Continent emerges as the focus of international spying, with South Africa becoming a regional powerhouse and communications hub
Seumas Milne and Ewen MacAskill
The Guardian - Tuesday 24 February 2015
Africa emerges as the 21st century theatre of espionage, with South Africa
as its gateway, in the cache of secret intelligence documents and
cables seen by the Guardian. “Africa is now the El Dorado of espionage,”
said one serving foreign intelligence officer.
The continent has increasingly become the focus of international
spying as the battle for its resources has intensified, China’s economic
role has grown dramatically, and the US and other western states have
rapidly expanded their military presence and operations in a new
international struggle for Africa.
READ MORE.....
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
Saturday, February 21, 2015
1937-1938 Portraits of African-American former slaves
By Chris Wild
MASHABLE - JAN 31, 2015
We honor 150 years since the abolition of slavery in the United States. On Jan. 31, 1865, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the country.
These portraits of black American men and women who had been slaves were taken in the late 1930s as part of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) of the Work Progress Administration (WPA). They are part of a group of 500, together with more than 2,000 first-person accounts of the experience of being a slave.
The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) operated during the Great Depression of the 1930s and tasked unemployed writers cross the USA with collecting the life stories of Americans across society. This particular set of pictures and testimonies was published in 1941 as the seventeen-volume "Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves."
READ MORE.....
MASHABLE - JAN 31, 2015
We honor 150 years since the abolition of slavery in the United States. On Jan. 31, 1865, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the country.
These portraits of black American men and women who had been slaves were taken in the late 1930s as part of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) of the Work Progress Administration (WPA). They are part of a group of 500, together with more than 2,000 first-person accounts of the experience of being a slave.
The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) operated during the Great Depression of the 1930s and tasked unemployed writers cross the USA with collecting the life stories of Americans across society. This particular set of pictures and testimonies was published in 1941 as the seventeen-volume "Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves."
READ MORE.....
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Renzo Martens – the artist who wants to gentrify the jungle
It is one of the poorest parts of the planet, a place where workers earn $1 a day – which is why, according to one artist, the plantations of eastern Congo really need an art gallery
Stuart Jeffries
The Guardian - Tuesday 16 December 2014
Next month, Renzo Martens, along with his wife, son and baby daughter, are going to live in eastern Congo so he can continue his five-year plan to gentrify the jungle. The 41-year-old Dutch artist is trying to create an arts scene in one of the most impoverished parts of the world.
It sounds like a sick joke. “It’s not,” Martens tells me when we meet in London. “I mean, it’s funny to call your programme a central African gentrification programme, but I’m basically putting a white cube in the forest to see what it does.”
There’s a little more to it than that. Martens is artistic director of an outfit called the Institute for Human Activities, which has helped artists from Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, establish a critical curriculum akin to a foundation arts course for plantation workers. The Congolese Plantation Workers Art League has now started to organise exhibitions of self-portraits. At workshops, workers’ children drew what they imagined their futures would be. “Most of these kids had never had a pencil in their hands before,” he says.
READ MORE......
Stuart Jeffries
The Guardian - Tuesday 16 December 2014
Next month, Renzo Martens, along with his wife, son and baby daughter, are going to live in eastern Congo so he can continue his five-year plan to gentrify the jungle. The 41-year-old Dutch artist is trying to create an arts scene in one of the most impoverished parts of the world.
It sounds like a sick joke. “It’s not,” Martens tells me when we meet in London. “I mean, it’s funny to call your programme a central African gentrification programme, but I’m basically putting a white cube in the forest to see what it does.”
There’s a little more to it than that. Martens is artistic director of an outfit called the Institute for Human Activities, which has helped artists from Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, establish a critical curriculum akin to a foundation arts course for plantation workers. The Congolese Plantation Workers Art League has now started to organise exhibitions of self-portraits. At workshops, workers’ children drew what they imagined their futures would be. “Most of these kids had never had a pencil in their hands before,” he says.
READ MORE......
