave stretches on, and they lie in bed with their clothes all gone, spread out in sweaty skin and rumpled sheets, the distant hum of the air conditioning reverberating through their bones. Inside this little oasis of cool, manufactured air, they are safe from the heat rising off the ground in a million little shivers, mirages of reflecting pools dotting the melting asphalt like sunny puddles after a long, hard rain. The heatwave won’t touch them in here.

But it does in lots of little ways, tanned skin and bathing suit lines suddenly becoming something magnificent and sultry, something to be touched and revered and loved and worshipped, and her skin tastes of cinnamon and vanilla depending on where he puts his mouth. The swell of her breasts are mix of three, of vanilla and cinnamon and if he wants to be trite, maybe a cherry, but it's really not that. Maybe it's chocolate or a piece of candied ginger that he tastes. Yes, that's it. Candied ginger. He enjoys it as it melts over his tongue, spicy and sweet.

Inside, the heatwave roils between them, hungry and insistent. Outside, the sun hangs swollen on the horizon and another day of the heatwave ends for the rest of the world. For them though, it’s just beginning.

Kayberg said...

"Here I Go Again"

What is a heat wave exactly? When one thinks of heat wave, well, it's just that; a wave of heat. The only problem with "what one thinks" is not what I was thinking when I decided to write about the words heat wave.

Do you have any idea how many non-weather heat wave subjects there are in this world. Why just yesterday, I read about a company in Malaysia that sells heat wave phat pants. Does this mean, a wave of heat goes through a "phat" persons pants? Now there is a visual! Can you believe there is actually a heat wave phat dance shuffle? I guess if I were wearing heat wave phat pants and the wave "hit" I too would be doing the shuffle dance.

It just occurred to me. I'm going to a baseball game tomorrow. The way society is with all these fads, I bet the "wave" at the game will turn into the heat wave phat dance shuffle, and everyone, in the stadium, will look like they need to go to the bathroom REALLY bad.

Aah, heck, wish I had just talked about the heat wave and the weather. Now there's an interesting word "weather." Do you have any idea how many variations there are to.........never mind, here I go again.

 

PUB: Parables For Today Anthology

The Power of Parables

 

Like every good teacher, Jesus had a favorite method he used to capture his pupils' attention and to effectively convey his points. Jesus' preferred teaching tool was the parable. Although well-known parables such as the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son are often simplified into children's stories, the ambiguous meanings and provocative content of many of the parables has continued to challenge modern readers, just as they engaged Jesus' original audiences two thousand years ago. Roughly one third of Jesus' teaching was done through parables. As Matthew suggests, "All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude; and without a parable spake he not unto them."

 

But modern ears have difficulty relating to the parables. The stories seem dustily quaint, events far removed from the present. What do we know about shepherds, sowing seeds, or laboring in a vineyard? What was commonplace and accessible to the shepherds, farm laborers, or vintners of Galilee is alien to us today. The only animals we tend are house pets and the only seed we scatter is grass seed.

 

Yet parables are still being used as teaching tools today, though in a somewhat different form. Listeners around the modern campfire (TV, movies, books) still yearn for a good story, but the difficulty of constructing a viable, interesting, and non-cliched parable will be confirmed by anyone who has tried it. Lesser talents than Jesus of Nazareth have opted instead for the sermon, the homily, or the fire-and-brimstone harangue that, while containing the desired principle, lacks the power to convince the heart of the hearer. The genius of Jesus' teaching was requiring his audience to participate actively in the story, pondering how the story elements applied to them.

 

 

 

 

EVENT: Harlem—Black August Film Festival 2011

Black August

Film Festival 2011

2nd Annual Black August Independent Film Festival

FEATURING

Africa and the Diaspora (4:15pm to 6:20pm)

“Native Sun” directed by Terence Nance & Blitz the Ambassador (21 minutes)

A boy journeys from the village to the city in search of his father. Shot entirely in Ghana, the film features the music of hip hop artist Blitz the Ambassador, from his album of the same name.

“The Prodigal Son” directed by Kurt Orderson (64 minutes)

 

Kurt Orderson, a Rastafarian and young filmmaker, from Mitchell’s Plain, Cape Town, came to an understanding of the meaning of black consciousness and thus sought to retrace his great grandfather’s epic journey and legacy– Joseph Orderson, who came from Barbados to Cape Town in the 1890’s and was part of the Universal Negro Improvement Association UNIA, founded by the great Marcus Garvey, the father of contemporary Black Nationalism and Pan Africanism. “The Prodigal Son” retraces the lost history of the Orderson family, and the West Indian community who left the Caribbean in the late 1800’s as emancipated slaves, to settle in District Six, Cape Town. The film was shot on location in South Africa, USA, Barbados and St. Vincent.

SHORT FILM: “A Crocodile Story” directed by Hisham Haj Omer (3 minutes)

Refugee Club celebrates the first day of the Referendum Vote in South Sudan, with the release of a short animation created by its founder, Hisham Haj Omar. The first animation released by RC, this effort features a traditional Sudanese song titled “Habibi Taal” sung by Alsarah and produced by Ehab of NasJota Productions.

“Agrarian Reform for Food Sovereignty” directed by Kurt Orderson (37 minutes)

The arrival of the Dutch in the Cape in 1652 signaled the beginning of a violent and destructive process, which placed their greed for land and possessions before the rights of the original inhabitants of the land. Suddenly, throughout the Cape, and indeed throughout Africa, following the arrival of other European colonizers, Land, which belonged to Africans, was marked as the private property of Europeans who enslaved Africans. Today, The Right to Agrarian Reform for Food Sovereignty Campaign is asking critical questions about the lack of transformation and land reform in South Africa, post apartheid, and through popular education have mobilized people to recognize their ancestral rights and reclaim land for the purpose of black, emerging, small scale, organic farming.

