Vodou in Brooklyn: Audio slideshow featuring the images and commentary of photojournalist Stephanie Keith who has documented a series of vodou parties involving Haitian immigrants who live in New York City. [via the never boring boing boing]
FASHION: Photos from 2009 Swahili Fashion Week held in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania this past November.
Screenshot from Swahili Fashion Week site
FASHION: Suno New York. Clothing line designed and developed in New York City’s Garment District and sewn in Kenya. Previous collections have been inspired by khanga cloth from the Kenya coast.
Screenshot from SunoNY site
FASHION: Jamhuri Wear: Nairobi Style. Speaking of NYC and Kenya, the incomparable Nomadic Wax recently featured Jamhuri Wear’s Jeffrey Kimathi whose street wear designs are inspired by both both places.
FILM: Yinka Shonibare: Threads of Art. Speaking of khangas, I was recently in Washington DC and saw the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African Art HUGE installation of Yinka Shonibare’s sculptures, photographs and video. If you are in the DC area, go see, it is well worth the visit. Narration is a little grad-school dissertation-y but does a good job of putting Shonibare’s work in cultural and political context for me after experiencing the art.
“Yinka Shonibare: Threads of Art”, Short Film by Ali Standish
To that effect, black female artists exhibiting more rebellious styles are consequently shunned by black audiences for being “too weird,” and ignored by other audiences as not being authentic rock musicians. This is where the Afro-punk movement comes in: a blindingly boisterous collection of musicians whose general style makes them “misfits of society.” However, in the eyes of many, their style of dress and sound simply makes them copycats of white musicians. In other words, with the argument that rock music originated with people of color, some believe that black females choosing to go the Afro-punk route are ultimately suppressing their African-American roots.
Where Are the Black Female Rock Stars? by Ayanna G. (via)
What makes me really root for black women who rock is their willingness to carve out their own niche, to follow their artistic muses despite all the expectations, private and public, of what a black woman should and shouldn’t do. Artists like Santi(o)gold, Janelle Monae, Meshell Ndege’ocello have achieved a measure of success and recognition, but most black female rock artists (random sample below) do their thing away from the attention and approval of mainstream of black culture.
CAROLYN “HONEYCHILD” COLEMAN: Kentucky-born, Brooklyn-based musician, composer, DJ.
“Thrash diva Honeychild brings to mind Miriam Makeba meeting Bjork in the Sex Pistol’s basement” (Greg Tate, VIBE).
(Bio).
Listen to “Never Goin’ Home” at the Bold As Love site
Honeychild Coleman performs with Apollo Heights at Afro-Punk 2009. © S. Kamau Mucoki
SHINGAI SHONIWA: Zimbabwe-born, UK-raised bassist and frontwoman for The Noisettes.
The band’s rapidly growing audience has a special significance for Ms. Shoniwa, who said her father wanted her to be an ambassador. “My private achievement is when I look out at the crowd and see a rainbow tribe, all different ages and colors,” she said. “Music should be about breaking down contrived divisions.”
from from New York Times profile on The Noisettes.
Noisettes: Never Forget You
JOYA BRAVO:
Singer/Songwriter/Rapper/Violinist, “JOYA BRAVO” is a New York native born in Queens and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. Conceived by Jamaican parents, Bravo’s upbringing was conservative, but musically charged. Bravo began playing the violin at age nine. Her success eventually earned her a chair in the Metropolitan Atlanta Youth Symphony Orchestra (a highly accredited youth ensemble in the southeast region).
(MySpace Bio)
Joya Bravo performs Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” on the violin
Joya Bravo performs at Afro-Punk 2009 © S. Kamau Mucoki
TAMAR KALI: Tamar Kali interviewed on NPR’s News and Notes in 2007 (audio)
Image of Peter Beard on the shores of Lake Turkana, 1965. From Guardian web site.
Controversial diarist, artist, photographer, writer, conservation activitist Peter Beard links my two worlds in New York City and Kenya. I always thought he was a Kenyan, a Kenya Cowboy to be sure but Kenyan none the less. Growing up, I remember his photography and the publicity it generated around wildlife conservation. The picture of him on the shores of Lake Rudolph (Lake Turkana to the kids) with half of his body in the mouth of a crocodile has always been part of my visual landscape.
