INTERVIEW: How does Africa inspire you? My 10 favourite interview responses > Afri-love

How does Africa inspire you?

My 10 favourite

interview responses

 

Over the last year, I've had the privilege to interview 21 passionate, talented and inspiring people whose vision and work embodies the Afri-love spirit. All of them reminded me of the value in doing what you love. I hope that they've given you encouragement, opened your eyes to new possibilities and that you've discovered new music, art and ideas in the process. My favourite question to ask is, "how does Africa inspire you?" It was a difficult decision but here are 10 of my favourite responses.

Ihsani-Culture-models

"Africa is who I am and it's Africa that raised me – the rest of the world just barely touched me. So everything that flows out of me is Africa – whether its basic components look or do not look overtly or stereotypically African." 

— The Design Director of Ihsani Culture, Kenya-based

 
Tapiwa-and-Mutsai

"Africa is beautiful in ways that see the senses fulfilled. In providing creative inspiration, Africa has no equal and this is reflected quite profoundly in its music. We are inspired by what it means to be African – how we have been spread all over the world but we can still relate to the Motherland and its music."

— Mutsai Musa, Co-founder of Afro-MP3, South Africa-based
(Shown above on the right, next to his Co-founder, Tapiwa Chimboza) 
 

"Wow! Where do I begin? It doesn't take much to realise that everything is coming into the full circle. It's all headed back to where it all began; in Africa.

The Dark Continent is actually the beaming light guiding this godforsaken planet. And we as musicians have a (honorable) duty to represent its greatness! And of course I’m inspired by the women ... of Africa (the real truth. Everything else was just a futile attempt to sound intelligent)."

M3NSA, lyrical genius, UK-based
 

Phiona-Okumu

"In every way possible, I would imagine. It directs the way that I respond to the world. It’s who I represent without even saying a word." 

Phiona Okumu, Afripop! editor and music marketeer, world citizen
 

Golden-Tamara-Natalie-Madden-painting

"Africa inspires most of my art. I am from Jamaica, but I see Africa every where. The beautiful people, their amazing skin tones, their full lips and thick hair – all of that inspires me. I am inspired by the strength of the people, and I am inspired by their pride and inherent power, and I see royalty in all of them. That is why I paint the images that I paint. African people all over the world have been looked down upon, pushed aside, and their beauty hasn't been appreciated. I want my work to show that we are decendants of royalty, and that inherently we are all kings and queens."

Tamara Natalie Madden, artist, US-based
 

Lesley-of-Ododo-Originals

"Africa doesn't "inspire" me as though it was some entity apart from myself. It's part of who I am, my upbringing, my past, my future. It's like trying to figure out how my leg inspires me. It doesn't, it's just wholly a part of my being. I do think the influences of my African upbringing are evident in my (hopefully) good taste and dramatic flair, at least when it comes to fashion."

Lesley, Ododo Originals, US-based
 

KRasheed_taxi-queue-SA

"The one thing (among many) that fascinated me about South Africa was the geography – literally the space and the ways that once-private space is made public, the way that once-non-Black space is reappropriated, and the intricate patterns people form on the streets while queueing for taxis or selling fruits. Some people say it is chaotic but there is something beautiful about it. A lot of folks talk about the overt beauty of Africa – the faces, the animals, the colors; however, I am more inspired and intrigued by finding the beauty in the seemingly chaotic and banal. I continue to look for that which goes unnoticed and disregarded."

Kameelah Rasheed, photographer, artist, writer, youth educator, US-based
 

Zaki-Ibrahim

"It is a part of me and my music. It is the origin of so much. I am constantly challenged by its complexity and wowed by its beauty. Africa, to me will always be home. Home is our point of reference and the place where we always come back to replenish our souls."

Zaki Ibrahim, music maker, South Africa-based
 

07_teddy_ruge_053

"Africa inspires me in so many different ways, but mostly because I see the vast potential for improvements everywhere. I love the entrepreneurial spirit embodied in the informal sector in just about every city you will visit. This thriving spirit to do for yourself and provide for your family against great odds. I am inspired by the children who will laugh, sing and dance despite having only toys they've made from banana stalk. I am inspired by how youthful the continent is. Over 400 million under the age of 16 and growing up fast in a digital revolution. There's a renaissance coming to the continent, and I am inspired by what that means. I am inspired by the promise of the changing of the guards, in our political elite, as new thinking shoves the old guard "hippo" ranks by the way side and, ushers in impassioned leaders with vision and the gumption to carry them out. I am inspired by this promise and so much more..."

TMS Ruge, changemaker, US-based

 

Minna Salami MsAfropolitan 2

"Africa doesn't inspire me in or by itself. It is part of my evolution and I am part of its evolution and it's that evolving process that I draw inspiration from, from trying to understand its strengths and its weaknesses to try and grasp the wholeness."

Minna Salami, blogger, UK-based


You can enjoy all 21 interviews here.
(Image credits available on the respective interview posts. )

 

 

INTERVIEW: New Orleans and the culture of resistance: Floodlines’ Jordan Flaherty > Art Threat

Jordan Flaherty

New Orleans and the

culture of resistance

Interview with Floodlines author Jordan Flaherty

by Stefan Christoff on May 18, 2011 · 1 Comment

Youth activist Knowledge is Born leads Secondline to protest school-to-prison pipeline, April 2009. Photo by Abdul Aziz.

Over five years since the catastrophe of hurricane Katrina, communities in New Orleans are still struggling to rebuild and return. Shocking images of Katrina broadcast globally continue to communicate the growing economic, social and racial fault lines in America. Beyond the headlines, community organizing and resistance to post-Katrina economic shock treatment of key public institutions, including the school systems and public housing, have drawn battle-lines illustrating broader contemporary struggles against hyper-capitalism.

On culture, artists in New Orleans are playing a critically important role in building a culture of community resistance for key political struggles, while creative, dynamic sounds and boundary challenging artistic practices — which have made New Orleans famous for the arts — continue to shape the front lines of contemporary culture in North America.

 

Author and community activist Jordan Flaherty explores culture, community and resistance in Floodlines, an inspiring read on Katrina and all the under-reported stories of social justice struggles in the years after the storm. Flaherty writes in a lyrical style, illustrating a deep connection to the arts, while also communicating the urgent realities facing the poor majority in New Orleans, a predominantly African-American city — realities that today have fallen far from the headline glare.

Floodlines is a key read for anyone interested in reading a critical contemporary history on Katrina and also for all involved in community organizing. It is an eye-opening examination on the hope, struggles and conflicts that revolve around community-led movements for social justice.

Community activist and Art Threat contributor Stefan Christoff had the opportunity to speak with Floodlines author Jordan Flaherty during a recent visit to Montreal.

Art Threat: In Floodlines you highlight community struggles and resistance in New Orleans surrounding hurricane Katrina, can you point to some key struggles you focus on in Floodlines and their importance for communities across the U.S. and in Canada.

Jordan Flaherty: U.S. policies on healthcare, education and criminal justice in someways presents a dystopian future for Canada, as many policies are first tried in the U.S. and then exported globally through structural adjustment programs via the IMF and World Bank. Today privatization policies are being applied and enforced in the U.S., striking communities like New Orleans.

A back and forward between different countries and contexts is taking place, different strategies to push privatization, militarization and the criminalization of the poor. All these issues were projected in hyper speed in New Orleans. Struggles around the privatization of education really came forward after Katrina.

Floodlines In New Orleans overnight around 7500 teachers and employees, basically the entire staff of the public school system was fired. An entire school system radically disrupted in New Orleans, from a system under the control of local school boards, to a system of charter schools or state controlled schools, a major move toward a free market school system.

On criminal justice, the first state institution to restart after the storm in New Orleans was the city jail, a bus station was transformed into a city jail. Prisoners were also left behind as the waters were rising during the storm or shipped upstate to prisons like Angola, a former slave plantation where it is estimated that over 90% of the prison population will die behind bars.

Our public hospital in New Orleans was immediately shut down after Katrina.

After the storm you had 80% housing damaged in New Orleans but the public housing was mainly undamaged, but public housing was quickly boarded-up post storm by people in power who tried to take that opportunity to close public housing. Congressman Richard Baker, a prominent Republican said after the storm, “we finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans, we couldn’t do it, but God did.”

People in power took advantage of the situation to push forward rapid reforms on all of these issues.

In listening to you outline the board changes across the social structure of New Orleans after the storm Naomi Klein’s thesis outlined via The Shock Doctrine comes to mind, can you expand on reality of hyper capitalism enforced on New Orleans post Katrina?

Certainly Naomi Klein’s framing in The Shock Doctrine has been an important lens through which to look at the situation and what we faced in New Orleans after the storm.

On the teachers, the union that they were all members in was the largest union in the city, it was 80% African American, so it was a foundation of African American middle class life in the city. After Katrina the union cease to exist, all the teachers were fired and so that move hit the social-economic well being of so many in the community.

In New Orleans public schools were already in trouble prior to Katrina but you had two different views about what was wrong with the school system, many community members thought that the problem was the lack of public funding for the schools, the bad pay for teachers, the crumbling infrastructure, while people in power thought the problem was that the teachers union had too much power that there was too much local control.

So opportunists took advantage of the storm to completely wrest the school system out of local control, to effectively shutdown a public school system for New Orleans. So the firing of teachers, attacking the teachers union, taking the schools out of school board control, were all steps in their plan to try out free market experiments on the education system.

Officials openly spoke about the New Orleans school system as a blank slate. As poet, educator and civil rights activist Kalamu ya Salaam said, “it wasn’t a blank slate. It was a graveyard. They are experimenting on people’s bones.”

