Friday Links
I, like a few others here at AIAC, update my Twitter feed regularly, but occasionally I have to put some of these things in blog post form at the end of the week.
* First up, performer Gonjasufi (above) is ‘super-hybrid.’ What’s that?
* I finally worked my way through design magazine Icon’s “Africa” issue from earlier this year. I know why not incorporate articles of Africa into every issue. Anyway, some good pieces on Burkina Faso architect Francis Kere and his South African counterpart Mokena Makeka, the area around Accra, Ghana’s new, “first, Western-style” shopping mall, Cape Town, urban studies professor Edgar Pieterse on “The African City,” and predictably the cellphone “revolution,” among others.
* “The Economist” has an audio post on “doing business in Johannesburg.” Someone sounding like Dame Edna Everage delivers the following nuggets: “… the white business community is very punctual,” the locals have strange greeting habits, that race is a “highly sensitive issue,” not “… bring[ing] up race as a topic straightaway,” about black “front men.” Lord. And of course, Johannesburg has a “nice, friendly atmosphere.”
* I did not want to waste anybody’s time by linking to or engaging with Dinesh D’Souza’s bottom-feeding nonsense (amplified by perennial US presidential candidate Newt Gingrich) about how Barack Obama, who met his father only once when he was a teen, inherited the older Obama’s “anti-colonialist Kenyan ideas.” We won’t bother with D’Souza. As for Newt, no surprises. As Texas in Africa reminded us a few months ago, Newt wrote a Ph.D. thesis on Belgium’s colonial education policy in the Congo. Without going to the Congo of course. Anyway, he concluded that colonialism was not such a bad thing after all, endorses paternalism.
* Journalist Alexis Okeowo (check out her great blog Exodus) has a piece in New York City literary magazine n+1 on the exploits of American TV evangelist Rick Warren in Rwanda, including a scheme to let Rwanda’s churches run its health care system. Oh, and Paul Kagame, life president of Rwanda, is down with Warren.
* In 1994 the American filmmaker Barbara Hammer was invited to the Out in South Africa Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (now called Out in Africa) to show her films. While there she taught people how to use video cameras and to record interview with each other. The results of those interviews became the film, “Out in South Africa.” That film, part of a Hammer retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, will be shown next Wednesday, September 22, at 4pm.
* The writer Alice Walker was in South Africa last week the deliver the 11th annual Steve Biko Memorial Lecture. You can watch the lecture in 6 parts on Youtube or read the transcript.
* Canada’s public radio program “The Current” has a series of radio programs, “Africa 50,” to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the political independence of a large part of the continent.
* Is Africa being looted? An online back-and-forth (archived here) about this question between political economist Patrick Bond and World Bank chief economist for Africa Shanta Devarajan, that started after a joint appearance on the same series.
* What’s Travelers’ Insurance got to do with wildlife? I suppose the point is to make you happy.
* South African arts journalist Sean O’Toole, in Frieze magazine, does short profiles of African artists who tackle prejudice and homophobia in their work.
* The MoMA exhibit “Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement” (October 3, 2010–January 3, 2011), presents eleven architectural projects on five continents “… that respond to localized needs in underserved communities.” It includes the Red Location Museum of Struggle, Port Elizabeth, South Africa and an elementary school built by architect Francis Kere in Burkina Faso (see earlier).
* What does it take be a Lagos Area Girl? The BBC knows.
* Franck Vogel photographs albinos in Tanzania.
* Look out for the work of Ghanaian-British painter, Lynette Yiadom Boaky, who “… makes portraits of fictional individuals, in a subdued palette inspired by Goya and Manet,” exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem from November 11 to March 13, 2011.
* Finally some self-promotion: Next Friday, September 24th, I will be part of a post-screening panel at New York University of Connie Field’s new film, “Selma to Soweto.” The 90-minute film is part of her 7-part documentary film series, “Have You Heard from Johannesburg” about the global struggle against Apartheid in South Africa. The time: 4:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. The Venue: Location: King Juan Carlos Center Screening Room, 53 Washington Square South in Greenwich Village.