In truth Peter Beard was born in these United States. He first developed an interest in Africa through visits to the Museum of Natural History in NYC. After graduating from Yale, he moved to Kenya working on game conservation, as documented in his book “The End of the Game“. The book featured the carcasses of mostly elephants that were dying in Tsavo from a combination of drought and overpopulation brought on by population pressures. Here in the US, Beard hung out with the art/social elite of NYC. Beard’s US base in Montauk (far east Long Island) was the place folks like Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, Richard Avedon, and Jackie Kennedy spent time. He also counted luminaries like Mick and Bianca Jagger, as well as Francis Bacon among his circle of friends.
Excerpts from “Peter Beard: Scrapbooks from Africa and Beyond”
Beard’s mixed media diaries and installations make use of a lot of the ephemera of Kenya’s past and present. From coins, to images of Presidents Kenyatta and Moi, from old photos of colonial Kenya to current images of the land, people and animals of Kenya, there is so much that that is part of my visual and cultural landscape. That his work was inspired by artists like Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon, and his fashion images were featured in Vogue and Vanity Fair, places him squarely in the art scene in the New York of the 60s and 70s.
What one cannot deny about the work of Beard is that he appreciates the raw beauty of Kenya and incorporates it in his art. He can see the beauty of a Turkana woman untouched by modernity and say that it is the same beauty as that of a Vogue model. That bold viewpoint, informed by his life-long love of nature and natural history, challenges the connotation of Africa as that “dark” and primitive place and links the notion of beauty in Westernized, modernized, removed-from-nature New York with that of Africa (and all nature in general).
Beard, after all, is the man who introduced the world to one Iman Abdulmajid, claiming he had discovered her while she was herding camels in the Northern Frontier District (North Eastern Province to the kids). Iman’s arrival on the beauty scene of the early 1970’s completely and irrevocably upended the notion of African beauty in the world of fashion, which is pretty revolutionary come to think of it.
Paradoxically, apart from the Maasai and Turkana who live in the wild (in nature), the rest of us modern Africans are “doomed” for our wanton reproduction and desire for progress. In the debate over the battle of man vs nature in the competition for resources, Beard falls firmly on the side of nature. This quote from the film “Peter Beard: Scrapbooks from Africa and Beyond” in the mid-90s seems to imply that diseases like AIDS are nature’s retribution for our profligacy:
“Coming to Kenya is coming to unspoiled, and unscrewed up by human beings (at least in the 50’s), … a frontier that extends right back in time to the Stone Age. Human beings are not going to stop, they don’t know when to stop. The only thing that can stop them are these diseases that everyone is spending all their money to fight. We are sucking the juices out of the earth to fight the diseases that nature wants us to have because we are too greedy and we have taken over too much.”
This is a position that is hard to abide considering that as post-colonial Africans we are free to screw up our environment (or not), without the moralizing of people whose ancestors destroyed their environment and big chunks of other peoples’ to boot. It is the romantic, outmoded “Out of Africa”-era fetishistic attraction to Africa the primordial and the repulsion at Africa the modern with its complex, intractable problems that makes it hard to have unalloyed admiration for Peter Beard’s art, as much as he has contributed ecologically, culturally and visually. However, I suspect that is the essence of the man, who while decrying the superficial nature of modernity, has no problem doing fashion shoots for magazines that embrace that same superficiality. The world is full of contradictions.
Photos by your humble servant
PHOTOGRAPHY: Pictures taken from the not so recent African Day Parade. The main parade was rained out but folks still turned out on 116th St. for a soggy, abbreviated celebration.
Screenshot of photo essay: “Halloween in Harlem” by Amy Stein. © A. Stein
PHOTOGRAPHY: Speaking of Harlem; Amy Stein: Halloween in Harlem. One of my favorite photo essays. One of my favorite photographers.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Critique: WHITE PEOPLE ARE LOOKING AT YOU BY SEBASTIEN BONCY. Speaking of Amy Stein she recently posted some images from South African photographer Pieter Hugo’s series on Nollywood. The post led to a response by Sebastien Boncy (who happens to Haitian). Among other things he contends that the way Hugo portrays his subjects is no different from a long history of colonial photography (and current documentary/war photography), whose aim was to make brown skinned subjects “the other”, somehow not human in the same way as Westerners.