Civil rights lawyer Tracie Washington referenced Tuskegee the notorious experiment on African Americans in the 20th century, that like all the major changes in New Orleans post-Katrina, was done without consent.

One of the most painful things for the people of New Orleans was that these radical reforms on the school system were pushed through without any desire from authorities to get consent from the parents, the teachers, the students, no consultation with people most impacted.

Lack of serious response by U.S. government and state institutions to Katrina lead to widespread outrage around the globe. Although the intense economic and structural reforms push by the government and corporate sector on New Orleans after the storm, the changes to the school system, to public housing, a whole different layer of brutality was not as widely debated or understood, can you reflect on this point?

On the schools there are many political forces in the U.S. who what to see such changes nation wide, there is a massive push for charter schools happening across the U.S.

Waiting for Superman, the new film by the director who made the Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth, really pushes charter schools. So you see an interesting coalition pushing charter schools, there are some progressive people involved, who see it as bringing community control to school systems, however many privatizers are very cynically using charter schools as a back door way to privatize public school systems.

Many forces across the U.S. are arrayed behind this push for charter schools. In New Orleans, for example, city government, state government and federal government, along with many private foundations, are all pushing for charter schools.

The Gates Foundation, The Walton Foundation and many of the major billionaires in the U.S. are behind this push for charter schools.

Opera just gave $1 million to a charter school in New Orleans. The head of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, just gave $100 to charter schools in New Jersey. So wealthy elites are putting major resources into this push for charter schools. Often times integral to this charter school push is breaking the teachers unions, breaking the power of the teachers unions in society, breaking local control. Another key part of that charter school push are the questions; how can we make profit from education, and how can charter schools be used as a step toward full privatization?

Back to New Orleans, many post-Katrina policies administered on the city really seem to revolve around squeezing profit from public systems. So we talked about how this played out for the school system, but could you expand on what post-storm policy looked like for public housings and other elements of public life in New Orleans.

On housing New Orleans experienced a part of a broader nation wide push in which corporate forces are trying to destroy the very principal of housing as a right, or the right to affordable housings. So for example in Atlanta, all of the public housing is now gone; there is no more public housing in the city. In New Orleans almost all of the public housing is gone, and in New Orleans this change happened after Katrina.

Public housing in New Orleans was some of the best built in the city and largely undamaged by the storm. Across the city, 80 percent of housing was damaged by flooding but the public housing was mostly undamaged and yet people in power put gates over that housing and used those gates to keep people from coming back home, one of the many obstacles that kept many people displaced from the city from returning.

Today at least 100,000 people from New Orleans are not able to return home. The former population in New Orleans was 450,000, and the current population is around 355,000. Some of the current population are people that moved to New Orleans post-Katrina, so well over 100,000 people have been displaced.

Many African-Americans that once lived in New Orleans want to return but feel they are being kept out by economics. Often the public housing people once lived in is closed, or if they owned a home and didn’t receive any compensation money to rebuild, or their job in the city no longer exists, it becomes virtually impossible to return. All these economic measures have literally kept people from returning.

Could you relay some of the human stories projected in your book? You highlighted that approximately 100 000 people are not able to return to the city, wondering if you could translate what this meant at a human level?

One of the things that makes me saddest about New Orleans is that so many of the incredible people that the city needs so much have been kept from returning.

Sunni Patterson is an amazing poet, spoken word artist and social justice activist. To many people she is the voice of New Orleans. If you listen to almost any young poet in New Orleans there is a Sunni Patterson influence. Today, Sunni is displaced to Houston, along with tens of thousands of others from New Orleans. Sonny is someone who loves New Orleans so much but is not able to return.

Many people who had been in New Orleans for generations found it difficult to return, while many people who just moved to the city or moved there after the storm found it easy to stay.

Given that you arrived in New Orleans a few years prior to the storm, I was wondering if you could compare the feeling on the streets before and after the storm, and describe the differences you feel walking in the city.

Some areas like the French quarter, or the business district where the hotels are, or the garden district, have changed very little. Those areas were not hit heavily by flooding and received a disproportionate amount of rebuilding money, so those areas have not changed a great deal.

But then if you look at former residential African-American neighbourhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward you can feel the emptiness and absence. In the Lower Ninth Ward, where the levy break happened, thousands of people once lived there — block after block of houses, a full residential neighbourhood. Over fifty percent home ownership, a predominately African-American area, a working class to middle class neighbourhood.

Now there are maybe twenty houses and the rest is a demolition zone, overgrown weeds sometimes higher than stop signs. Occasionally you will see steps leading up to a home that is no longer there, a foundation for a home that is gone. Many homes were hit by the storm and then subsequently demolished.

Despite the devastation after the storm people in New Orleans continue to organize for justice, a major theme in your book. Could you reflect on how the post-Katrina reality in New Orleans points to the grassroots spirit in the city, the spirit to fight back.

Actually this recent period in New Orleans points to the heart of many struggles.

Floodlines was largely inspired by the idea to communicate these stories about community resistance in New Orleans out to the world. There are warning signs for everyone in the example of New Orleans, while there are also inspiring stories on important and beautiful organizing.

So many people have returned to New Orleans against great odds. In the city we have seen people fighting for justice and winning some real concrete victories on various issues, especially on the issue of police violence.

People struggled for years against the wall of official silence about incredible police brutality around Katrina and beyond. Now we are beginning to see changes. People won a victory in the creation of an independent monitor over the police department and the U.S. Department of Justice intervention and filing of charges against police officers involved in violence and killings against civilians after the storm.

All this movement and change happened at an official level because people at the grassroots refused to be silent and refused to stop fighting.

Secondline Parade. Photo by Abdul Aziz.

Culture from New Orleans celebrated globally has often been linked to struggles for justice, both today and in the past, the struggle for emancipation and against slavery. Can you point to some of the ways you feel that New Orleans artists embody cultural resistance today?

This is a crucial point to the story of New Orleans.

In many ways the very history of these art forms — jazz funerals, Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs, Mardi Gras Indians, all very specific African-American community and cultural traditions basically unique to New Orleans — were created through a community using art to resist the dominant white supremacist culture.

Throughout African-American communities in New Orleans you have Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs — black community institutions originally formed in the reconstruction era of New Orleans. Clubs act both as a vehicle to facilitate culture but also as a space to benefit the community, to provide insurance for people in the community, to buy books for kids at school, that is the roots of these institutions.

They were also the vehicle that preserved jazz funeral second lines, roving street parades that we have every weekend in the city, with anywhere from one to six brass-bands, with a few hundred to thousands of people all completely taking over the street in a swarm of dancing. An incredible tradition that really came about as a forum of claiming public space and cultural resistance.

Even more modern musical traditions like hip hop find New Orleans roots in bounce music, which was developed through block parties mostly in the poor neighbourhoods. It was first called project music because it came from the housing projects.

Block parties often started because one person on the block couldn’t make rent, so the community would have a party where everyone came together and paid a couple dollars, at the end of the night that money would go to help that person pay the rent.

So in New Orleans, culture was preserved and musical traditions were amplified and multiplied through community parties that were also about social aid.

Hurricane Katrina illuminates many profound failures by political and economic power in the U.S. to deal with the crisis and displacement, rooted in a broader history of economic and racial oppression. However, Floodlines focuses not on victimizing people but really on the ability for community power and resistance to overcome incredible odds.

New Orleans points to so many important lessons for social movements. Battles about public control versus corporate control over key social institutions will be mirrored in many other struggles, not just in the U.S. but internationally.

We are already seeing the main players from New Orleans move on to other countries and disaster zones. Many of the corporations that profited from Katrina moved on to profit off of the Haiti earthquake.

Even our school superintendent Paul Vallas, who re-engineered the New Orleans school system towards privatization through the growth of charter schools, was brought in to advise in Haiti after the earthquake, and again brought in to advise in Chile after the earthquake. We are seeing the same players again and again around the world.

The criminalization of the people of New Orleans after Katrina must also be remembered. Suddenly the mainstream media’s depiction of people changed from them being survivors to being criminals or looters. In both New Orleans and Haiti you saw the criminalization of disaster survivors and the militarization of the relief effort, with U.S. troops being deployed in both situations.

We really need to learn lessons from New Orleans for future situations. I think the economic system we live under thrives from disasters and that they are an inevitable and intrinsic part of the system . We need to learn how to respond effectively through struggle to these disasters.

In Floodlines you present stories of struggle from New Orleans, and you are touring your book, sharing these stories from your heart. I was wondering if you could talk about your experience in touring Floodlines, your travels and links that you have been able to build through your tour as an activist.

Before Katrina I had actually written only a little, and was not a journalist or a writer. However, when the storm happened I was living in New Orleans, so I wrote about my experiences and the situation on the ground.

My words described a different reality than the mainstream media depiction and that initial writing that I did was forwarded around the world and translated into several languages.

Organizers who I really respected in New Orleans encouraged me to keep writing, to keep uplifting these stories that weren’t being told in the mainstream. So for me, travelling around, bringing this book to different communities and trying to communicate these stories of resistance in New Orleans is a continuation in my initial efforts to amplify grassroots voices.

Floodlines is trying to support community voices in New Orleans by spreading the word on unreported struggles and the lessons being learned after Katrina that can be valuable in many other contexts.

It has been absolutely incredible travelling around, connecting with activists throughout the country, seeing how there are many similarities between struggles, and learning how people are facing similar obstacles in different places, not just in terms of police, or privatization, or corporations, but also in relation to the very structural problems that we have within our movements.