Black Resistance in the USA (6:25pm to 8pm)

“Know Your Rights: How to Deal With Police Confrontations” directed by the students of Satellite Academy (16 minutes)

In the Spring 20011, through a program offered by Educational Video Center and facilitated by teaching artist and documentary filmmaker Dennis Flores, students at Satellite Academy High School produced a short documentary entitled “Know Your Rights: How to Deal With Police Confrontations.” Satellite Academy High School is an alternative public high school and the last educational opportunity for many at risk adolescent youth in New York City. Under the guidance of their instructor, students collectively decide on the theme of the documentary, the script, the scenes to film, and who to interview. In the first part of the documentary, youth decided to interview diverse people on the streets of New York City to engage their experiences with police and law enforcement in general. Through their poignant questions and interactions, we learn that current policing tactics, namely NYPD’s “Stop and Frisk” are disproportionately affecting communities of color; whereby 80% of those stopped and frisked are African American or Latino/a. In the last part, youth address the legal rights and recourse people have when confronted by the police.

“Cointelpro 101″ directed by the Freedom Archives (56 minutes)

Beginning in the 1950s with a focus on the Puerto Rican independence movement and continuing through the 1960s and into the 1970s when much of its focus had shifted to the Black Liberation, Chicano Liberation and American Indian Movements, COINTELPRO racked up a number of assassinations, false imprisonments and ruined lives. No government official was ever punished for actions taken under the program’s auspices. The film by Freedom Archives details this history through the artful use of still photos and moving images of the period covered. Films of police attacks and protests; still photos of revolutionary leaders and police murders graphically remind the viewer of Washington’s willingness to do whatever it takes to maintain its control. Organizers who began their political activity during the time of Cointelpro discuss the effect the program had on them and the organizations and individuals they worked with. Indeed, several of the interviewees were themselves targets and spent years in prison (some under false accusations, as in the case of Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt) or on the run.

“Panther Cubs” (Trailer) directed by Ksisay Sadiki (12 minutes)

“Panther Cubs, ” will tell the story of children who grew up with moms and dads who were Black Panthers. Born in the early seventies, we had front row seats to a revolutionary time in history. Our parents boldly tried to change the injustices of the world and organized and resisted the government. They were teenagers, they were idealistic but to us they were our parents. We grew up like any other kid but we also had parents going underground, spent long days in court, visits to prison, tapped phones, continuous threats of kidnapping. To protect themselves our parents taught us a code of secrecy that affects us to this day.In 2010, now adults, we “panther cubs” are starting to reconnect with one another, and the film will follow our attempts to deal with our parents’ choices. Partly because we are now parents ourselves, we are questioning our parents decisions to put their lives – and ours -on the line. How did our parents activism affect us? What was lost and what was gained? With so many ex panthers deceased, in exile, or serving long sentences in prison, was it all worth it? How did the media portrayal of our parents affect our identities? Were they “criminals” or “heroes“? How obligated are we to carry on their legacy? Part first-person essay, part group portrait, the film will focus on the varied lives and experiences of several Panther children.

 

SHORT FILM: “A Creation Story”  directed by Natasha Ngaiza (9 minutes)

“A Creation Story” is Natasha Ngaiza’s 2nd year film at Temple University. It is shot on super 16mm film and uses clay animation to reveal the magic of storytelling, hair maintenance and the special relationship between mothers and daughters.

Dinner Break (8pm-8:30pm) Food and snacks will be available at the festival throughout the day.

SHORT FILM: “Mirror Mirror”  directed by Tamika R. Guishard (4 minutes)

Reflections of Love. This silent film is an exercise in purely visual storytelling. Shot on 16mm. B & W film, Mirror Mirror is a chance meeting between two people that are picture-perfect. Their potential for a match made in heaven is undeniable despite the fact that they have never met…happily ever after?

 

Hip-Hop, Spoken Word, and Activism (8:35pm-10:30pm)

“Black Womyn Griots” directed by Helen Yohannes (9 minutes)

Black Womyn Griots is a film that explores the black literary genre of spoken word. Toronto-based female poets share how they use storytelling as an act of resistance and language as a site of power. This film depicts spoken word as a powerful means to build communities, organize resistance and tell our stories.

“Hip Hop is Bigger than the Occupation” directed by Nana Dankwa (98 minutes)

Hip Hop is Bigger than the Occupation is a documentary about a ten day journey of artists traveling through Palestine, teaching and performing Non Violent Resistance through the arts. The tour included M1 of Dead Prez, Shadia Mansour, Marcel Cartier, Mazzi of Soul Purpose, DJ Vega Benetton, Lowkey, Jody McIntyre and Trinidad, Brandon and Lavie from the South West Youth Collaborative/University of Hip Hop Chicago. Staying in the heart of Balata Refugee Camp @ the Yafa Cultural Center in Nablus the group witnesses night raids, meet families of shaheeds as well as young Palestinians who have been jailed, shot, humiliated, they come face to face with Daniel Luria in the heart of Jerusalem and confront him, they visit Hebron where there are roads for the Jews and Roads for the Arabs, the group visits Bi’lin where they get shot at and tear gassed and experience first hand what it felt like living under occupation

 

The Black August Film Festival will take place 

August 13th, 2011 from 4PM – 10PM

Location: The National Black Theatre – Institute of Action Arts

2031-33 National Black Theatre Way/Fifth Ave.,

New York, NY 10035

(Btwn 125th & 126th St.)

 

Suggested Donation: $10 (nobody will be turned away)

Visit Us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=196429703745900

 

INTERVIEW & VIDEO: Alain Mabanckou (Congo)

“Mabancool”

JULY 15, 2011
by Neelika Jayawardane

In France, Alain Mabanckou is known as “the African Samuel Beckett.” Mabanckou left Congo-Brazzaville in 1989 to study law in France, “but quit as a corporate lawyer within a decade,” according to The Economist. His first novel, “Bleu Blanc Rouge” (1998), “ironically saluted the French tricolor in its title”; following novels “moved between the dashed dreams of migrants in Paris and the ills of post-independence Africa”, his writing permeated with the absurdities of continually translating one’s body and intellect within empires that question one’s right to be there, here, anywhere.

