Here.

You couldn't miss this trailer in front of The New School's West 12th Street building in the West Village last week:

The Ghana ThinkTank Mobile Unit is a custom-built teardrop trailer designed to journey into the so-called “First World,” where it collects issues of concern from various local communities. The collected problems get sent to think tanks in Ghana, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Serbia, Iran, Afghanistan and/or other countries, where strategies are developed. The trailer then rolls back into the previously visited communities, this time as a workstation, cooperating with community members to apply the strategies received from this global network of think tanks—whether they seem impractical or brilliant—for effected communities. Ghana ThinkTank thus reverses the customary flow of knowhow from “developed” to “developing” countries in playful and provocative ways.

Photo Credit: Amanda Ghanooni

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usksH8B07do Ghostpoet (government name: Obaro Ejimiwe) raps "in the bluesy, introspective tradition of Tricky and Roots Manuva". The video for his latest, "Liiines," came out last month. I actually prefer the video, above, and song for "Survive It," better.

This is also Found Object, Number 15 as Uganda's dictator Idi Amin Dada on his short-lived 1977 TV sketch comedy show on the American network channel, NBC. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AG9OvVYvviQ

One of the photographs in a new series "Children of the Mountain" by academic and journalist Howard French. The  children live in and near the Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique. French was there reporting a story on sociobiologist E.O.Wilson (now 82 years old) for The Atlantic. Wilson is working with an American billionaire, Greg Carr, and the Mozambican government to save the Gorongosa National Park, under stress during the civil war (more like proxy war by Rhodesia, South Africa and the United States) from 1976 to 1992 and since then by poachers and "locals setting fires to clear fields for farming and to smoke out wild edibles, from bushmeat to insect delicacies." Here's French's description of the park:

... the only largely intact rain forest in all of Mozambique, a semitropical country roughly the size of Texas and Oklahoma. Solitary and broad-shouldered, the mountain rises more than 6,000 feet above the surrounding plains, providing a local climate unlike any other for hundreds of miles around it. It draws its water from the warm, moist winds that blow in from the nearby Indian Ocean, kissing its cool upper flanks and sustaining a unique ecosystem of rare orchids, mountain cypress, and rich bird life like the green-headed oriole, along with any number of other species yet to be identified.

Here's the full set.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7tlcTtbPEA I just came across these videos: Number 13 in a humorous--and of course very ethnocentric--series of Youtube videos made in the UK entitled "World Cup 2010 Most Shocking Moments."

Artist Simen Johan  photographs a variety of plants and animals in natural preserves, zoos, farms, museum dioramas or his own studio,then "resituates them digitally into new environments constructed from images photographed elsewhere."  The new work, Until the Kingdom Comes, is on display from November 3 to December 23 at the Yossi Millo Gallery in Manhattan. For Johan, the images, " ... depict an unsettling natural world hovering between reality, fantasy and nightmare. Johan merges traditional photographic and sculptural techniques with digital methods."

While some photographs in the series reference Biblical motifs, Johan says that his choice of title, Until the Kingdom Comes, “refers less to religious or natural kingdoms and more to the human fantasy that one day, in some way, life will come to a blissful resolution. …In a reality where understanding is not finite and in all probability never will be, I depict ‘living’ as an emotion-fueled experience, engulfed in uncertainty, desire and illusion.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f845_v41YFo Nerina Penzhorn likes this. That means I should too. The very young singer, Lianne La Havas, walks the streets of Paris and sings.

The more we learn about Rick Perry--whose campaign for US President seems to be stalling--the more we're not surprised. This week we learn that Perry grew up in an almost all-white rural area in Texas where many referred to slingshots as "niggershooters." And last week we learned of his hunting buddies:

After Rick Perry stopped visiting his N----rhead camp, he still went hunting—with N word–using rocker Ted Nugent and a hunter whose best trophies came from what he calls “The Dark Continent” of Africa.

Source. H/T: Brett.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB8729TcngY The full video of the Open Society Institute in Manhattan's panel discussion on contemporary Rwanda is now up. Its a little more than one and a half hours in length and worth watching. The panel consisted of academics and journalists Howard French and Stephen Smith, the former Kagame confidant Theogene Rudasingwa, and, finally, Rona Peligal, deputy director of the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch. Peligal acted as moderator. The themes that run through the presentation are: conversations about Rwanda are driven by two impulses (guilt and fear); the continuities between Kagame and predecessor regimes in Rwanda;  Kagame runs "a transformative authoritarian regime" (in Smith's words); and that ethnicity is at the heart of state politics as well as that of exile. The panelists conceded that Kagame can take credit for rebuilding Rwanda after the 1994 genocide, but some noted that  "Rwanda has always been a well organized country." Check out the outburst near the end of the panel by Tim Gallimore, former spokesperson for the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. He was listed as "a  discussant." Gallimore, who is also a consultant to the Rwandan government, accuses the panel of "a double standard" when it comes to Kagame and that the debate was "laced with poisonous rhetorical questions" and "unsubstantiated charges."