In the U.S. we are dealing with the non-profit industrial complex and the ways that social movements have become increasingly accountable to corporate or foundation funding, rather than directly to their constituency.

In touring Floodlines I have connected with people involved in incredible resistance in many places, from Latino parents in Chicago who held a sit-in to save a community school there — resisting the city’s plans to sell it to a private school — to organizing and marching against police brutality in Pittsburgh.

Travelling allows you to see first hand how similar issues are coming up across the country, and the ways people are struggling around North America really encourage you to make sure that we learn lessons from the struggles in New Orleans while working to build unity in our movements.

For more information on Jordan Flaherty and the book Floodlines visit floodlines.org.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Photos by Abdul Aziz.

 

VIDEO: Wasting My Time - Black Coffee > AfriPOP!

WASTING MY TIME

And for the house fans? It’s all about dance star-on-the-rise Zakes Bantwini – the uber-talented vocalist and dancer behind club bangers Shake your Bum Bum and Clap Your Hands.  Zakes is being plugged as MTV Base’s Brand: New artist for April 2011.

Translation: In this video what sounds like ‘worsting’ is in fact ‘wasting’. :)

 

PUB: Flash Fiction Writing Contest - Writing Competition

Flash Fiction Writing Contest

      

Organized by FanStory.com
Contests are free to writers.

The challenge of flash fiction is to tell a complete story in which every word is absolutely essential. A writer must take away the excess until the story is left with nothing but the clean-scraped core of a story.

In this flash fiction contest we are challenging writers to write a flash fiction piece that is between 500 and 800 words on the topic provided. The topic is "missing".

For this contest write a story that somehow involves the topic. How you approach this topic is up to you but the focus of the story must clearly incorporate this topic. It must be a complete story. No non-fiction. No poetry.

The winners will be selected by the FanStory.com Contest Committee. A winner will be announced approximately one to two weeks after the deadline passes. The decision is final.

The submitted work must be between 500 and 800 words. The title of the work does not count in the word count. If the word count is over or under this amount the work will not be presented to the contest committee. For a rough word counter utility click here but we recommend the use of a word processor to count the words.

 

A Gift Card Is A Prize Option
The winner takes away a $100 cash prize. Second place will win twenty-five member dollars. Third place ten member dollars.

This contest is open to all members. Past contest winners can join the contest.

 

 

The voting booth will include this summary of the contest:

 

    In this flash fiction contest we challenged writers to write a flash fiction piece that is between 500 and 800 words on the topic provided.

     

     

    One entry per person. New entries to the site only.

    Deadline: Sunday, September 11, 2011 at 11:59 p.m. EST.

    Click the link above to submit your entry. Members with reservations can use the link provided in their contest profile.

    Members may not request votes, mention contest entries, or notify potential voters of the vote by private message or other means as specified in the contest terms. The site automatically checks for this form of communication. A break in the contest terms will result in the cancellation of the account.

    Cash prizes delivered by PayPal. Winners also have the option to choose a Visa Gift Card (US residents only) or Amazon Gift Card (where available). Reserve Your Spot.

     

    PUB: The Cecilia Unaegbu Prize for Flash Story 2011 (Nigeria/ Worldwide) > Writers Afrika

    The Cecilia Unaegbu Prize for Flash Story 2011 (Nigeria/ Worldwide)

    Share |

    Deadline: 17 July 2011

    The contest is now open for the above prize and closes on July 17 2011. Anyone from any country is eligible for this contest. Entrants are to submit only one true flash story of not more than 750 words on the theme: Women as Vessel of Honour. Entry is free.

    Soft copy of entry to be submitted as attached file in MSWord to lionlordjeff@yahoo.com with the subject: Cecilia Unaegbu Prize. The name, phone number, address and pasted self photographs of entrants to be provided in MS Word in a second attached file.

    Entrants should make sure not to provide their particulars within the body of the story. This is to help for fair judgement. Any entry submitted without heed to the above conditions will be disqualified.

    Special consideration will be given to stories that celebrate the virtuous woman in the authors' lives by reconstructing for history an unforgettable virtuous action(s) done by such a woman. Masterful use of rich language, engaging imagery and cohesive plot are buzz skills for the prize too.

    Public announcement of winners will be made in early September 2011, first at the launching of four books by her son, Jeff Unaegbu and in other media.

    First prize: 15,000 Naira
    Second prize: 10,000 Naira
    Third prize: 5,000 Naira
    and 10 consolation prizes.

    All thirteen winners will be published in an anthology which will also contain the biographies of famous women of virtue from guest authors including the biography of Mrs. Cecilia Unaegbu with the title: Women of Virtue Book of Fame.

    Competition judge: Unoma Azuah

    Contact Information:

    For inquiries: lionlordjeff@yahoo.com

    For submissions: lionlordjeff@yahoo.com

    PUB: Prestigious opportunity for young African journalists > Africa News blog

    Prestigious opportunity for young African journalists

    Jun 2, 2011 09:04 EDT

    It is the time again when we seek entries for the prestigious FitzGerald prize for young African journalists.

    This offers a scholarship for a promising, young (under 30) African journalist or aspirant journalist to do a post graduate BA hons degree at the University of The Witwatersrand ’s Journalism Programme in Johannesburg, starting in early 2012, and to join Reuters thereafter for a period of work experience.

    Candidates must have an undergraduate degree or at least 3 years professional experience in journalism and must be nominated by a senior journalist, publisher or academic.  They must be fluent in English. The scholarship will cover fees, accommodation and a modest living allowance.

    Previous winners have come from Malawi, Nigeria and Kenya, chosen from among extremely strong candidates.

    Candidates should submit a motivation letter, a CV, writing samples and at least 2 letters of nomination/reference by July 31, 2011  to fitzgeraldprize@thomsonreuters.com. Candidates will have to make themselves available for a written test and interview.

    INTERVIEW + VIDEO: Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" (40th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition)

    By K. Bonin
    Copyright © 2011 by K. Bonin/SoulMusic.com

    Home > FEATURE: Marvin Gaye: What's Going On (40th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition) (Motown)
    FEATURE: Marvin Gaye: What's Going On (40th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition) (Motown)

    Listen to Marvin's masterpiece as you read...

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    It is undeniable that the ‘60s and ‘70s were a time of great social change in this country and in the world. In January 1971, a song was released that would not only reflect that change, but miraculously remains relevant 4 decades later. That song was the elegant and moving, “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye. I had been a fan since the early to mid-‘60s. Even going so far as to perform “I’ll Be Doggone” in a school talent show. Songs like “You”, “Chained”, How Sweet It Is”, “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”, “Too Busy Thinking About My Baby” and “That’s The Way Love Is” all solidified my love and respect for the preacher’s son from Washington D.C. (Not to mention his passionate duets with Tammi Terrell). Not as well known to his millions of fans, was the fact that Marvin was a great songwriter. He had even written the gorgeous, “If This World Were Mine”, for one of the Tammi Terrell duets. That song should have been an indication of his great talent. That is not to say that all the other pop/R&B hits he wrote or co-wrote before the ‘70s, were not worthy of his artistry. However, little could have prepared anyone for what he delivered to the airwaves that January ’71.

    It just so happened to be my final year of high school and my first year in college. Surely, my musical taste had become sophisticated enough to fully appreciate the depth of what he bestowed on my ears as my commencement ceremonies dominated a lot of my world. I loved the passion and sentiment of “What’s Going On”. It was a heady time when Americans headed to the streets in search of correcting the ills of our country. WHAT’S GOING ON was the soundtrack to that humanitarian sentiment.

    The album spawned 3 hits including the title track, “Mercy, Mercy Me” (about the eco-system) and “Inner City Blues” (an homage to the pains and ills of life’s less fortunate). If that album were placed in a time capsule for the year 2025, it would be a near perfect snapshot of the American people’s struggles entering a new decade, the exciting changing times of the ‘70s.

    In speaking to Harry Weinger, VP of A&R for Motown/Universal, about WHAT’S GOING ON’s endurance, he stated that it can be attributed to the fact that “the subject matter spotlighted by Marvin has remained real and relevant for 40 years. Marvin has never gone out of style”.

    In 2001, Motown/Universal released the “Deluxe Edition” of the album. It was an elaborate 2-CD set which included the unreleased “Detroit Mix” of the album and also an impressive full concert of the album recorded in June 1972 at the Kennedy Center Auditorium. The Kennedy Center Auditorium also marked a coming home of sorts as this was Marvin’s birthplace.

    Now with the 40th Anniversary of this monumental album, Mr. Weinger states “When I was considering what might work for a 40th Anniversary edition of WHAT’S GOING ON, I saw a beginning and an end: Marvin deciding to tackle the topic in late spring and summer of 1970 with the title tune, wrapping up in the spring of 1972 with Marvin, like most of the rest of the Motown staff, leaving Detroit for Los Angeles”. He continues, “With the album in essence the last major Motown album recorded in Detroit, although, for one, The Temptations cut the ALL DIRECTIONS album with Norman Whitfield after that.....I felt everything on the set had to be Detroit-centric. Those instrumental jams may have been a holding pattern, but they were a vital part of the story, so I dove further back in”.

    ‘The first mix’ of the title song was known about but not in the sense of what it really was. I didn’t realize, until recently, it was mixed before Marvin and David Van DePitte added more elements. I’d dismissed it from the 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition because the live recordings were the real story of that release. When I went back to it a few months ago to check the various mixes, my mouth fell open, there was the first version heard by Motown’s Quality Control committee. The first one following the horn and background vocals overdubs was the released single version. Motown engineers actually created a few more ‘single’ mixes, but beyond the single, the album and that first undubbed mix, the nuances are pretty minor”, he reveals.