Sunday, February 8, 2015
African Development Successes
Success Story from Liberia: Dr. Rajesh Panjabi’s Last Mile Health
Success Story from Uganda: Andrew Rugasira’s Good African Coffee
Success Story from Cameroon: Samuel Eto’o Gives Children a Chance
Success Story from Somalia: Fatima Jibrell’s Conservation Initiatives
Success Story from Nigeria: Nwankwo Kanu’s Heart Foundation
Success Story from South Sudan: John Dau’s ‘Lost Boys’ Clinic
Success Stories from Africa: Judith Rodin’s Books
READ MORE........
Success Story from Uganda: Andrew Rugasira’s Good African Coffee
Success Story from Cameroon: Samuel Eto’o Gives Children a Chance
Success Story from Somalia: Fatima Jibrell’s Conservation Initiatives
Success Story from Nigeria: Nwankwo Kanu’s Heart Foundation
Success Story from South Sudan: John Dau’s ‘Lost Boys’ Clinic
Success Stories from Africa: Judith Rodin’s Books
READ MORE........
The black experience: portraits of a community
A fascinating collaboration between the V&A and the Black Cultural Archive charts the changing lives of black people in Britain and tells us much about who we are today
Matthew Ryder
THE GUARDIAN - Saturday 7 February 2015
In 1988, I bumped into a friend walking back from a lecture. “I didn’t see you at the black students’ group,” I said.
“It’s just… all we ever seem to talk about is racism,” she said, sighing. I was immediately filled with undergraduate indignation: “What do you mean ‘all’? It’s important!”
“I know,” she replied, “but isn’t there more to being black and British than that?”
It’s a question I have been trying to answer ever since. And it lies at the heart of the exhibition Staying Power: Photographs of Black British Experience 1950s-1990s, which is the culmination of a seven-year collaboration between the V&A and Brixton’s Black Cultural Archive. Over the two locations it features 118 images by 17 artists. The exhibition shares the name of the famous book by Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). But while Fryer’s landmark work was largely concerned with slavery, colonialism, immigration and racism, this exhibition is different. Racism, insofar as it features, is merely one element of the historic backdrop. Instead the focus is on images of the ordinary lives of black Britons – those of African and Caribbean heritage – in the UK. Like the conversation with my friend back in 1988, it makes you question what it is to be black and British.
READ MORE.....
Matthew Ryder
THE GUARDIAN - Saturday 7 February 2015
In 1988, I bumped into a friend walking back from a lecture. “I didn’t see you at the black students’ group,” I said.
“It’s just… all we ever seem to talk about is racism,” she said, sighing. I was immediately filled with undergraduate indignation: “What do you mean ‘all’? It’s important!”
“I know,” she replied, “but isn’t there more to being black and British than that?”
It’s a question I have been trying to answer ever since. And it lies at the heart of the exhibition Staying Power: Photographs of Black British Experience 1950s-1990s, which is the culmination of a seven-year collaboration between the V&A and Brixton’s Black Cultural Archive. Over the two locations it features 118 images by 17 artists. The exhibition shares the name of the famous book by Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). But while Fryer’s landmark work was largely concerned with slavery, colonialism, immigration and racism, this exhibition is different. Racism, insofar as it features, is merely one element of the historic backdrop. Instead the focus is on images of the ordinary lives of black Britons – those of African and Caribbean heritage – in the UK. Like the conversation with my friend back in 1988, it makes you question what it is to be black and British.
READ MORE.....
Don’t Be Like That Does black culture need to be reformed?
By Kelefa Sanneh
The New Yorker - February 9, 2015 Issue
It was just after eight o’clock on a November night when Robert McCulloch, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County, announced that a grand jury would not be returning an indictment in the police killing of Michael Brown, who was eighteen, unarmed, and African-American. About an hour later and eight hundred miles away, President Obama delivered a short and sober speech designed to function as an anti-inflammatory. He praised police officers while urging them to “show care and restraint” when confronting protesters. He said that “communities of color” had “real issues” with law enforcement, but reminded disappointed Missourians that Brown’s mother and father had asked for peace. “Michael Brown’s parents have lost more than anyone,” he said. “We should be honoring their wishes.”