Snip:
MAYBE IT HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE WAY HUGO AND HIS DEFENDERS ARE SO QUICK TO DISMISS OR MINIMIZE CONCERNS ABOUT THE RACIAL CONTEXT THAT THIS WORK TRAVELS IN. HUGO HIMSELF DENIES ANY CLAIMS OF OTHERING BLACK AFRICANS AND TURNS THE TABLE ON HIS ACCUSERS BY CALLING THEM “CONDESCENDING” “WHITE LIBERALS” THAT DENY HIS SUBJECTS ANY REAL AGENCY IN THE FABRICATION OF THESE IMAGES, BUT WE KNOW THAT PERMISSION DURING PROCESS DOES NOT MEAN CONTROL OR EVEN APPROVAL OVER THE FINAL PRODUCT. LARRY CLARK AND DIANE ARBUS HAD PERMISSION, YET THE ETHICS OF THEIR WORK IS ALWAYS FRONT AND CENTER OF ANY SERIOUS DISCUSSION ABOUT THEIR LEGACY. IT IS NOT JUST ABOUT WHAT GOES INTO THE WORK, IT IS ALSO IMPORTANT TO CONSIDER WHERE IT’S HEADED, WHERE IT COMES FROM AND WHO’S DOING THE BUYING.
More …
HUGO IS WORLDWIDE. HE HAS A GALLERY IN SOUTH AFRICA, ONE IN THE USA, ONE IN ITALY, AND ONE IN THE NETHERLANDS. NONE OF THOSE COUNTRIES ARE KNOWN FOR THEIR HAPPY, WELL-INTEGRATED BLACK POPULATIONS. THE PEOPLE SIPPING WINE AND SPENDING MONEY AT MOST HUGO OPENINGS ARE HIGHLY UNLIKELY TO HAVE ANY SIGNIFICANT KNOWLEDGE OF NIGERIA OR EVEN FIRST-HAND KNOWLEDGE OF BEING PART OF THE BLACK-BEANS-FOR-DINNER-THREE-NIGHTS-IN-A-ROW CLUB. AND THESE PICTURES DO NOT OFFER ANY SORT OF EDUCATION FOR ONE UNFAMILIAR WITH NIGERIA. NOW IN A NIGERIAN GALLERY OR MAGAZINE THESE WOULD BE VERY DIFFERENT IMAGES: THE AUDIENCE WOULD BE ABLE TO DECIPHER AND DISCUSS THE REFERENCES, THE MEANINGS OF THE FICTIONS AND ICONS THAT ARE SPECIFIC TO NIGERIAN LIVES, NIGERIAN ECONOMIES, NIGERIAN HISTORIES, NIGERIAN RELIGIONS. WHAT IS AN ITALIAN ARISTOCRAT THINKING WHEN CONFRONTED WITH A MOOLIGNON VADER WITH HIS DICK OUT? I THINK IT IS BEAUTIFUL THAT HUGO TRUSTS THE AUDIENCE TO COME UP WITH COMPLEX AND INSIGHTFUL CONCLUSIONS, BUT I ALSO THINK IT IS NAIVE IF HE THINKS HE CAN JUST TOSS THESE PHOTOGRAPHS AT SOCIETIES THAT CONTINUE TO OPPRESS THEIR BLACK POPULATIONS AND NOT EXPECT NEGATIVE READINGS OF RACE TO STICK TO OR BE AMPLIFIED BY THE WORK.
Trailer for the Waris Dirie biographical film “Desert Flower”
FILM: Desert Flower. Waris Dirie’s book of her escape from Somalia, rise to supermodel superstar-dom and later fight against female genital mutilation gets the Hollywood treatment. Ethiopian Liya Kebede stars.
Screenshot from Suresh Natarjan’s portfolio site on the Behance Network
PHOTOGRAPHY: Suresh Natarajan: Tanishq Aarka. India meets Africa.
Back in February, the Jamaican Broadcasting Commission banned from the radio songs that reference “daggering” and other acts of sex and violence. The controversy set to the one-drop reggae of the “Indiscretions Riddim” (featured on Heatwave’s Early Warming mixtape).
Indiscretion: Konshens – Straight Forward (Indiscretions Riddim)
But tonite mi just wah dagga
I’m a straight forward kind of bredda
Mi know mi seh wi coulda just chill tonight
But when mi see your body
Girl mi cyah badda
Mi just wah dagga
And leff all a di talking fi tomorrow
Tonite I wanna make you my baby madda (wooooh)
Tonite mi just wah dagga
Censorship: Busy Signal – Beep (Indiscretions Riddim)
just through di beep(beep)
I and I cyaan speak
warn to freedom of speech
just through di beep(beep)
we nah express weself inna di song
and now di beep fulfill it
just through di beep(beep)
I and I cyaan talk
cyaan tell mi fans everything inna mi thoughts
dem only waan mi music play pon sidewalk
certain things dem nah bright cause
“The BLK JKS homecoming slideshow” audio slide show from the Mail & Guardian site.