    This conversation with Harry Weinger, a Grammy® award-winning producer, proved so compelling that we decided to continue our conversation with an overall view of Marvin’s career at Motown.

    Q: What are the best-selling titles in Marvin’s catalog?

    A: In general, like many artists, it’s his greatest hits collections. (RIAA® states that Marvin has over 23 gold & platinum audio & video titles. Six are greatest hits collections).

    Q: After WHAT’S GOING ON, Marvin recorded “You’re The Man”. It appears as if he were staying political and topical. Was “You’re The Man” a lead-in to a different album from Marvin?

    A: Possibly. He cut it three different ways: were they bookends to an album? Were the instrumentals demos for further development? Was he recording at home, trying other things out? Judging by Marvin’s usual response, we might have seen a YOU’RE THE MAN album if the song had hit the pop top 10. But it didn’t, and we can only sift through what was left behind.

    Q: He surprised fans by recording the sexually charged LET’S GET IT ON album. Were some of the tracks that have ended up on this Super Deluxe version of WHAT’S GOING ON intended for that album or a different project? Do you really think LET’S GET IT ON surprised fans?

    A: Three of the four songs on Side Two of the original LET’S GET IT ON album – “Come Get To This,” “Distant Lover” and “Just To Keep You Satisfied” – originated in Detroit in the fall of 1970, while Marvin was supposedly “on strike” and not recording. The backing tracks remained intact, and Marvin added to and embellished them to make then what we know as those songs. The only vocal remnants from the “WGO” period are on the Originals’ version of “Just To Keep You Satisfied,” and Marvin’s “Head Title,” which became “Distant Lover” – you can hear Marvin say, “I know I’m supposed to have a new record out about now…”

    The only reason we have “Head Title,” or knew it existed, was because the engineer Steve Smith had a rough mix of it. Though it was water-damaged, and we had to edit out chunks of material, that’s the tape we used on the 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition. A little while later, I discovered the original session tape in the vault, from which we could do a proper mix.

    Q: When I first heard the single, "What's Going On", it still had a Motown feel to it. Legend has it that Berry Gordy initially rejected the album because he felt it wasn't commercial enough. Do you think the single and/or the album still sounded like a Motown copyright?

    A: BG first rejected the single. When the single sold, he a assuredly wanted the album. I taught a course on Motown at NYU and used this album as a cornerstone of the curriculum – because if one says, the single was rejected, the follow-through to a younger generation is, what system allows for a song to be rejected? If you point out the uniqueness of Marvin’s producer credit, you open the door to an explanation of the Artist Development system. And so on. So, if you put this song in context with Marvin’s sound up to that point, and with Motown’s general direction, and consider Marvin’s complex relationship with the company, yeah, you might well reject the single. But if you side with sales and with Smokey Robinson, who considered the social vibe and other instincts, you wanted that sucker out fast. Are “Ball Of Confusion” and “War” Motown? Sure. I don’t think you can separate Marvin from Motown. He made the album Motown.

    Q: Marvin worked on an album called LOVE MAN. Was this an extension of IN OUR LIFETIME or a completely different album?

    A: LOVE MAN was the first version of what became IN OUR LIFETIME. Marvin kept returning to the material, fine-tuning it, deepening its meaning.

    Q: Marvin was quite a prolific writer, not sure if many people knew this. You included his elegant ballad he wrote and produced for The Miracles, "I Love You Secretly" and the two hits for The Originals amongst many. Are there versions of Marvin singing some of the songs that were recorded by others? (Harry included The Miracles version of “I Love You Secretly” on the 30th Anniversary Edition of WHAT’S GOING ON).

    A: Only “Just To Keep You Satisfied.”

    Q: Rolling Stone stated that both I WANT YOU and HERE, MY DEAR were not fully appreciated when they first were released. Why do you think that is, because they actually were instant favorites of mine?

    A: Rolling Stone, at the time, may not have been the best outlet for understanding those albums. Speaking generally to make a point, would you ask a writer from Vibe magazine to review the latest Neil Young album?

    But there is a reconsideration of those records now, of course, and your taste won out. Both, according to the magazine, rank among the greatest albums of all time.

    Q: Do you know if the Washington D.C. concert, where he performed the entire album, was ever filmed?

    A: I don’t believe so. No one is quite sure it was even photographed. The local papers covered the event and the only photos from their coverage are of the day’s events leading up to the show. Remember, the show started unbelievably late, around 11PM, and by that time, the newspapers were already mocking up the next morning’s edition for printing.

    Q: Marvin, Stevie, Smokey and Diana are the Mount Rushmore artists of Motown. Any particular thoughts why these artists still endure 50 years later?

    A: And the Temps, the Tops, the J5, et al. All of them had or were given great songs. And they were the best to sing them.

    Q: Marvin made two movies, “Chrome and Hot Leather” and “The Ballad of Andy Crocker” that are very rare. Do you know who owns those films?

    A: Both are on DVD.

    Q: Who are your favorite artists to source in the vaults?

    A: Unfair question.

    Q; Do you know why WHAT’S GOING ON was the first album to give credit to The Funk Brothers?

    A: Valerie Simpson’s album actually was, a month earlier. Both had a kinship with the musicians and wanted to give credit where credit was due.

    Q: Is there a dream Motown project that you would like to see come to fruition as VP of A&R?

    A: Since we’re talking about Marvin, his ballads sessions – the full Vulnerable project. And all of these albums, ’60s and ’70s, in a box set, like the great classical composers. Of course, we should do that for all of the artists.

    Harry Weinger is Compilation Producer of “What’s Going On (40th Anniversary/Super Deluxe Edition)”.

    K. Bonin has worked in the music industry for the last three decades. He describes himself as "a child of Motown and the classic rock era." Having spent the balance of his career at Arista Records, his experience and passion gives him a unique perspective on music and the music industry. Kirk can be contacted via email at bokiluis@gmail.com

    This 40th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition contains 2 CDs + Vinyl LP + Gatefold Booklet with Rare Photos, Lyrics and New Essays.

    Highlights include:
    * A remastered version of the album plus 28 bonus tracks - 16 unreleased.
    * Original mono versions of the LP's hit singles.
    * A previously unreleased original `Quality Control test mix' of "What's Going On," mixed before Marvin had added strings, horns and additional vocals.
    * Several pre-album outtakes, recorded while Marvin was "on strike," waiting for his single to be released, including "Head Title," now in unedited form for the first time.
    * Several post-album instrumental jams with local musicians who included Ray Parker Jr. - a series of recordings made in Detroit before Marvin followed Motown to Los Angeles.
    * The original single version of a sequel to the album, "You're The Man," as well as two alternate versions.
    * The album's rare, original "Detroit Mix," previously issued on CD for the 30th anniversary, now on vinyl for the first time.

    Click here for THE MARVIN GAYE (US) STORE AT SOUL MUSIC.COM for CDs, MP3s, Bio, etc.

    Click here for THE MARVIN GAYE (UK) STORE AT SOUL MUSIC.COM for CDs, MP3s, DVDs, Bio, etc.

    INFO: Should Journalists Who Witness Killings Try and Stop Them? > GOOD + NYTimes Report

    Should Journalists

    Who Witness Killings

    Try and Stop Them?

    • June 4, 20118:00 am PDT

    The still above was taken from a new video on the New York Times website. It depicts a hundreds-strong mob in Diepsloot, South Africa, attacking a man they falsely accused of being a thief. Farai Kujirichita was actually an innocent Zimbabwean immigrant, but when the mob swarmed on him, they beat him with sticks until he was dead.

    The beating is terrifying in and of itself, but the video gets all the more shocking when it fades to black and a frame of text reads, "This video was provided to The New York Times by a freelance journalist who lives in Diepsloot." It's not every day one hears about a mob killing, but when one does, and when a horrified journalist was watching the whole thing, isn't it important to ask why the journalist did nothing?

    The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma advises journalists who arrive to a violent scene: "It’s not your role to act as professional responder unless someone’s life is in danger." Kujirichita was hit more than 200 times with a wooden plank, and with each blow his life grew more and more endangered. If Dart is correct, Golden Mtika, the journalist who came upon Kujirichita, should have stepped in. Alas, he didn't.

    Ten American states currently have "duty to rescue" laws on the books (sometimes called "good Samaritan laws"), which compel citizens to at least call the police or run to get help if there's a person in distress. Mtika did phone the police while he videotaped the beating, and the cops eventually arrived. But by then Kujirichita was taking his last breaths. So Mtika then phoned Barry Bearak, the New York Times' bureau chief for southern Africa, who ended up titling his article on the killing, "Watching the Murder of an Innocent Man."

    There are a lot of questions to unpack here, particularly about what a journalist's job really is. It's to depict the world as it is, of course, but is it also to intervene and fix things when you can?

    In 2009, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Berrett ended up lying in a pool of his own blood after he came to the aid of a woman and child being attacked by a man with a metal pipe. The attack happened at a fair, where security and police were surely present, but Berrett didn't wait for them. He dove in fist first and very possibly saved two people's lives.

    No doubt it's good that Mtika was able to capture Kujirichita's attack on film, thus providing the world with a glimpse at a nation in peril. And I'm quite certain Mtika was terrified of the beating before him (the shaky camera work is a testament to that). But isn't it more haunting, and in a more sustained way, to know that you could have saved a person's life instead of videotaping the carnage for a newspaper?