Even as he mentioned Brown’s parents, Obama was careful not to invoke Brown himself, who had become a polarizing figure. To the protesters who chanted, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!,” Brown was a symbol of the young African-American man as victim—the chant referred to the claim that Brown was surrendering, with his hands up, when he was killed. Critics of the protest movement were more likely to bring up the video, taken in the fifteen minutes before Brown’s death, that appeared to show him stealing cigarillos from a convenience store and then shoving and intimidating the worker who tried to stop him—the victim was also, it seemed, a perpetrator.
READ MORE.....
The New Yorker - February 9, 2015 Issue
It was just after eight o’clock on a November night when Robert McCulloch, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County, announced that a grand jury would not be returning an indictment in the police killing of Michael Brown, who was eighteen, unarmed, and African-American. About an hour later and eight hundred miles away, President Obama delivered a short and sober speech designed to function as an anti-inflammatory. He praised police officers while urging them to “show care and restraint” when confronting protesters. He said that “communities of color” had “real issues” with law enforcement, but reminded disappointed Missourians that Brown’s mother and father had asked for peace. “Michael Brown’s parents have lost more than anyone,” he said. “We should be honoring their wishes.”
Even as he mentioned Brown’s parents, Obama was careful not to invoke Brown himself, who had become a polarizing figure. To the protesters who chanted, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!,” Brown was a symbol of the young African-American man as victim—the chant referred to the claim that Brown was surrendering, with his hands up, when he was killed. Critics of the protest movement were more likely to bring up the video, taken in the fifteen minutes before Brown’s death, that appeared to show him stealing cigarillos from a convenience store and then shoving and intimidating the worker who tried to stop him—the victim was also, it seemed, a perpetrator.
READ MORE.....
Thursday, February 5, 2015
Remembering Stuart Hall: Stuart Hall’s South African Legacy
By Sean Jacobs
Social Text - August 8th, 2014
My early university education at the then-very white University of Cape Town coincided with South Africa’s transition from Apartheid to democracy. Stuart Hall didn’t feature much, despite the fact, as I would later learn, I was indirectly influenced by his ideas about identity politics, language, culture, race, and social movements. For example, I remember writing a seminar paper as a final year student at the University of Cape Town about “black Afrikaans”—a movement of coloured (STET) poets and educators in Cape Town and the Cape West Coast allied to teacher unions and the United Democratic Front who sought to counter white histories of Afrikaans by emphasizing its hybrid origins in a slave economy and encouraged use of spoken Afrikaans in classroom settings. Nevertheless, culture (or studying culture) was hardly a priority for my late-1980s/early-1990s cohort—South Africa then was in the midst of a violent transition; protest movements and their academic allies were tactically focused on electoral power and state institutions. Strategic considerations, too, pushed us to eschew analyses of race in favor of class. Lynette Steenveld, a media scholar at Rhodes University in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, wrote to me that “… identity was a problem because of the Apartheid state’s racialization of identity and its essentialist stance on culture. So the one progressive move was to eschew identity and focus on class.” That said, there is ample evidence that South African scholars, students and media activists were very familiar with Hall’s work in that period. In 1980s Apartheid South Africa, academics who studied culture, came at it from two diametrically opposed schools: on one side a more traditional behavioralist approach (the Afrikaans “communications studies”) and on the other, leftist /political economy approaches to culture (reflecting dominant positions in the liberation movement and old school Marxist influences).
READ MORE.....
Social Text - August 8th, 2014
My early university education at the then-very white University of Cape Town coincided with South Africa’s transition from Apartheid to democracy. Stuart Hall didn’t feature much, despite the fact, as I would later learn, I was indirectly influenced by his ideas about identity politics, language, culture, race, and social movements. For example, I remember writing a seminar paper as a final year student at the University of Cape Town about “black Afrikaans”—a movement of coloured (STET) poets and educators in Cape Town and the Cape West Coast allied to teacher unions and the United Democratic Front who sought to counter white histories of Afrikaans by emphasizing its hybrid origins in a slave economy and encouraged use of spoken Afrikaans in classroom settings. Nevertheless, culture (or studying culture) was hardly a priority for my late-1980s/early-1990s cohort—South Africa then was in the midst of a violent transition; protest movements and their academic allies were tactically focused on electoral power and state institutions. Strategic considerations, too, pushed us to eschew analyses of race in favor of class. Lynette Steenveld, a media scholar at Rhodes University in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, wrote to me that “… identity was a problem because of the Apartheid state’s racialization of identity and its essentialist stance on culture. So the one progressive move was to eschew identity and focus on class.” That said, there is ample evidence that South African scholars, students and media activists were very familiar with Hall’s work in that period. In 1980s Apartheid South Africa, academics who studied culture, came at it from two diametrically opposed schools: on one side a more traditional behavioralist approach (the Afrikaans “communications studies”) and on the other, leftist /political economy approaches to culture (reflecting dominant positions in the liberation movement and old school Marxist influences).