Music: BLK JKS are back in the States to tour in support of the debut album “After Robots” out now. Rolling Stone has called them “Africa’s best new band” and artists to watch in 2009. Here is a sampler track from their new album:
Photographers I Like: Speaking of BLK JKS, you’ve probably seen a tall gentleman on/back stage at their shows taking pics of the performances. Said gentleman would be Kwesi Abbensetts, an art photographer who beautifully captures the creative vibe of Brooklyn. He posts his work on the photoblog “Spaceship George“.
Screenshot from “Oroma” a photo essay on Mike Schreiber’s site. © M. Schreiber
Photography, more: Mike Schreiber, Oroma Speaking of photographers, here as some cool images of Oroma Elewa the editor and creative force of nature behind the magazine/site pop’africana (which site I have been criminally silent about). Mike Schreiber is another Brooklyn-based photographer with great work, check out his esays on M.I.A. as well as other music portraits he has shot on his site.
Promise of Africa Collective at New York Fashion Week
FASHION: Speaking of fashion, herewith highlights from the Arise: Promise of Africa Collective Spring/Summer 2010 show at the recently completed New York Fashion Week. It featured togs by David Tlale, Eric Raisine, Tiffany Amber and Jewel by Lisa.
Democracy in Dakar Trailer from Nomadic Wax on Vimeo.
Politics: “Democracy in Dakar” The intersection of hip hop, activism and politics.
African Underground: Democracy in Dakar is a groundbreaking documentary film about hip-hop youth and politics in Dakar Senegal. The film follows rappers, DJs, journalists, professors and people on the street at the time before during and after the controversial 2007 presidential election in Senegal and examines hip-hop’s role on the political process. Originally shot as a seven part documentary mini-series released via the internet – the documentary bridges the gap between hip-hop activism, video journalism and documentary film and explores the role of youth and musical activism on the political process
“Nosotros los de la Saya” (“We of the Saya”) from AbNomad Media on Vimeo.
Human Rights: “Nosotros los de la Saya” (“We of the Saya”) Afro-Bolivians struggle for official recognition.
WE OF THE SAYA (pronounced “sigh-yah”) is a feature-length cultural and social documentary about the marginalized Afro-Bolivian community, and their struggle to achieve recognition as a legitimate ethnic group in the new Bolivian constitution. In addition to enriching culture and music, this film will present the rise of an Afro-Bolivian civil rights movement. “We of the Saya” is an inspirational story about the Afro-Bolivian movement (and all Afro-Descendant movements in a broader sense), and their resistance to suffer more years of continuous marginalization.This is an inspirational story about self-determination and seizing the moment in order to improve a community’s way of life.
(In Spanish with subtitles)
Trailer for the film “Thomas Sankara, Upright Man”, now publicly available at California Newsreel
California Newsreel makes library of African film available to the public
California Newsreel is making this collection of feature films available directly to consumers — for the first time in its history, the Library of African cinema will be widely available on DVD for $24.95 each.
The collection includes widely celebrated feature films such as Ousmane Sembene’s “Faat Kine” (2001), Djibril Diop Mambety’s “La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil”, also known as “the Little Girl Who Sold the Sun” (1999), Zézé Gamboa’s “The Hero” (2004), Newton Aduaka’s “Ezra” (2007), Moussa Sene Absa’s “Ça Twiste à Poponguine” (1993), Joseph Gai Ramaka’s “Karmen Gei” (2001) and Mohamed Camara’s “Dakan” (1997).
Bajah + The Dry Eye Crew performance in New York City © K. Mucoki
Bajah + The Dry Eye Crew are superstars in their native Sierra Leone. Although their sound traverses hip hop, reggae and dancehall and their shows are seriously festive; the former Sierra Leone war is not far away, tinging some of their music with a heightened sense of social awareness that comes from living with the effects that harrowing conflict.
Bajah + The Dry Eye Crew (in collaboration with DJ Gray) have released a FREE mixtape titled the “Kings of Salone,” ahead of their debut full length album slated for later this year/early next. Link to downloadable mixtape available from their site.
Bajah + The Dry Eye Crew performance in New York City © K. Mucoki
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