     

    __________________________

     

    Watching the Murder 

    of an Innocent Man


    Pieter Hugo for The New York Times

    Killing Field The open space between two squatter camps where Farai Kujirichita was beaten to death by vigilantes.

    GO HERE TO SEE VIDEO REPORT, GRAPHS AND PHOTOS

    The mob, desperate for vengeance, had found an unlikely guide to lead them into their dark work. Fifteen-year-old Siphiwe, short, round-faced and reliably smiling, declared, "I know where these criminals live."


    He was a wayward teenager, a bad boy wanting to become a worse boy, and this gave him credibility in the matter of where vicious criminals might be found. A few men lifted him onto their shoulders so that the crowd, already in the hundreds, could see him better. Then an older man, wiser about these things, said to put the boy down. More than likely, they were about to kill someone. No one in the mob ought to be too conspicuous.

    Diepsloot, in the northern reaches of Johannesburg, is a settlement of 150,000 people, the majority of them destitute. Crime oversteps even poverty as the most bedeviling affliction, and the night before, a gang of thugs marauded through one of the huge squatter camps in a subdivision called Extension 1. They were a methodical bunch, taking their time, shrewd about where to find stashes of cash amid the pittances, aware also of the police’s reluctance to enter the weave of shacks — themokhukhus — where the narrow, unlighted pathways can be a fearsome labyrinth. The criminals killed two people, though the churning rumor mill put the number as high as 11.

    Siphiwe himself claimed to have been robbed. “They took my cellphone,” he told the others. He was unaccustomed to feeling so important, and he walked cockily at the front of the mob along Thubelihle Street. It was close to noon on a cloudless Saturday morning in late January, the heart of the South African summer. The road abounded with township life: good music playing over bad radios, women pinning laundry to droopy clotheslines, storekeepers brushing aside plump flies in the butchery. People were curious about the mob’s intentions, and some followed along as if dutifully joining a militia.

    In a few blocks, the pavement of Thubelihle gave way to hard-packed dirt and stones. A busted pipe had gone unrepaired for months, and the escaping water cut a trough in the ground that now carried a stream of garbage and sewage. The odor was bracing, but there was open air ahead, a large, marshy field that separated Extension 1 from the squatter camp in Extension 2. The mob took an undulating footpath across the terrain, and once it halted, Siphiwe pointed out an empty shack and a locked trailer. These belong to criminals, he said, and the structures were easily torn apart with a few tools and strong hands and then set on fire.

    People cheered the crackling of the flames, but this minor demolition was hardly enough to bring their wrath to a cathartic finish. Mob justice is not uncommon in Diepsloot, and most often it involves the swift capture of a supposed criminal, the villain there to beat up, to stone, perhaps even to wrap in a petrol-soaked shroud. But this undertaking was something entirely different. The vigilantes had walked a long distance on a hot day in the uncertain pursuit of unspecified thugs — all on the word of this talkative boy.

    The crowd eventually migrated from the cramped lanes of the mokhukhus to a clearing used as a soccer field. A meeting began, and several women from Extension 2 shouted angrily about crime: the shootings and the rapes and how they have to hide their children under the beds. One claimed that criminals hung out in front of a tiny store, what’s known as a spaza shop. The business’s entire stock consisted of two bags of Simba cheese snacks, she said scornfully. “How can you have a spaza that sells only two Simbas?”

    Siphiwe led the way, back along the dusty paths between the shacks to the edge of the marshy field. The spaza shop was locked, and though empty of people, it was actually well supplied with soft drinks, biscuits, beer, toiletries and paraffin. The mob nevertheless busted through the walls, and Siphiwe rooted around in a back room, collecting for himself two pairs of sneakers, a Nike track suit and a nylon jacket. The shop was set ablaze, again to the noisy approval of the crowd, though this, too, seemed scant retaliation against murderous thugs. Where were those despicable people?

    As the restless mob milled about, a 26-year-old Zimbabwean immigrant named Farai Kujirichita emerged from one of the narrow passageways that led to the field. He was wearing a carefully pressed, lilac-colored shirt and talking into his cellphone. By then, many people were coming and going; his arrival was nothing remarkable. And yet some men from the crowd confronted him.

    “Who are you talking to?” they wanted to know. “Who are you warning?”

    Then came a more complicated question. “Where are you from?”

    Foreigners, especially Zimbabweans, are blamed for much of the crime in Diepsloot. Farai must have decided that it would be safer to lie. He said he was a South African, and his response was in Sepedi, a South African language. This was risky. Nationalities can be easy to surmise, telltale from accents, the style of clothing, the shape of a face, the rhythm in a walk.

    The men grabbed the phone. Stored in the list of contacts were many Zimbabwean names and numbers. “This means you are a criminal,” one of them insisted. Most of the mob could not hear this terse conversation, but from a distance they assumed one of the thugs finally had been caught.

    Farai was being pushed and pulled. His captors ordered him to throw himself into the flames of the burning shop. The shouts of those wanting him dead were louder than the pleas of the few who said, We know him; he’s innocent.

    Farai broke free. He ran until he fell, and then the mob was upon him.

    My friend Golden Mtika, who lives in Diepsloot, called me about an hour later. He had recorded the scene on video, which was perilous. Mobs prefer to be thought of as an anonymous horde rather than as a collection of individuals; those landing the deadlier blows don’t wish to be identifiable. Golden was shaken by what he saw, and he spoke so fast I could barely follow. I heard the words “mob justice.” Then he said: “They hit this man again and again. They killed him like they’d kill a snake.”

    Golden is the son of a Malawian father and a South African mother. When I met him, he owned a small tavern in Extension 1. This was an unusual business for a Mormon who had never tasted spirits, and after thieves one night carried off every bottle in stock, he closed up for good and began to rely entirely on his other source of income, taking photos and calling in stories to The Daily Sun, a tabloid well stocked with crime. By his count, he has photographed about 200 murder victims. Golden, who is 39, is among the best-known people in Diepsloot; as an American journalist, I sometimes hire him to translate for me and help with introductions. He is reliably plugged in, able to connect me with the settlement’s devils and angels and everything in between. His two cellphones seem to ring every few minutes. Many consider him their Good Samaritan of choice, and being his friend is an expense, for he is often collecting money for some pauper’s funeral or the care of an orphan.

    I live in much different circumstances, renting a house in the Dainfern Golf and Residential Estate, one of dozens of gated communities built in a city overwrought about crime. The perimeter is fortified with high walls topped by electrified wire; guards patrol the landscaped roadways and roundabouts. Houses are large, and many front entranceways are ornamented with waterfalls and fish ponds. Though safe, Dainfern is rather claustrophobic, and its location is so far north that it seems inconvenient to everything but my son’s private school and Diepsloot. South Africa is thought by some economists to be the most unequal society in the world, and in just 10 minutes I can drive from one end of the great disparity to the other. In the mornings, the maids and gardeners of Diepsloot walk to their jobs in Dainfern. I often go the opposite way.

    This time, I went to watch the video, which was barely three minutes long. Fearful of being seen by the mob, Golden had stopped his camera at several key moments. He also paused to phone the police, calling the direct lines to a small substation, a cluster of trailers that is the only police presence in Diepsloot. No calls went through. He then tried a general emergency number for the region and pleaded with a dispatcher for help.

    The video shows Farai already on the ground, using his left leg to try to block the blows of a man swinging a heavy piece of wood. Others are pelting him with rocks from behind and hitting him with sticks. At this point, it is still possible to imagine the young man’s escape. He can speak; his movements are spry; there is barely a smudge on the lilac of the shirt. But by the next scene, he is sapped of strength and badly injured. His frantic efforts to get away have failed, and he has landed in a filthy, water-filled ditch. As he crawls out, his hands groping at the dirt, a man in blue pants kicks him in the chest, and Farai flops backward with a splash. Some in the crowd, including children, scoot around to get a better look.

    The video then jumps ahead. Farai is again on dry ground, lying on his back, seemingly near death but still breathing. Blood is leaking from his head. He barely raises his left hand, and this trivial movement somehow becomes a cue for the beating to resume. A man wearing a white cap wallops him seven times in the face and neck with a plank, the assailant’s arms reaching high to amplify the force of his swing. Another man repeatedly punches Farai in the groin. For some nearby, these final devastating blows are too awful, and a boy holding a soccer ball looks away. Others are celebrating the mob’s triumph. A slender young woman in a tight pink top has been in and out of the picture in several scenes. She is as petite as the men are brawny. Her smile is girlish. Before Golden again stops the camera, the woman lifts a large block of cement above her head, preparing to heave it at the beaten man. A good bit later, the police finally arrive. They keep the mob from setting Farai alight and are there for his final breaths.

    Golden and I sat in my car as we watched the video on his camera. He repeated what he said earlier: “They killed him like he was a snake.”

    South Africa, rightfully extolled as a country of spectacular beauty and a beacon of democracy, is also well known for crime, though not so much for the amount of lawbreaking as for the violence that comes with it. Comparisons between nations are problematic; the integrity of statistics varies greatly from one country to another. But the global bookkeeping for murder is considered relatively accurate, and South Africa has one of the highest homicide rates in the world, seven times higher than those in Kenya or the United States. The frequency of rape is utterly shocking. A rigorous study recently showed that 37 percent of the men in Gauteng Province, which includes Johannesburg, admitted to forcing a woman into sex.

    The topic of crime is a national preoccupation. In 2007, the government gave $500,000 to a policy group to explain why lawbreakers committed misdeeds with such ferocity. Many legislators and public officials were disappointed by the study’s conclusions. There was no unified field theory of South African violence, just “a variety of factors” sounding overly familiar: too many guns, too much poverty, the warp of history.