Recently, France’s culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, gushed over him, calling him “Mabancool” and a “shining ambassador for the French language” as he presented Mabanckou with a Légion d’Honneur in March this year. Hilariously, Mabanckou’s subversions of the French language, suffused with Congolese immigrant city slang and bar-fly speak, was modeled on the manner in which Anglophone writers played in the fields of the British overlords’ language. Apparently, the writer’s subtle mockery was lost on those minding the rules of the Académie Française, too busy praying that ex-colonials writers will forget exclusions, slights, and outright racist policies, and help win back France’s metropolitan glory.

Few English speakers have heard of Mabanckou’s work, but only three of his books have been translated to English. But now that he is a tenured professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, more Mabancool may be on its way to us.

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Congo-Brazzaville:

Alain Mabanckou's

"Urine-Soaked Book"

 


Alain Mabanckou's [African Pyscho (2007)] newly translated 2005 book, Broken Glass, gets a kick ass review from Anderson Tepper over at Words Without Borders:
...Mabanckou clearly revels in the mash-up of his characters and their antics—this is a boozy, bawdy, urine-soaked book. Don’t be fooled, though: Mabanckou has his eyes on the literary firmament, too. He’s won the Prix Renaudot in France for another novel, Memoirs of a Porcupine, which will be published next here in the U.S. And one of the many pleasures of Broken Glass is the way Mabanckou has scattered literary references through the book’s screed, creating something of a treasure hunt for titles such as The Famished Road, Petals of Blood, God’s Bits of Wood, Satanic Verses, A Confederacy of Dunces, and The Catcher in the Rye, among many more. (A marking of his literary turf, so to speak.) Mabanckou is not the only one writing with verve and bite about Africa now—the Kenyan Binyavanga Wainana also sounded the charge with his satirical 2005 Granta article “How to Write About Africa”—but he is certainly one of the most wildly inventive and entertaining.
Below, a rare English interview - Mabanckou shares the stage with Veronique Tadjo in a conversation with Marc Parent at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2010.

 

 

 

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African literature

Prince of the absurd

The mad, bad fiction of Congo’s Alain Mabanckou

ALAIN MABANCKOU genially holds court at Jip’s, an Afro-Cuban salsa bar in Les Halles, central Paris. In a faded denim jacket and his signature flat cap, he modestly shares news of his burgeoning career and tricontinental travels with members of Paris’s black communities—from Guadeloupe to Guinea. Whether barmen or budding writers, they could have stepped straight off any page written by this Franco-Congolese novelist who, over the past decade, has come to be known as Africa’s Samuel Beckett.

Mr Mabanckou came to France from Congo-Brazzaville to study law in 1989, but quit as a corporate lawyer within a decade. Now 45, he talks expansively about his passion for reading and rumba music, and with disdain about President Denis Sassou-Nguesso’s “soft dictatorship” in the former French colony he revisits each year. But Mr Mabanckou’s probing thoughtfulness (and the bear hugs he offers old acquaintances) give little hint of the comic savagery of his fiction. Its exuberant satire extends to a Rabelaisian pissing contest whose participants map France in spray, and a morbid parody of the serial-killer genre that owes as much to Albert Camus’s “The Outsider” as to Bret Easton Ellis.

With nine novels to his name, along with six volumes of poetry, a biographical homage to James Baldwin, a gay American civil-rights writer, and a clutch of literary prizes, Mr Mabanckou broke new ground when he recently swapped his prestigious French publisher, Le Seuil, for the even more prestigious Gallimard. His fictionalised memoir of childhood, “Demain J’Aurais Vingt Ans” (“Tomorrow I Will Be 20”), came out under Gallimard’s august La Blanche imprint. For nearly a century, La Blanche’s distinctive cream covers have been the entry ticket to the canon of French literature. Mr Mabanckou is the first writer from Francophone black Africa to be included, and is now published alongside Marcel Proust and Jean-Paul Sartre. A Légion d’Honneur quickly followed. Presenting it in March, France’s culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, gushed over him, calling him “Mabancool” and a “shining ambassador for the French language”.

Since his first novel, “Bleu Blanc Rouge” (1998), ironically saluted the French tricolor in its title, Mr Mabanckou’s fiction has moved between the dashed dreams of migrants in Paris and the ills of post-independence Africa, with its kleptocratic dictators and fratricidal wars. Yet, insisting on laughter in the midst of desperation, he sugars the pill of criticism with humour that veers from the gently ironic to the bawdy or macabre. “African Psycho” (2003) skewers consumerism through the inept Grégoire, a deadbeat petty criminal who botches all attempts to become a serial killer. It also makes fun of rivalries between Mr Mabanckou’s “little Congo” and the formerly Belgian “big Congo”—one land carved up by European powers.It was surely an ironic moment. For Mr Mabanckou is a subversive, who views the language he learnt aged six as a “river to be diverted”. Many of his models in breaking the “chains of ‘pure’ French”, as he calls them, are Anglophone writers, such as Nigeria’s Amos Tutuola, who have a longer history of remoulding English to their own ends. Rebelling against the rules of the Académie Française (the official authority on the French language—and one that has no equivalent in English), Mr Mabanckou’s freewheeling prose marries classical French elegance with Paris slang and a Congolese beat. It weds the oral culture of his unlettered mother (the dedicatee of all his books) to an omnivorous bibliophilia encouraged by his stepfather, a hotel receptionist in Pointe-Noire on the Atlantic coast. In “Broken Glass” (2005) a disgraced schoolteacher retells the hard-luck stories of habitués of a Congolese bar, with drunken momentum and not a single full stop. The author incorporates the titles of about 300 of the books he feels made him a writer, from Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s “Death on Credit”, to Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.