READ MORE.....
Bringing Fanon's "Concerning Violence" to Film
By Alnoor Ladha
Truthout | Interview - Thursday, 05 February 2015
Activist and author Alnoor Ladha interviews Joslyn Barnes, co-producer of Göran Hugo Olsson's film, Concerning Violence, which explores African liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s.
Alnoor Ladha: I recently watched Concerning Violence and was in awe during the entire duration of the film. What is it about these scenes from colonialism and imperialism that strike a chord at the deepest core of our humanity?
Joselyn Barnes: That they are true. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak says in her preface to the film, "The issue of colonization is a greed shared by humankind. No one is better than anyone; every generation must be trained in the practice of freedom, caring for others, as did [Frantz] Fanon, and that is what colonization stops. Within the greed for capital formation, colonization allows already existing ignorant racism to spread the markets in the name of civilization or modernization or globalization, as it does today. This film captures the tragedy of the moment when the very poor are convinced in the name of a nation, that is going to reject it once it is established on its own two feet, to offer themselves up for a violent killing. Fanon insists that the tragedy is that the very poor is reduced to violence, because there is no other response possible to an absolute absence of response and an absolute exercise of legitimized violence from the colonizers."
Spivak's preface was indeed powerful. And poignant. One could argue, and indeed we do, that our current brand of capitalism, neoliberalism, is simply a continuation of colonialism. That the logic of capital requires extraction, exploitation, violence etc. Would you agree with this line of thinking?
Decolonization, as Fanon pointed out, needs to work in both directions. The colonized and the colonizer both must be decolonized.
READ MORE....
Truthout | Interview - Thursday, 05 February 2015
Activist and author Alnoor Ladha interviews Joslyn Barnes, co-producer of Göran Hugo Olsson's film, Concerning Violence, which explores African liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s.
Alnoor Ladha: I recently watched Concerning Violence and was in awe during the entire duration of the film. What is it about these scenes from colonialism and imperialism that strike a chord at the deepest core of our humanity?
Joselyn Barnes: That they are true. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak says in her preface to the film, "The issue of colonization is a greed shared by humankind. No one is better than anyone; every generation must be trained in the practice of freedom, caring for others, as did [Frantz] Fanon, and that is what colonization stops. Within the greed for capital formation, colonization allows already existing ignorant racism to spread the markets in the name of civilization or modernization or globalization, as it does today. This film captures the tragedy of the moment when the very poor are convinced in the name of a nation, that is going to reject it once it is established on its own two feet, to offer themselves up for a violent killing. Fanon insists that the tragedy is that the very poor is reduced to violence, because there is no other response possible to an absolute absence of response and an absolute exercise of legitimized violence from the colonizers."
Spivak's preface was indeed powerful. And poignant. One could argue, and indeed we do, that our current brand of capitalism, neoliberalism, is simply a continuation of colonialism. That the logic of capital requires extraction, exploitation, violence etc. Would you agree with this line of thinking?
Decolonization, as Fanon pointed out, needs to work in both directions. The colonized and the colonizer both must be decolonized.
READ MORE....
BLACK HISTORY: Black Women who were Lynched in America
Black Women who were Lynched in America
http://www.funkydineva.com/black-history-black-women-who-were-lynched-in-america/
The Waco Horror: A Report on a Lynching
http://www2.uncp.edu/home/berrys/courses/hist362/hist362_docs_waco_lynching.pdf
http://www.funkydineva.com/black-history-black-women-who-were-lynched-in-america/
The Waco Horror: A Report on a Lynching
http://www2.uncp.edu/home/berrys/courses/hist362/hist362_docs_waco_lynching.pdf
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