    Most researchers begin their analyses with apartheid, the sin among sins, the one cause that ripples into a hundred more, its legacy like some vestigial defect in Nelson Mandela’s 17-year-old rainbow nation. Violence, after all, was the medium of white domination: uprooting people from their homes, forcefully exploiting their labor, beating the disobedient into compliance. Torture and murder were deemed necessary to maintain the racist equilibrium, and in apartheid’s aftermath, there remains not only the pent-up rage of the once-subjugated but also the perverse effect the system’s wicked strictures had on family life, education and labor markets.

    South Africa, a nation of 50 million, is the richest country on the continent but has one of the world’s lowest levels of employment. Most of the jobless have never worked, and a third of the employed earn less than $150 a month. Whites, who make up 9 percent of the population, have an average income seven times that of blacks. But poverty is not necessarily a predictor of crime, and while apartheid was horrific, other nations have suffered long histories of oppression, writes the South African criminologist Antony Altbeker, whose book “A Country at War With Itself” examines the common explanations for the nation’s violent bent and finds most of them pertinent but none entirely adequate. However you weigh the impact of apartheid, he asserts, violent behavior has somehow become a “cultural phenomenon” for a significant minority of young men, “an expression of their selfhood.” Violence now feeds off its own energy.

    To protect themselves, wealthy South Africans compete in an arms race with their neighbors, the elevated walls of one leading to even higher walls next door. One in 14 newly created jobs is for a security guard.

    But it is the impoverished who are most vulnerable to crime, poor people living in the midst of poor criminals. Under apartheid, the police were enforcers of state repression, and they are yet to be fully trusted as protectors. Mob justice is most likely to occur in the nation’s informal settlements. In Diepsloot, where a sea of shanties covers much of the expanse, police officers are often derided as bunglers at best and crooks at worst. Courthouses are a journey away, and the due process of law seems an impractical ideal. Many of the poor, living without electricity and using communal taps and toilets, feel the necessity — the burden — to police themselves. I was commonly told: The more horrible the death of a criminal, the better it deters the rest.

    Golden and I had worked on an earlier article about mob justice. We both found these events enormously disturbing, but I had never seen vigilantes actually complete their ruthless mission. Now, viewing the video, I was flooded with discomfiting emotions: horror, disgust, sadness, pity. These responses weren’t going to be momentary. By watching, I had unwittingly made an agreement with myself. Farai’s gruesome death was going to endure in my memory, and I would have to answer certain questions about what I saw or leave them to trouble me forever. I was obligated now, to myself and to him.

    I asked Golden: “Who was this guy? Had he really done anything wrong?”

    The next afternoon, I met three of Farai’s four brothers, each a working man, all living in Extension 2. “Why weren’t you with him?” their mother cried when they phoned Zimbabwe with the news. This was a terrible question, and they were asking it of themselves, not because they could have saved Farai from the mob but because they felt vaguely ashamed they had not died at his side.

    The brothers — Clemence, James and Washington — were unfailingly polite and kept thanking me for my interest. Clemence, the eldest, spoke the best English. He was able to afford an $80-a-month room in a U-shaped building away from the teeming shacks. “Even now I am not believing,” he said as we sat on a bed that took up nearly the entire space of his home. “It’s hard to find someone who can really explain what happened, because people are afraid, and I am powerless, I am weak, I am exhausted.”

    The brothers were very close, and Clemence, who is 31, was already busy with the logistics of getting Farai’s body back to their home village, Mukukuzi, in Zimbabwe’s rural southeast. He works in the office of a tourism company and said his boss agreed to lend him a vehicle. Still, he would also need to rent a trailer, buy a coffin, pay the mortuary fees, feed people at the funeral. It would cost a daunting $1,000 or more.

    Money, of course, is what brought the brothers to South Africa in the first place, Clemence coming in 1998 and the others following one by one; Farai arrived five years ago. Neighboring Zimbabwe was once the breadbasket of the region, but its leader for the past three decades, the 87-year-old Robert Mugabe, grew more eccentric and tyrannical over time, pushing the country into calamity. Millions fled — as much as a quarter of Zimbabwe’s population — as the food supply dwindled and inflation evaporated people’s savings.

    South Africa is the main terminus of the Zimbabwean diaspora, and some of its own poor despise these newcomers for accepting wages so meager that they bring down the pay scale for everyone. In May 2008, paroxysms of anti-immigrant violence erupted in one South African city after another. Farai and one of his brothers retreated to Mukukuzi until the bloodletting passed. At least 60 people, many of them Zimbabweans, were murdered by mobs. Some 35,000 foreigners were hounded from their homes.

    Farai was among those immigrants who landed decent jobs. He worked as a house painter, earning $100 a week. His boss, Don Myburgh, is a cantankerous old man with unruly white hair. “He pinched paint from me, and I should have fired the bastard,” he said of his recently murdered employee. As we talked, he produced a green notebook that supposedly contained Farai’s penitent confessions of thievery, but while I found an admission about “talking back,” the other entries were merely ungrammatical descriptions of disputes with his boss. One read: “I say to him why you grab me like this remembering is not time for apartheid. He shout me. And after that he chase me.” I asked Myburgh why he continued to employ Farai for two and a half years. “With these blokes, one is as bad as another,” he said.

    Farai was married, and last August his wife, Caroline, gave birth to their second child, a girl they named Nancy. The young family visited Mukukuzi around Christmas, but at the time Farai was deeply troubled. For weeks, he had been afflicted with nightmares in which he and his brother Washington were fighting enemies they could not recognize. According to their traditional beliefs, these dreams meant that someone might be practicing sorcery to bring them misfortune. “Witchcraft” was the English word the brothers used in explaining this. They did not mean to suggest anything of the occult, but rather the everyday possibility that one person could employ medicines and charms against another.

    Farai returned to Diepsloot on Dec. 29; his wife stayed behind with the children, planning to rejoin him later. Alarmed by the portentous dreams, Farai and Washington, who is 21, joined a church that accommodated both witchcraft and Jesus, trying to ward off harm under the guidance of two congregants said to be prophets. On Jan. 21, the day before he died, Farai spent the night under the stars, fasting and praying well into the predawn with a few dozen others of the church. The squatter camps of Diepsloot may be an unsightly conflux of scabrous shacks, but to the east, on the other side of a busy avenue, lie the rolling hills of the open veldt. Worshipers gather there in the bush, the ritual boundaries of their outdoor churches demarcated with rocks on the ground.

    The two brothers, dressed in white robes, danced and chanted in a marathon of devotionals, returning to Diepsloot just before sunup. Farai napped in his shack, a 7-by-10-foot hovel, its space cramped with a lumpy bed, a tiny table, old paint cans used to store water and clothes piled in a wicker basket. The only light came from a long white candle stuck into a Coke bottle.

    When he awakened at about 9 a.m., he cooked porridge on a paraffin-fired hot plate. Washington came by to share this breakfast, and the two brothers walked back toward the main road, where dozens of peddlers sell old clothes under the ragged canopies of crude shelters. The brothers then split up. Washington went to watch pro wrestling in a tavern. Farai headed back toward his shack in Extension 2, and along the way he met Precious Mbedzi, a Zimbabwean friend. He asked her if she would do his laundry, she said, and the two haggled about price without agreeing. They heard the noise of the mob, and each took a separate path toward the summoning smoke.

    Precious recalled, “When they were beating him, I ran over and said, ‘This man is not a criminal,’ and they asked me, ‘Do you want to die with him?’ ”

    Two days later, the police arrested seven suspects in connection with the deaths of Farai Kujirichita and Patries Zonke, an earlier victim of mob justice who died a horrible death at the hands of a different mob. The killings occurred about 11 hours apart, and Golden Mtika’s story about them made it to Page 1 of The Daily Sun. Another newspaper, The Star, sent a reporter to do a follow-up. While he was collecting information, a protest broke out against the police. Some of the angry demonstrators viewed the arrests as an affront to well-intentioned vigilantes; others simply believed that the cops had rounded up the wrong people. The Star’s headline atop the front page was a hyperventilating declaration, “Anarchy in Diepsloot.”

    In my experience, things were hardly more lawless than usual. The streets were ordinarily safe during the day and extraordinarily dangerous at night. But the gust of publicity provoked a visit from a member of the provincial cabinet, Faith Mazibuko, who spoke in a tent meeting. An empathetic speaker, she tried to win over the huge crowd by acknowledging a fair list of the settlement’s complaints about crime: the police never patrol on foot; they don’t respond for hours; they prefer bribes to arrests. She was amply applauded until she bravely condemned mob justice, citing the Ten Commandments as a supporting text. Surely many people agreed with her, but from then on the boos and catcalls prevailed. Living in squalor was bad enough; living unprotected from crime was unbearable. When people were asked to step forward with comments, the biggest ovation went to a man misquoting Jesus about “an eye for an eye.”

    Whatever the police’s faults, for a time they energetically pursued Farai’s killers. Golden had not shared his video with detectives. “If I’m seen as a snitch, I am a dead man in Diepsloot,” he told me. But the investigators were given another video, taken with a cellphone, and it provided much the same evidence. The seven initially arrested were released, but four others — two of them teenagers — were taken into custody and charged with murder.

    The new suspects did not include the three main assailants seen in the video. These men ran off as soon as the police began poking around. But the young woman in the pink top, the one heaving a hunk of cement, was under arrest. Given her appearance in the footage, there was no point in a denial. “I hit him because I heard people saying he was a thug, and I wanted to participate,” she said flatly in one of our talks, her words translated from Tswana.