In “Broken Glass” the chronicler/narrator virtually lives in a bar that goes by the name of Credit Gone West. For the author, an African bar is an open-air laboratory crammed with the educated jobless, an inventive forum for debate. “Memoirs of a Porcupine” (2006) forms a loose sequel. Its tongue-in-cheek fable of a porcupine that has to kill for its human double is ostensibly written by the same sozzled scribe, who is himself called Broken Glass. The novel draws on oral lore and parables in its sly critique of those who use traditional beliefs as a pretext for violence.

“Black Bazar” (2009) returns to Paris, exposing prejudices between African and Antillean, or between west and central Africans, to dispel notions of black harmony. The main figure, Fessologue, is a Congolese sapeur or sharp-dresser. As a boy, Mr Mabanckou was fascinated by the dandies who returned from Paris obsessed with brand names, but the novel lampoons the idea of tailoring as a political statement.

Mr Mabanckou’s work has been translated into 16 languages, including Korean and Polish. But the English-speaking world has been slow to catch on to his cutting charm. Only three of his books have come out in English (with an English version of “Black Bazar” on the way). And they are published by small, sharp-eyed firms: Soft Skull Press in America and Serpent’s Tail in Britain. That may change, though, now that he is a tenured professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he spends eight months each year.

Mr Mitterrand may regard Mr Mabanckou as an exotic flower in France’s literary garland, but the author is convinced that metropolitan France is no longer the centre of French literature. As Gallimard has recognised, writers from outside France are the ones now snatching the prizes and carrying the influence of French abroad. Mr Mabanckou proves that.

 

 

REVIEW: Book—The Pirates of Somalia - By Jay Bahadur > NYTimes.com

Tracking Somali Pirates

to Their Lair

Mohamed Dahir/Agence France-Press-Getty Images

A Somali pirate in January 2010, with a captured Greek cargo ship anchored offshore.

On April 8, 2009, the Maersk Alabama, a 17,000-ton United States cargo vessel, was hijacked by four Somali pirates several hundred miles east of Mogadishu. Bobbing in a lifeboat with the skipper, 53-year-old Richard Phillips, they began negotiating with the ship’s owners via cellphone for a multimillion-dollar ransom. For five days, the pirates and their hostage drifted in the Indian Ocean, shadowed by the U.S.S. Bainbridge, a destroyer that arrived at the scene not long after the hijacking. At dusk on April 12, Navy snipers killed three of the Somalis, and Phillips was rescued unharmed. The surviving pirate was seized and taken to the United States, where he pleaded guilty in a Manhattan courtroom to a host of charges and was sentenced to 33 years and nine months in a federal prison.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE PIRATES OF SOMALIA

Inside Their Hidden World

By Jay Bahadur

Illustrated. 300 pp. Pantheon Books. $26.95.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


The hijacking of the Alabama, the first seizure of an American-flagged vessel in 200 years, drew the country’s attention to the return of a scourge once associated with plank-walks, treasure chests and peg-legged marauders. But, as Jay Bahadur makes clear in “The Pirates of Somalia,” buccaneering has evolved into a very modern activity, complete with night vision goggles, GPS units and even investment advisers.

In the fall of 2008, Bahadur, a young Canadian, quit his job writing market-research reports in Chicago and flew in an aging Russian Antonov to Puntland, a breakaway region of northeastern Somalia that has become, as he puts it, “the epicenter” of the piracy business. Braving the constant threat of kidnapping, he ingratiated himself with pirate bosses and their crews and made a risky trip through the desert to Eyl, the remote enclave where present-day Somali piracy was born.

Bahadur has gone deep in exploring the causes of this seaborne crime wave, charting its explosive growth and humanizing the brigands who have eluded some of the world’s most powerful navies. The way Bahadur tells it, the piracy industry gained force in the 1990s, after the outbreak of Somalia’s civil war. The first targets, commercial lobster-fishing vessels, were trawling off the coast of Puntland. Because they used steel-pronged drag fishing nets, Bahadur explains, “these foreign trawlers did not bother with nimble explorations of the reefs.” Instead, “they uprooted them, netting the future livelihoods of the nearby coastal people along with the days’ catch.” A small group of aggrieved fishermen, led by a pirate called Boyah (whom Bahadur interviewed at a farm near the flyblown Puntland capital, Garowe) began capturing the trawlers and holding the crews for ransom. But after the commercial fishermen cut deals with southern warlords for protection, Boyah and his fellow pirates switched tactics, indiscriminately assaulting vessels that sailed into the vicinity of Eyl.

As Somali piracy increased, resourceful characters like Mohamed Abdi Hassan, known as Afweyne (“Big Mouth”), from the central coastal town of Harardheere, brought a new sophistication to the business. Afweyne raised venture capital for his pirate operations, Bahadur writes, “as if he were launching a Wall Street I.P.O.” Criminal gangs like his became highly organized, and the deployment of “motherships” allowed them to operate hundreds of miles from the coast.

When a radical fundamentalist movement called the Islamic Courts Union seized control of the southern half of Somalia in 2006 and declared war on pirates in its territory, the Puntland operations gained unchallenged supremacy. And dodgy coast guard outfits hired by the Puntland government inadvertently provided on-the-job training to aspiring pirates, familiarizing them with sophisticated weapons, assault tactics and advanced navigation systems. In 2009, Puntland’s newly elected president, Abdirahman Farole, a low-key former professor who seemed, Bahadur says, to abhor the pirates, ended the laissez-faire policies of his predecessors. But while he authorized the arrest and imprisonment of pirates, Farole has proven unwilling to attack their bases. To do so would risk plunging clan-fractured Puntland into civil war.

It wasn’t until October 2008 — when NATO, the European Union and the United States committed significant naval forces to patrol the main shipping route — that the international community began to respond. The Internationally Recommended Transit Corridor, a heavily patrolled safety zone, now runs for about 400 miles along the Yemeni side of the Gulf of Aden. Yet lumbering destroyers are often no match for small groups of marauders in nimble skiffs. “Hunting pirates,” Bahadur remarks, “must seem like playing a losing game of Whac-a-Mole.” Moreover, what the pirates sometimes lack in technology and firepower, they have compensated for in adaptability. After Western nations began positioning naval vessels outside key harbors, the pirates simply tied their skiffs to the backs of 4×4s and set sail from remote beaches.

The payment of seven-figure ransoms, an inexhaustible supply of unemployed young men, a highly romanticized pirate culture and continued Somali chaos have undermined efforts at interdiction. From 2008 to 2010, Bahadur reports, the number of attacks nearly doubled, with only a small drop in the rate of success.

Bahadur captures the inner workings of Somali piracy in extraordinary detail. The organizational structure of typical pirate cells, he explains, includes not just attackers, interpreters, accountants and cooks: almost every group also has its supplier of khat, a plant flown into Somalia by the ton every day from Kenya and Ethiopia and chewed for an addictive high. Like low-level urban crack dealers, the pirates at the bottom rung of the hierarchy make barely enough to survive. But, high or low, these brigands practice some peculiar rituals. After receiving his cut of the ransom on the captured ship, one pirate tells Bahadur, each man must toss his mobile phone into the ocean — a precaution to make sure no one can call ahead to his kin to arrange an ambush of his fellow cell members.

Bahadur seems to admire the pirates’ audacity and resourcefulness, yet at the same time he avoids glamorizing them. If the first wave of Somali pirates consisted mostly of “fishermen vigilantes,” Bahadur writes, the new generation is far more cynical, exuding “cold ruthlessness” and demonstrating a proclivity for torture and violence.

Not all of Bahadur’s encounters are edifying. There are too many long-­winded conversations with desperadoes who present the same tiresome self-­justifications (they were pushed into their crimes because of abuses carried out by commercial fishing vessels) and the same dubious assertions that piracy would disappear if illegal fishing were halted. A lengthy excursion to meet low-level pirates in a maximum security prison in Kenya — a dumping ground for outlaws captured in international waters — doesn’t add much to the narrative.

But the book ends with a flourish, with Bahadur’s account of his road trip to Eyl, a hellhole by the sea where swaggering young pirates lord over a cowed population. Sitting immobilized in the harbor is the MV Victoria, a German freighter hijacked while transporting rice to the Saudi Arabian port of Jeddah. For the captive crew, weeks of boredom and terror end the way such episodes usually do, in this case with a $1.8 million ransom dropped by parachute. A solution to the scourge of Somali piracy, as Bahadur’s brave and exhaustively reported book makes clear, won’t fall into place so easily.

 

Joshua Hammer, a former Newsweek bureau chief, is a freelance foreign correspondent. He is writing a book about German colonialism in southern Africa.

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Jay Bahadur
EXCERPT

‘The Pirates of Somalia’


Prologue

 

 

Where the White Man Runs Away

It was my first trip to Africa.

I arrived in Somalia in the frayed seat of a 1970s Soviet Antonov propeller plane, heading into the internationally unrecognized region of Puntland on a solo quest to meet some present-day pirates. The 737s of Dubai, with their meal services and functioning seatbelts, were a distant memory; the plane I was in was not even allowed to land in Dubai, and the same probably went for the unkempt, ill-tempered Ukrainian pilot.

To the ancient Egyptians, Punt had been a land of munifi cent treasures and bountiful wealth; in present times, it was a land of people who robbed wealth from the rest of the world. Modern Puntland, a self-governing region in northeastern Somalia, may or may not be the successor to the Punt of ancient times, but I was soon to discover that it contained none of the gold and ebony that dazzled the Egyptians—save perhaps for the colours of the sand and the skin of the nomadic goat and camel herders who had inhabited it for centuries.

The cabin absorbed the heat of the midday African sun like a Dutch oven, thickening the air until it was unbearable to breathe. Sweat poured freely off my skin and soaked into the torn cloth of my seat cover. Male passengers fanned themselves with the Russian-language aircraft safety cards; the women fanned their children. The high whine of the Antonov’s propellers changed pitch as it accelerated along the Djibouti runway, building towards a droning cres cendo that I had not heard outside of decades-old movies.

The stories I had heard of these planes did nothing to put me at ease: a vodka-soaked technician banging on exposed engine parts with a wrench; a few months prior, a plant-nosed landing at Bossaso airstrip after a front landing strut had refused to extend. Later, in Bossaso, I saw the grounded craft, abandoned where it had crashed, a few lackadaisical guards posted nearby to prevent people from stripping the valuable metal.

This flight was like a forgotten relic of the Cold War, a physical testament to long-defunct Somali-Soviet geopolitical ties that had disintegrated with the countries themselves; its Ukrainian crew, indentured servants condemned forever to ferry passengers along this neglected route.

Over the comm system, the Somali steward offered a prayer in triplicate: Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, as the plane gained speed. The whine heightened to a mosquito-like buzz and we left the ground behind, setting an eastward course for Somalia, roughly shadowing the Gulf of Aden coastline.

∫∫∫

As I approached my thirty-fifth weary hour of travel, my desire to socialize with fellow passengers had diminished, but on purely self-serving grounds I forced myself to chat eagerly with anyone throwing a curious glance in my direction. I had never met my Somali host, Mohamad Farole, and any friend I made on the plane was a potential roof over my head if my ride didn’t show. Remaining alone at the landing strip was not an option; news travels around Somalia as fast as the ubiquitous cellphone towers are able to transmit it, and a lone white man bumming around the airstrip would be public knowledge sooner than I cared to contemplate.