Africa Unsigned, an Amsterdam-based website uses crowd-funding--a method which allow people to pool their money online--to raise money for African and Africa diaspora musicians that you cannot  be found inrecord stores, commercial radio or local versions of MTV. Here's a link to a report by Voice of America producer Ricci Shryock with Rina Mushonga, a Dutch-Zimbabwean singer, and Pim Betist, the site's founder. Most of the site's visitors are from Europe and America, but now Africa Unsigned is targeting the continent. They're targeting mobile phone users. Kenya is the first target. [audio=http://riccimedia.com/photoblog/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/10-10-11-SHYROCK-AFRICA-MUSIC.mp3] * While you're at it check out Ricci's photography.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Da7K3e0M8SI The video for Kampala rappers Sylvester & Ssavoo's "Akaseera" comes with a laid back groove. I am still celebrating Ugandan independence. Via Silkamb.

By Abdourahman Waberi* Jeffrey Gettleman will not run the risk of being seen as ‘a nobody, a cockroach, a gangster,’ unlike the Somali pirates he depicted in the columns of the New York Times Magazine last weekend ('Taken by Pirates', Oct 5, 2011). In that particular piece of reportage, a totally asymmetric treatment is set from the beginning and accepted as an indisputable truth. The Chandlers, a British couple taken hostage by a group of ‘scruffy’ Somali pirates, are the real people the journalist is concerned about. But in the process, we the readers are, in our turn, taken  hostage by the journalist’s asymmetric  vision. We know from the very first lines that he is the omniscient eye and ear of the most powerful newspaper in the West and that he is reporting from the worst places on this earth. The fact of being there constitutes a badge of honour and a privilege he will not easily give up. Thanks to people like Jeffrey Gettleman, who continually shed their own kind of light on the tragedies and injustices in the Horn of Africa, my native region is routinely misrepresented. And the world has grown tired of the Somali story; Brave Jeffrey has not. He deserves my admiration. Better, I should thank him immensely for his courage and his dedication and praise his sense of observation. Even when the latter is more often than not approximate, if not fuzzy: ‘It wasn’t really a pretty night’, Rachel Chandler recalled… 'There was no moon, and the stars were shrouded by clouds… Within seconds, eight scruffy Somali men hoisted themselves aboard’. Jeffrey Gettleman seems to be a failed novelist (mentors’ list may include Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene). Having read and re-read his piece, I am tempted to give him some old-fashioned advice : ‘Shoemaker, stick to thy last… Better do supremely well one thing than many badly!’ * The piece was accompanied by this set of illustrations. This is Abdourahman Waberi's second post for AIAC.

http://youtu.be/igaiypLKVEE ... To New York City? By Ghanaian crooner M3NSA off his new album.

Here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrQGVqC8TJI "Judge Hatchett Discovers She Is Nigerian." She even does accents. The Hausa gets mangled in the process. So does Benin. * Found Objects is back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdh32XjNWTE The video for French-Ghanaian female MC, Lousika's "No Bee Aloo" says more about where popular culture (that stuff on TV and commercial radio) is heading on the continent than about the music itself.

A striking piece from "State of The Nation," a new project of Zimbabwean-born, South African artist Kudzanai Chiurai (remember him) which "focus[es] on youth culture and proposes a fresh way of looking at the socio-politics of our continent by juxtaposing the past and the present."  For the show in Johannesburg-- curated by Melissa Mboweni--Chiurai is collaborating with photographer Jurie Potgeiter and singers Thandiswa Mazwai and Zaki Ibrahim. Information

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2oymHHyV1M Spotted on Youtube yesterday before it went viral: A South African professional mountain biker is taken out by a buck at a game reserve in South Africa.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G34pW5S9Rx4 Mos Def (or Yasiin Bey) is on a roll. First the Stephen Colbert performance with Talib Kweli. Now this footage of him performing 3 songs Saturday with the Brooklyn Philharmonic in Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn: his own songs "Life in Marvelous Times" (video above), and  "Revelations" and, finally, a clip of his performance of "Coming Together," written by the American composer Frederic Rzewski a month before the 1971 Attica prison uprising. Sources: deebeezy.