    Her name is Dipuo. She is 17, though she looks younger when wearing the white shirt and gray vest of her secondary-school uniform. She was regretful about being arrested; in fact, she collapsed from nervousness at one court hearing. But she was incurious about the man who died at her feet. “My friend’s mother said she’d heard the person killed was not the right one,” she told me, adding with a shrug, “I don’t really know.”

    Less remorseful yet was the other teenager, Siphiwe, the boy at the front of the mob. I interviewed him seven times, more than enough to know that he and the truth were only casual acquaintances. “How can I get him to stop lying?” I asked his mother, Oniccah. “Before he’ll tell the truth, he has to be beaten up,” she said with commiseration. Siphiwe is the oldest of her three sons, each from a different father. She said she long ago lost control of him, and he was now off in a delinquent world of ganja smoking, petty thievery and who knew what else. He rarely slept at home.

    The two teenagers were released into the custody of their mothers, and the expectation was that, as minors, they would submit to counseling and serve no prison time. But the other two suspects, Walter Baphadu and Evens Matamisa, were locked up in Pretoria. I had known these men for two years and had doubts about the extent of their involvement, if they took part at all. Vigilante justice was surely among their enthusiasms, but they were wily about it, seemingly too clever to kill a man as hundreds watched.

    Baphadu once headed Extension 1’s community-policing forum, a citizens’ group legally empowered to help the police. These organizations operated nationwide, though the way they interpreted their powers varied widely. In Diepsloot, people were as likely to report crimes to these vigilantes as to the police. Forum members rounded up suspects on their own, and while they sometimes turned the accused over to the law, they more often judged the cases themselves and meted out beatings, fines and banishments. These quasi-legal prerogatives could lead to temptation, and some groups used them as moneymaking schemes, operating as protection rackets or functioning as housing authorities, divvying up the shacks. Baphadu, 40, worked as a plasterer but considered his higher calling to be something like a volunteer sheriff. He and the police had a quarrelsome history. In 2009, he was arrested for his forum’s supposed excesses, which made him so angry that he quit his unofficial law-enforcement duties. One time he refused to intervene when a mob set a man on fire after compelling his “confession” by making him swallow sewer water. “If I see burning now, if I see raping, I look the other way,” he said huffily back then.

    Matamisa, 39, was another sort of vigilante entirely, a leader of a group in Extension 1 calling itself the Comrades. Members like to present themselves as servants of justice but were nothing more than hired muscle. People sometimes paid the Comrades to retrieve stolen property, and while they solicited fees to beat up thieves, they also accepted cash to throttle unfaithful wives or anyone else their customers found annoying. This work was not always lucrative, and the group accumulated unforgiving enemies as well as satisfied customers. Last year, Matamisa nearly died after being attacked with a lead pipe. I saw him soon after he was released from the hospital. The humbled bully pulled off his knit hat and parted his dreadlocks to show me the dents in his head.

    I visited the two men in jail. We spoke through a pane of thick glass, and they denied any part in Farai’s death. Baphadu, as usual, lamented the violence in society. “The killings, the rapings,” he said morosely, “I guess it’s coming to the end of the world.”

    Golden Mtika, too, was weary of crime. He wanted to live like most South Africans, far from the troubles of the shacks, and he was saving money to move his wife and their 5-year-old son away from Diepsloot. The police, the vigilantes, mere acquaintances: they phoned him at all hours to inform him of murders, rapes, even simple break-ins. This benefited him as a reporter and depleted him as a human being. “The victims all want me to help them, and I cannot help everyone,” he said.

    Our investigation of Farai’s death was itself exhausting. At first, we simply went to the squatter camp where he was killed and questioned those living nearby, each day widening the arc of our meander. The shacks are usually built from scraps of metal and wood and often sit one against another. Roofs are secured with the weight of large rocks or old tires. Heat thrives in the trapped indoor air, and with the weather sultry, people were often sitting outside. They told us assorted versions of what happened that Saturday, nearly all the accounts mistaken, some outlandishly so. People were not lying. But the scene had been chaotic. It was hard to see in that big a crowd, harder yet to hear. Many witnesses turned their backs to avoid the grisliest moments. In the aftermath, people repeated various story lines. As such things often go, even the most central of details mutated with each telling.

    In one version, Farai’s photo had been found in the burning shop, and that was how the mob knew he was guilty. In another, he was caught hiding in a large plastic tub and then admitted to everything. In yet another, he was slapped by a pregnant woman who fingered him as a thief or a rapist or both. There were alternate subplots to this account. In one, she was his jilted lover. In another, she was a prostitute, and he had shortchanged her by $2.

    My interest was less in who delivered the fatal blows than in why the mob settled on Farai as a target. Those with solid information were hard to locate and, when found, hesitant to talk. Within the week, Golden and I had become a marked pair: the tall, slender man from The Daily Sun and the bearded white guy. Perhaps a few dozen people threw a rock or landed a blow during the beating; the police already had made arrests and maybe they would make more, if the culprits could be found. Our inquiries were consequently a threat, and even many of those people willing to speak with us were frightened to be seen in our company.

    I recruited a small staff of go-betweens, and they would arrange for us to meet witnesses away from the squatter camp, and then we would all drive a distance from Diepsloot to talk. This went on each day for several weeks. For every interview, there were two no-shows; for every person who really knew something, there was a pretender who did not.

    On occasion when I met with people, they expressed sorrow that the mob turned so violent; they would be appalled to learn that Farai was at church on the night he was supposedly marauding.

    “From church?” Katlego Matheta, 29, a security guard, said softly. “It means he was a Christian. That means they killed Jesus.”

    Farai’s family was also trying to understand how the mob arrived at its murderous presumptions. James Kujirichita, 29, was the most religious of the brothers. He was also the one most interested in retribution. “The spirit of God will take them; they will not live,” he said of those who attacked Farai. “What I am wishing is that everyone involved is going to be died.”

    He wanted to organize a special ceremony where prayers of vengeance would be recited. It was God’s intention, he said, that within 40 days all his brother’s murderers would perish. “They should be died violently, maybe hitted by a car,” he said.

    James is a man of peculiar intensity. He considers himself a prophet, a Christian with powers to communicate with the divine. When I told him that Dipuo, the 17-year-old girl, had collapsed in court out of fear, he concluded that a retaliatory spirit had entered her body.

    “God is already showing his greatness,” he said.

    Clemence, the oldest brother, also spoke angrily of the mob, about not only its blind rage but also its bizarre rejoicing: “Why do people celebrate like this? These are brutal killings. They learned it in old times, I think. They get it in their minds that a person’s life is not so important. Some people, when they see blood, they cry. Some people, when they see blood, they suck it.”

    I would visit with the Kujirichita brothers on Sunday afternoons, most often sitting in Clemence’s room and sharing a large bottle of Coca Cola. Once, we went to Farai’s church, taking off our shoes and socks and praying on our knees. God was asked to shield us from evil, or at least that is what I was told. The worshipers were Shonas, which is Zimbabwe’s dominant ethnic group, and Shona was the language being spoken.

    By then, weeks into the reporting, I had finally realized that the brothers saw Farai’s death through a different metaphysical lens than I did. Time and again, they repeated phrases that I dutifully wrote in my notebooks and then heedlessly forgot. They called the killing “bad luck”; it occurred “on a natural day of harm”; it was a result of “bad muthi,” bad medicine.

    Eventually my listening sharpened and my questions changed. To the brothers, the mob was only the instrument of their brother’s murder. The deeper cause lay in forces set loose in the rural depths of Zimbabwe by a powerful n’anga, a traditional healer. A “witch doctor,” they called him. His secret knowledge connected the world of the living with the world of the spirits. This man was their father, Wilson Kujirichita.

    By Shona tradition, when someone dies, whether young or old, the family seeks an underlying explanation for the death — not the medical cause but some person’s misconduct that may have prompted the failed health or accident. Christians are likely to ask a prophet for this information; African traditionalists visit a n’anga. These consultations often reveal that a relative of the deceased is to blame, and this person is then asked to make restitution, commonly livestock. Early last December, Washington’s wife gave birth to a boy, but the infant, seemingly healthy, cried without stop on his fifth day and died. A prophet said that Wilson, the baby’s grandfather, was responsible for the death, a notion that the n’anga rejected as an indignity. He refused to take part in any family discussions about the situation and warned his sons to drop the matter or face “consequences,” Clemence said.

    This was a momentous word choice, for when the mob killed Farai, the brothers considered it a fulfillment of their father’s threat. Before taking the body home for burial, they hurriedly sought out diviners of the truth, who confirmed that “problems within the family” led to the death. When I heard the story later, this seemed a flimsy corroboration of Wilson’s culpability. But the brothers were so wedded to their conclusions that on the very afternoon they arrived with the body in Mukukuzi, they attacked their father with fists and feet and a golf club. Villagers had to stop the assault to save the 57-year-old man’s life.

    Then, as if to assemble further proof of their father’s evildoing, the brothers visited additional prophets and n’angas, traveling hours to meet some of them. These other seers, I was told, also blamed Wilson, and the speculation was that the renowned healer, in possession of objects with arcane powers — perhaps even human body parts — had used this muthi to demonstrate his continuing hold over his family. “He’s a witch,” Clemence said firmly.

    To punish their father, the three brothers decided he must give up being a n’anga and dispose of all items used in his esoteric practices. The chastened patriarch reluctantly agreed, gathering his medicines, bones and animal hides and packing them into two sacks. The sons took Wilson 30 miles away, where the items were thrown into the swollen waters of the Sabi River to be carried through the remote scrublands and into Mozambique.