When he learned that I was travelling to Garowe, Puntland’s capital city, the bearded man sitting next to me launched into the unfortunate tale of the last foreigner he knew to make a similar voyage: a few months previous, a Korean man claiming to be a Muslim had turned up in the capital, alone and unannounced. Not speaking a word of Somali, he nonetheless succeeded in finding a residence and beginning a life in his unusual choice of adoptive homeland. He lasted almost two weeks. On his twelfth day in Puntland, a group of rifle-toting gunmen accosted the man in broad daylight as he strolled unarmed through the streets. Rather than let himself be taken hostage, the Korean made a fight of it, managing to struggle free and run. He made it several metres before one of his bemused would-be captors casually shot him in the leg. The shot set off a hue and cry, and in the ensuing clamour the gunmen dispersed and someone helped the man reach a medical clinic. I later learned from another source that he was a fugitive, on the run from the Korean authorities. His thought process, I could only assume, was that Somalia was the last place on earth that his government would look for him. He was probably right.

∫∫∫

Just a few months earlier, I had been a recent university graduate, killing the days writing tedious reports for a market research firm in Chicago, and trying to break into journalism with the occasional cold pitch to an unresponsive editor. I had no interest in journalism school, which I thought of as a waste of two of the best years of my life—years that I should spend in the fray, learning how to do my would-be job in places where no one else would go. Somalia was a good candidate, jockeying with Iraq and Afghanistan for the title of the most dangerous country in the world. The country had commanded a soft spot in my heart since my PoliSci days, when I had wistfully dreamt of bringing the astounding democratic success of the tiny self-declared Republic of Somaliland (Puntland’s western neighbour) to the world’s attention.

The headline-grabbing hijacking of the tank transport MV Faina in September 2008 presented me with a more realistic opportunity. I sent out some feelers to a few Somali news services, and within ten minutes had received an enthusiastic response from Radio Garowe, the lone news outlet in Puntland’s capital city. After a few long emails and a few short phone calls with Radio Garowe’s founder, Mohamad Farole, I decided to buy a ticket to Somalia.

It took multiple tickets, as it turned out. Getting to Somalia was an aerophobe’s nightmare—a forty-five-hour voyage that took me through Frankfurt, Dubai, Djibouti, Bossaso, and finally Galkayo. In Dubai, I joined the crowd of diaspora Somalis, most making short visits to see their families, pushing cart upon cart overflowing with goods from the outside world. Curious eyes began to glance my way, scanning, no doubt, for signs of mental instability. I was in no position to help them make the diagnosis; by the first leg of my trip, I had already lost the ability to judge objectively whether what I was doing was sane or not. News reports of the numerous journalists kidnapped in Puntland fixated my imagination. I channelled the hours of nervous energy into studying the lone Somali language book I had been able to dig up at the public library; I scribbled answers to exercises into my notebook with an odd sense of urgency, as if cramming for an exam that would take place as soon as I set foot in Somalia.

The last white face disappeared at Djibouti’s dilapidated, near-deserted airport, as American F-16s performed eardrum-shattering training manoeuvres overhead. By the time the plane landed in Galkayo, I was the only non-Somali passenger on board.

From "The Pirates of Somalia" by Jay Bahadur. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon, a division of Random House, Inc.

 

MEDIA: Starvation Photography - Picturing Us

STARVATION PHOTOGRAPHY

by Sean Jacobs

The famine in the Horn of Africa has revived the debate about “starvation photography.” The blog of the Irish NGO, Dóchas, has compiled the different viewpoints in one place.

* Related: What groundbreaking images of ‘Africa’ can we expect this year from The International Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan, France?, asks Duck Rabbit. Sadly, more of the same.

*  Jonathan Faull sent in this item on parachute journalism at its “best” featured on CNN’s website: “Photographer captures ‘unbreakable spirit’ in West Africa

Photographer “Thomas Nybo has captured images of some of the toughest issues facing Africa, from child mortality to access to education” presumably during his indepth understanding of the continent gleaned from his extensive understanding of the “five countries he recently visited in 11 days.”

Nybo also takes the obligatory photo of himself posing with children. (What is it with foreign correspondents posing with children all the time. The adults don’t like you?) As Jonathan remarked: Watch the video for some spectacularly patronizing nonsense.

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A Photographer's Journey

Photographer Thomas Nybo narrates his journey around West Africa through powerful pictures.

 

>via: http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/international/2011/08/01/ia.photographer.journey.bk.b.cnn

 

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*** POST UPDATED 6 August, 10h30 ***

The famine in the Horn of Africa has revived the debate on the ethics of famine photography.

Here are a few recent contributions:

Also of interest: “Imaging Others” – on how our thinking about other cultures has evolved, and has been reflected in photography. 

 

And now, read our Code of Conduct on Images & Messages.

Thank you.

Article in the Irish Independent: “The truth behind the famine pictures that break your heart”

 

>via: http://dochasnetwork.wordpress.com/2011/07/23/starvation-photography-the-ethi...

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Imaging ‘Others’

By Caitlin Patrick

Photography as a technology and practice was developed in an age of Western European cultural, economic and political expansion. How early photographers from Europe and North America represented the new places they encountered is thus intimately bound up with their nation-states’ foreign and domestic politics and colonial practices. Many of these early photographic styles and approaches have had lasting impacts to present times. Most photography involves an interaction with something or someone else, an ‘other’, and understanding how this self/other boundary functions and fluctuates is a key element of photographic study. Identity creation has consistently revolved around the factors of race, class and gender, and these are important factors for understanding how photographic practices interact with processes of identity formation.

James Ryan’s work on visual elements of colonial geographic practice provides ways of understanding how ‘Western’ knowledge and cultural attitudes towards ‘the rest’ of the world were historically developed. Ryan investigates how cameras were immediately enlisted in projects of empire-building, whether they were being brought to record battle scenes, to preserve images of landscapes and topography, or to allow the flora, fauna and peoples of the colonies to be classified and displayed in centres of colonial power. Photography was seen, like other Western sciences and technologies, both as proof of Western intellectual and cultural superiority to ‘other’ areas but also as means by which these places could be absorbed into Western knowledge and control. Used in conjunction with telescopes and microscopes, photography also expanded human powers of observation and observable space. Inevitably, these new spaces were invested with meaning that was not simply based on obvious, visual ‘facts’ of the photographs, as many might have liked to believe, but were also tied to the fantasies and imaginings about other worlds beyond the immediate experiences of their creators and viewers.

Casimir Zagourski (1883-1944), Teke Chief, Belgian Congo, L’Afrique qui disparait! Series 1, no. 3, c. 1929-37, silver gelatin print on postcard stock. Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution

Ryan points out that it was not just the ‘dark’ and ‘unknown’ regions of the expanding colonies that were exposed to the ‘light’ of cameras. The ‘deviant’, different and marginal populations of the Western world itself were also explored and compared. Thus, during the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the East End of London became imaged and described as a place of darkness, danger, illness and the unknown using some of the same vocabulary and photographic techniques as were being used to document distant colonial topographies.

Using the theoretical insights of Michel Foucault, an influential scholar for those studying colonial and postcolonial practices, forms of colonialism are commonly understood to entail both dominating forms of power, in a variety of types of overt exploitation and control, and more ‘productive’ forms, such as attempts at ‘education’ of colonial subjects in order to help them achieve Western norms and standards of efficiency, technology and development. All these terms, and indeed the entire discourse of ‘development’, are loaded with particular meanings of what it is to be ‘civilized’ or ‘primitive’ human beings in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These understandings have had a major impact on how various groups of people were and are photographed.

Edward Said’s work is significant for its efforts at describing the history and mindset of colonialism as well as media perpetuation of colonial ideas. Influenced by Foucault, Said argues that a complex set of representations was historically created, developing a structure for how ‘the West’ would understand and interact with ‘the Orient’. This imaginary framework largely determined Western involvement with the vast and diverse regions subsumed under the term ‘Orient’, ‘Third World’ or ‘developing world’ from colonial days to present. Said’s hope is that realization of this situation will lead to efforts to develop different ways of understanding and imaging ‘others’, ways which do not postulate the existence of a single set of characteristics representing the ‘other’ or ‘the Orient’ where, in fact, he sees diverse and ungeneralizable groups.

Severely malnourished children at a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) therapeutic feeding centre in Angola. Aid organizations have had access to large portions of the country only after a ceasefire was signed in April 2002. J.B Russell/Panos.

Difficulties for this position arise, according to Robert Young, when Said attempts to posit a critical place for intellectuals distanced from contemporary ideologies. In Young’s opinion, this retention of the Western humanist conception of the critical individual prevents Said from exploring how ‘the West’s’ creation of the ‘Third World’ or ‘the Orient’ reflects its own self-doubts and internal contradictions rather than misrepresenting ‘real’ aspects of these places. Young, taking a perspective indebted to the theory of Jacques Derrida, suggests that this position traps Said in having to say that there is a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to interpret these discursive categories, which Young believes should not be treated as fixed or stable. Other theorists, engaging with issues of (post)colonialism after the publication of Said’s Orientalism, have developed many of his ideas while attempting to steer clear of his dilemmas. They argue that colonial stereotypes are not crude or ‘incorrect’ but rather are complex, ambivalent and contradictory. Homi Bhabha has developed the idea of the ‘colonial mimic’: hybrid, fetishized identities practiced by colonized peoples that both adopt some features of the colonizer but which also, precisely because of these adoptions, can become threatening to the colonizer.

Deminers from the Church World Service (CWS) carry equipment on their way to work in the Svay Kdor minefield. The CWS assists the Mines Advisory Group (MAG) in the clearance of unexploded ordnance (UXO) in Cambodia. Sean Sutton-MAG/Panos.

Photography and practices of representing ‘others’ are thus often seen as unstable, fluid and shifting – like the colonial project itself. Despite giving ample proof of the endurance of particular colonial discourses, human geographer Derek Gregory nonetheless recognizes, in line with the thought of Judith Butler, Young and Bhabha, that “every repertory performance of the colonial present carries within it the twin possibilities of either reaffirming and even radicalizing the hold of the colonial past on the present or undoing its enclosures and approaching closer to the horizon of the post colonial” (Gregory, 2004: 19).  The power of photography thus resides in its ability to challenge established ways of understanding people and places, as well as to consolidate existing or predominant beliefs.

These theoretical shifts in understanding identity production have been accompanied by important practical and technological changes, which have allowed greater numbers of citizens from the ‘developing world’ to present their lives to others through their own lens of perspective. The growth of both traditional media industries in these areas, as well as new Internet-based options, offer possibilities to encourage these developments and make photographs and stories produced by majority world citizens more widely available on a global basis.

For details on the references please go to the bibliography.

 

 

 

HISTORY: African Creeks > This Is Africa

AFRICAN CREEKS

Photo reblogged from Hatching Again

 

eclecticalexandria:

On August 4, 1865, the Loyal Creek Council formally declared that African Creeks would be considered full citizens of the Creek Nation.  African Creeks soon designated August 4th “Emancipation Day” and organized celebrations, including picnics, parades and speakers beginning as early as 1867, which continued through the Territorial days and early years of Oklahoma statehood.  The celebration fell into disuse as the African Creeks and other Indian freedpeople were increasingly marginalized in the twentieth century.  The celebrations have been revived recently as the freedpeople of the various Indian nations struggle for tribal recognition.  The action of the Creek Council was nearly a year before the Creek Treaty of 1866 was ratified.  Under Article II of that treaty, African Creeks were given full citizenship rights, including “rights to the soil” and the right to share equally in the division of tribal monies.  

The 1866 Treaty was the culmination of a process that began in the summer of 1861 when Opothleyahola, an Upper Creek leader, declared that any slave who joined his party in opposing the Creek Confederate treaty would be considered free.  The Loyal Creeks had also negotiated an earlier treaty with the United States in the summer of 1863 with essentially the same language as the 1866 treaty regarding African Creek rights.  The Creeks finally rejected that treaty after the U.S. Senate altered it with unacceptable amendments regarding a proposed land cession.

 

VIDEO: Mama Africa – The Life of Miriam Makeba > Revivalist Music

Mama Africa

– The Life of Miriam Makeba

It’s safe to say that the changes that have taken place in South Africa can be attributed to the music and spirit of Miriam Makeba. Mama Africa, as Makeba was affectionately known, was a citizen of the world. She was many things to many people lending herself to speak out about women’s rights and civil rights. One of apartheid’s biggest opponents, Makeba was an ambassador who became the face and voice of a people. Her music transcended continents and weaved itself in a myriad of genres and the issues of her time. And like all of us, her life was not without its challenges but her buoyancy allowed her to rise above it all. To some she was considered “exotic,” her presence radiant and her style expressive. A masterful vocalist, her voice could warm the coldest of hearts and has been praised not only for its prowess but also for it’s message.

Miriam “Zenzi” Makeba was born on March 4, 1932 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her love of singing began with the spirit songs she learned from her mother. Makeba also sang in the church choir and at her school. In 1948, when Makeba was just sixteen years old, the system of apartheid was set in place in South Africa. Despite the limitations apartheid sought to impose, Makeba’s musical career began to spark. At nineteen, she became the front woman for a vocal quartet known as the Cuban Brothers. For stage purpose she began using the name Miriam for the first time. While performing at a show with the Cuban Brothers, Makeba was spotted by a member of the Manhattan Brothers, an acappela quartet that followed in the tradition of American jazz and swing orchestras. Makeba was asked to join and she accepted. While with the group, Makeba covered jazz and pop standards, sighting Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn as her favorite performers. The songs Makeba performed with the Manahattan Brothers where sung in the local languages, including the Xhosa and Zulu languages, as it was against the law for blacks to sing in English. Around this time, Makeba released her first song, “Pata, Pata” (Touch, Touch) in 1956. The song was later re-released years later and topped the charts worldwide.

 

 

Makeba also joined a female quartet, called the Skylarks. In 1957, Makeba began touring with the African Jazz and Variety Review. Opportunities continued to present themselves to Makeba who starred in the musical King Kong, a legendary South African musical about the life of a boxer. It played to integrated audiences and spread her reputation to the liberal white community. The musical, which was promoted as a “jazz opera”, was performed in the universities to avoid the apartheid laws and allow for mixed race audience.

That same year Makeba made a cameo appearance in a documentary filmed in South Africa, titled “Come Back Africa.” The film’s director, Lionel Rogosin, also arranged for Makeba to present the film at the Venice Festival. Her appearance in the film would mark the start of her exile from South Africa. The South African government perceived Makeba’s growing success and international platform as a serious threat. Her passport was revoked. She was prevented from returning home to her family. Makeba didn’t let this hurdle slow her speed. If nothing else, it fueled the creative fire. She relocated to America were her music was gaining support. Her first live show at the Village Vanguard in New York City, brought out the creme de la creme on the jazz scene including Nina Simone and Miles Davis. Her first US television appearance on the Steve Allen show was her introduction to the nation. It was Allen’s show that she sang “Qogothwane” (The Click Song) showcasing the impressive percussive clicking sound, she’s made famous, known as Ngongongtwang, which is an integral part of the Xhosa language. On stage, Makeba incorporated lots of expression, emotion and pulsating movements that emphasized her vivaciousness.

 

 

While in the States, Makeba collaborated with Harry Belafonte, who helped shape her into the entertainer she would become. Her musical repertoire also changed. Her songs now had less of a jazz and R&B bent. Her new material concentrated on updated Zulu and Xhosa traditional music as well as her own composed songs. This new sound was in keeping with the folk revival taking place in the States. Makeba became the first African woman to ever win a Grammy for the album, An Evening With Belafonte/Makeba. She also worked on several projects with her ex-husband and fellow South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, whom she continued to collaborate with throughout her career.

Even with all of the success, the plight of South Africa was never far from Makeba’s mind or heart. She used her status to speak out against apartheid. She testified at the United Nations Committee Against Apartheid describing the spectacular and ordinary indignities. Because of her testimony, the government of South Africa banned her records from the radio and in the local shops.

 

 

But her career in the U.S. suffered severe damage due in part to her marriage to radical black activist Stokely Carmichael. Her recording and performing opportunities diminished and while not officially censored by the government, she was treated exactly like she would’ve been in South Africa. Nevertheless, Makeba continued to tour, lecture and record in Europe as her American albums slowly went out of print. In 1990, Makeba returned to South Africa after the ban of her albums was lifted.

Miriam Makeba continued to stay actively involved in entertainment until her passing on November 9, 2008. Her legacy has inspired generations of artists including renowned singer, Angelique Kidjo, who shares some of the same influence as Makeba. As well, vocalist, Somi, an artist whose style borders on jazz and soul mingled with African rhythms, has too drawn comparisons to Makeba. Makeba’s influential reach can even be heard and seen in the rhythmic vibrations of countless artists including Baaba Maal, Goapele and Les Nubians.

Miriam Makeba’s life continues to shines as a beacon of light for all generations. She lived a purposeful life that keeps paying dividends. Her talent and efforts elevated her to a platform that she may not have intentionally been trying to reach but she was true to herself. And when you’re true to yourself, the rewards and triumphs are inevitable.

Words by Terri Neal