    The Kujirichita family grows corn and cotton on a small plot, but Wilson lives separately on a sugar plantation, where he works as a fumigation officer. I hired a Zimbabwean reporter to speak to him. (In April 2008, I was jailed for “committing journalism” while covering the Zimbabwean elections, and though a magistrate dismissed the case, the police threaten to rearrest me.) Wilson welcomed his visitor, confirming most of what his sons said but disputing his role as villain. His practice as a traditional healer was something he did as a sideline for two decades, and the extra earnings paid the school fees of the very children now berating him. He said he was suffering not only heartbreak over his son’s death but also the lingering pain of the physical beating, which left scars on his head, thighs and ankle.

    Wilson regretted the loss of his precious objects, the things that had allowed him to cure the sick: the black-and-white cloth he wore while contacting the spirit world; the bones and stones he customarily threw on a mat to fathom the meaning of events; the sheep fat he burned to chase away evil spirits; his beads and impala horns; his potions, herbs, roots, bark and snuff.

    His side of the story was far more mundane than the version inhabited by spirits. Envy lay at the core of his family’s rancor, he said. His wife and children began to “hate me with passion” after he took a second wife, a much younger woman who now received the benefits of his attentions.

    At age 17, the Republic of South Africa is still young enough to be appreciated as a marvel. The “skunk of the world,” as Nelson Mandela called the apartheid state, has been peacefully transformed into a constitutional democracy. There are disappointments, without question. The optimism of the early years — the glorious idea that South Africa would be an inspiration of enlightened leadership — has long faded. The frail, 92-year-old Mandela may remain the most beloved and respected man on the planet, but during its years in power, the organization he championed, the African National Congress, has become, in the words of the historian Martin Meredith, “just another grubby political party on the make.”

    Whatever the A.N.C.’s failings, the poor have benefited immensely: the government has built two and a half million homes, brought electricity to eight and a half million households, tripled the number of people with access to potable water. Progress would seem greater yet if the need wasn’t multiplying so fast. People are pouring into the cities, and since 1994 the number of informal settlements has increased tenfold to 2,700. More than 1.2 million families are living in shantytowns.

    In Diepsloot, nearly everyone is from elsewhere — another settlement, a village, a foreign country. Roots are shallow, and the most coveted possession is one of the 5,000 or so government-built R.D.P. houses — two bedrooms, a living room, a bathroom and a kitchen — connected to utilities. More than mere shelter, these homes sustain the beneficiary with an ongoing income. Owners normally build a cluster of shacks in their yards, renting to tenants who can then tap into the water pipes and electricity. In one swift step, the landless become landlords, the aristocrats of the shanties.

    I asked the mothers of the two accused teenagers if they had applied for R.D.P. houses. Oniccah said she put her name on the list in 1998; Rosina, Dipuo’s mom, had been waiting since 2004. This conversation was in February, after a court hearing. I had taken the teenagers and their mothers to lunch at the Spur Steak Ranch, a restaurant in the Fourways Mall, on my side of the rich-poor divide. Sirloins and spareribs were eaten, and the waitress had just served chocolate sundaes and brownies. Siphiwe was feeling jolly and boastful that afternoon. Farai, he said, was the second man he had been involved in killing. There was another act of mob justice a few weeks earlier, the comeuppance for “a boss of all the thieves,” someone else guilty of “stealing” Siphiwe’s cellphone.

    We were just getting acquainted then. Both mothers wrote the names of their children on my notepad to make sure the spellings were correct. When I first met Siphiwe, he denied knowing anything of Farai’s death. But now, with him jovially confessing, I felt unsettled. The dialogue was too cheery for what was being discussed. To change the mood, I pulled out a photograph of Farai, and there he was, a smiling man in a T-shirt, his head fashionably shaved, posing with his left hand resting on the hip of his white pants. Everyone at the table asked to see it. “He looks like a gentleman,” Dipuo said. She was surprised by his handsomeness; the only other time she had seen his face, it was swollen and bloody.

    Golden, who was translating, was eager to confront the young woman. “Dipuo, I don’t understand,” he said peevishly. “Why did you participate in mob justice?” She had no answer, and Rosina, usually too shy to speak up, was perturbed by her daughter’s apparent nonchalance and also upset with herself. She hadn’t been in Diepsloot that day. Dipuo “knows I don’t accept her going where people are fighting,” the mother said.

    At that early juncture in the case, it seemed justice was moving apace. The police were saying the trial could begin within the month. But since then not much has happened. Every subsequent court date has been a pro forma affair that led to a continuance. The prosecution says further investigation is required. And, of course, the main perpetrators still have not been caught.

    The case against Evens Matamisa was dropped. Witnesses had implicated a man with dreadlocks called Rasta. But Diepsloot has many men sporting that hairstyle, and a good many of them answer to that same nickname. Matamisa was merely the best known of the Rastas, and he was able to prove he was elsewhere that day. Murder charges remain against Walter Baphadu, however. Several witnesses, including Dipuo and Siphiwe, say he was at the scene, though no one claims that he actually struck a blow. When Baphadu was released on $150 bail, Golden and I tried to prod him into telling us what, if anything, he knew. At one point, I came on tough like a TV cop in the interrogation room. “We’ve got 13 witnesses who place you there,” I said, raising my voice and inflating the number. But Baphadu still denied he was present.

    Dipuo remains in school, staying late sometimes for an extra lesson in her favorite subject, accounting. Did she ever weep any private tears about what she had done? I don’t know. She has a boyfriend now, which pleases her unemployed mother. Dipuo’s father is long dead, and he had run out on the family anyway. Money is a constant point of stress, and the new boyfriend is in his late 20s and earns the steady wages of a miner. Sometimes they do not see him for a month or so, but when he does visit he usually leaves $100. “He is very generous,” Rosina says gratefully.

    Golden, too long a chronicler of dismal endings, predicts that this romance will lead to grief. “Dipuo will one day find a boyfriend her own age, and then the trouble begins,” he said. “The mother needs the money. The miner has made an investment. Someone will want to kill someone else.”

    One recent Sunday afternoon, we found Siphiwe wandering the streets. His mother threw him out of the house a few weeks before. He had been stealing from her for a long time, but his latest offense went too far, taking her boyfriend’s sneakers. Siphiwe was wearing the misbegotten shoes, one with an orange lace, the other green. But he was without his usual bravado. Estranged from his mother, he had no one to watch the calendar for him and had missed two court dates. Scared now that the police would jail him, he spoke in barely a whisper, his head encased in a brown hoodie. He looked boyish. He seemed tired. He needed a bath.

    It was early afternoon, and Golden was still dressed up from his morning at church, a solid pink tie knotted at his collar. The clothes seemed to enhance his rectitude. “You have to go to your mom on bended knee and ask for forgiveness,” he lectured. “The problem is you apologize, and then after a few days you do something else wrong, and she loses trust.” He paused to allow the words to penetrate. “In jail, you won’t like it, Siphiwe. It won’t be like Diepsloot, where you can run around.”

    I wasn’t sure I would ever see the teenager again. Once, he told me that killing Farai had been “fun.” It angered me, but I said nothing. Mob violence wasn’t mindless; there were minds at work, and these minds were self-justifying. The murder, of course, was hardly Siphiwe’s fault alone. Others also guided the mob, others confronted Farai and struck the deadlier blows. But he was the culprit conveniently at hand. A surge of harsh words rushed into my throat, but I managed to say only, “You shouldn’t have killed Farai.”

    The teenager had never shown any signs of feeling guilty, never a hint that he and his conscience were in a tug of war, and there were none now. English isn’t his first language, but even in a foreign tongue, his confidence seemed to resurface.

    “This is what we do,” he said defiantly, content with what the mob accomplished, pleased with his new shoes.

    Barry Bearak (bearak@nytimes.com) has spent the last three years as a bureau chief for southern Africa for The Times. Editor: Vera Titunik (v.titunik-MagGroup@nytimes.com).

     

     

     

     

    VIDEO: South Africa’s Best Foreign Language Oscar Submission “Life, Above All” Gets US Release Date! > Shadow and Act

    South Africa’s Best Foreign

    Language Oscar Submission

    “Life, Above All”

    Gets US Release Date!

    South Africa’s entry for this year’s Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category, titled, Life, Above All, will open in limited USA release next month, beginning on July 15th.

    Sony Pictures Classics acquired all North American distribution rights to it last summer, soon after it screened out of competition, in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, which was when we initially profiled it on Shadow And Act.

    At the time, no release date was given. But it now officially has a date! July 15th.

    Directed by Oliver Schmitz, the dramatic story goes… Just after the death of her newly-born baby sister, 12 years old Chanda learns of a rumor that spreads like wildfire through her small, dust-ridden village near Johannesburg. It destroys her family and forces her mother to flee. Sensing that the gossip stems from prejudice and superstition, Chanda leaves home and school in search of her mother and the truth.

    I’ll let you take a wild guess at what that “rumor” about her family is… but don’t let that spoil your appetite for the film, as it’s been well-received by critics who’ve since seen it, including our own MsWOO who saw it at the London Film Festival . You can read her thoughtful review HERE.

    Life, Above All stars first-time-actress Khomotso Manyaka. It’s based on the award-winning novel Chanda’s Secrets by Allan Stratton.

    I’m scheduled to see it next week Friday, the 10th, so I’ll share my own thoughts afterward, before its official July 15th theatrical release date.

    Check out the good-looking trailer below: