The graphic above accompanied an opinion piece by Frank Bruni on gay marriage in Portugal in Sunday's New York Times. South Africa is the only African country of 10 worldwide to have national laws extending marriage rights to gays and lesbians. And as we know South Africa is not the most gay friendly countries. Here's Bruni:

It was only a little more than a decade ago that a country first legalized same-sex marriage, and that happened in precisely the kind of forward-thinking, bohemian place you’d expect: the Netherlands. About two years later, Belgium followed suit.

Then things got really interesting. The eight countries that later joined the club were a mix of largely foreseeable and less predictable additions. In the first category I’d put Canada, Norway, Sweden and Iceland. In the second: South Africa, Spain, Portugal and Argentina.

Why those four countries? People who have studied the issue note that that they have something interesting and relevant in common: each spent a significant period of the late 20th century governed by a dictatorship or brutally discriminatory government, and each emerged from that determined to exhibit a modernity and concern for human rights that put the past to rest.

“They’re countries where the commitment to democracy and equal protection under the law was denied, flouted and oppressed, and the societies have struggled to restore that,” said Evan Wolfson, the president of Freedom to Marry, a New York-based advocacy group, in a recent interview.

Source

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlXkKCa2yy0 Another Michael Kiwanuka tune.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOOCQiKlZ8w Cape Town's answer to Vanilla Ice . Only in Cape Town. Quite a White Ou (that's his name) even translates his lyrics for you.  It's a viral for a company promoting Xhosa language lessons. BTW, seems there is an obvious obsession with Vanilla Ice as performance art in South Africa. Here's comedian Deep Fried Man from earlier this year: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSpYg4GZ2UM H/T: Tony Karon, Stephen Coplan

Here's my semi-regular round-up of trailers for new African or African-themed films which I wish to get my hands on. It's a big continent, so I am not surprised at the output. Some of these are sure to make the rounds at film festivals or short runs in art cinemas or pop up on obscure cable channels. (I'm still waiting for that entrepreneur who'll start an African film Netflix. I'll be a customer.) So here they are: Migration is a big topic in these films. First up there's Swiss director Fernand Melgar's "Special Flight" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vL1PgyL0lk Film critic Leo Goldsmith writes  about "Special Flight" in Brooklyn Rail:

[Melgar] investigated a detention center for asylum-seekers in Switzerland; his new film concerns a group of foreign nationals at a rather darker place in the process. Many of the film’s subjects—a couple of dozen men, mainly originating from Africa and Kosovo—have lived in Switzerland for decades, working, paying taxes, and raising families. Now, at a detention center in Frambois, near Geneva, they sit in clean, gray institutional buildings, waiting to hear about the status of their appeals for citizenship, or else to be forcibly shipped out to their countries of origin, the “special flights” of the film’s title ... [The] degree of access occasionally gives the film a professional polish that makes it seem almost staged. Stills from the film, which resemble a slightly sunnier Pedro Costa film, made more than one non-Swiss festivalgoer I spoke to think the film was a work of fiction.) Stranger still is the interaction between the detention center’s staff and the inmates (whom the former prefer to call “residents”), which is cordial, warm, and often even apologetic. Members of the staff welcome the detainees, express remorse for their situations, and hear out their grievances sympathetically, forming relationships that border on friendship. And when the orders come down for deportation, staff-members carry them out with an odd mix of duty, helplessness, and regret.

There's also Belgian filmmaker Nicolas Provost's "The Invader" which focuses on the travails of an African migrant in Brussels. The film has a brilliant opening scene. See Tom's post later today. Another feature film with African migrants washing up on the shores of a European island at the heart of it; this time the Canary Islands: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzXRKLZ4LXU The very talented Akin Omotoso (somebody give him buckets of money to keep making films) directed "Man on Ground," a film about xenophobic violence against African migrants by black South Africans in Johannesburg. Here's an early review and here's an interview with Omotoso. Here's the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7syzEXy2ZM "The Cardboard Village" about an Italian priest and illegal immigrants who take shelter in his church.  Bonus: it stars "Blader Runner" star Rutger Hauer. (I don't know what to expect from that casting choice.) The trailer doesn't make much sense, but here it is anyway: http://youtu.be/gEjp5R__aHw And here--in its entirety--is a new short, "Counterfeit," about West African migrants selling counterfeit watches and fake handbags in Chinatown in New York City: http://vimeo.com/17602593 And also a 12 minute short about racism and the border between Dominican Republic and Haiti (no surprises from which side the racism emanates): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61ky5aICIXE "Always Brando" part fake documentary, part drama about a Tunisian filmmaker's obsession with the famed American actor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKqWR68MXwo Another North African film. This time Moroccan director Faouzi Bensaidi's "Death for Sale" about 3 young petty thieves: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG3dzT26XFk Then there is, "Les Hommes libres," a period piece about an Algerian black marketer in Nazi-occupied France (also by a Moroccan director). The lead is played by Tahar Rahim who played the lead in the prison film, "A Prophete." (I'm assuming this is in the same vein as the excellent "Indigènes," which aimed to set the record straight about the roles of blacks and Arabs' in the liberation of France during World War II): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHsjuXuWuy4 "The Rhythm of My Life," a documentary film about the Miami rapper Ismael Sankara who travels to Gabon to visit family and sort of figures out his life and career: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LfTZbWORG8 A number of German films have recently explored their country's relationship to the African continent. (Remember "Nowhere in Africa," "Sleeping Sickness" and "At Ellen’s Age."  Now there's "The River Used To Be A Man" about a German actor finding himself in some open African space.  Here's a clip (what's with  trailers that don't mean or say much?): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpMWiaY_kwA The trailer for director Aki Kaurismäki's "Le Havre" (France) about the relationship of an elderly working-class couple in the French port city of the title with a a young, lovable African illegal immigrant they're harboring and the police inspector searching for the stowaway. This film is loved by every mainstream critic who has reviewed it. The trailer suggests it has obvious tropes which appeals to American and European audiences: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpAFPgNyxmc Talk about films with cute children. "Lucky" is film about a young South African child and the AIDS epidemic there (remember "Life Above All" directed by Oliver Schmitz and which had a limited release here in New York City in the Spring).  The director of "Lucky" is Avie Luthra, an Indian national. In "Lucky" there is a nice twist though; unlike most AIDS films he is not saved by a saintly white person: the lead character ends up in Durban with unscrupulous relatives, but is helped by a South African woman of Indian origin. As far as I know, apart from Leon Schuster's racist caricatures (Disney just gave him guarantees to make more of that nonsense), "Lucky" might be the first time you have an Indian South African in a major role in a film coming from that country. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_FBdPcV6PM Back to documentaries: "Last Call At The Oasis" about the global crisis about water which affects us all: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lq5yy0pYoQ Films about the unfinished Egyptian Revolution our coming out fast. Take "Tahrir 2011: The Good, The Bad And The Politician." The film is divided into three chapters; the first focuses on activists, the second on the police and the third the dictator Hosni Mubarak: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjA2XbUCcz0 Then, Italian director Stefano Savona's "Tahrir: Liberation Square": http://vimeo.com/26904025 There's also the music-focused "Microphone" by Egyptian director Ahmed Abdallah: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlkqSAGkToE The trailer for Columbia University art historian Susan Vogel's film, "Food, Crumple Crush," about the famed Ghanaian artist El Anatsui who lives in Nigeria: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr0sSCV2UDg There's a few others for which I can't find trailers: * The film version of Albert Camus' final, unfinished novel based on his childhood in French-occupied Algeria, "The First Man." * "The Education of Auma Obama" about Barack Obama's sister, Auma, which includes home video of the young Barack Obama on his first ever visit to Kenya in the late 1980s.  (Here's a link to a post-screening Q&A with director Branwen Okpako and Auma Obama at the 2011 Toronto Film Fetsival.) Then a film, I have at the top of my wish list. "Indochina, tras la pista de una madre" (Indochina, Traces of a Mother) is the story of an Afro-Asian man (the son of a Vietnamese woman an and African soldier) who goes back to Vietnam. His parents met when his father, from Benin, was conscripted by France to go and resist Vietnamese independence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZrXCh9mf1I * A new film about the struggle around AIDS in South Africa (by veteran director Jack Lewis): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnhJ4po_5Ho This film will definitely not make a commercial cinema screen here. The Senegalese director Mamadou Sellou Diallo films the pregnancy of his wife and the birth of his daughter. It's also a film about womanhood in Senegal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqFFJ4lsz4M *  There are also some films about the descendants of Africans in America: Director Diana Paragas and writer Nelson George's "Brooklyn Boheme," about black life in late 1980s and 1990s Fort Greene, Brooklyn, is finally here. (That's my neighborhood for the last 10 years). Here's the first 5 minutes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-f5gww1laY There's a documentary about black punk rockers Fishbone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChXk4R0mGNw A profile of foul-mouthed, ageing rapper Blowfly; in daily life the mainstream musician Clarence Reid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCOBGotTMmM "White Wash," a documentary about black surfers (which reminds me of the film, "Taking Back the Waves," about Apartheid racism and surfing in South Africa): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iNE4Qeye70 "Angel," a documentary film directed by Sebastiano d'Ayala Valva, about a former Ecuadorian boxer, lately a transvestite prostitute in France, traveling back to his homeland: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n36e9cA9WbE Helene Lee, who wrote a book--"The First Rasta"-- about Leonard Howell, who is considered the founder of Rastafari in Jamaica, has now made a documentary about him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BK4D8WpgaA *  Finally, a couple of short films you can watch in full: Johannesburg filmmaker Palesa Shongwe--whose work reminds me of fellow South African Steve Mokwena--has a short film (in full below) "Atrophy (and the fear of fading)" about nostalgia and youth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-dJNYHARbQ And, American Allysa Eisenstein's film on homophobia in Uganda based around interviews with gay rights activists and the bigotry and hate they encounter: http://vimeo.com/14204295

http://vimeo.com/30085559 Short video piece on Jelani Gibson, a 16-year-old protester who traveled with his grandmother from Pontiac, Michigan to New York to join the protests Wall Street. He also has a 4.0 GPA.  He had never slept on the street before.  Tell that to US media.

Earlier this week Egypt's military rulers made it clear that they will effectively be in power till "late 2012." The generals, all Mubarak appointees, want to reorganize the political landscape to ensure they can still wield influence. They've also revived old emergency laws favored by Mubarak. And they try civilians in military courts. Revolution indeed. That reminded me of a recent opinion piece by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley in The New York Review of Books, "The Arab Counterrevolution." There, Agha and Malley argue that "the Arab awakening" is "a tale of three battles rolled into one": people against regimes (basically the tug of war between regimes and spontaneous protesters); people against people ("a focused fight among more organized political groups"); and regimes against other regimes (this "assumes an increasingly prominent role"). They argue that "any number of outcomes could emerge from this complex brew." They claim that "the outcome of the Arab awakening will not be determined by those who launch it."

Revolutions devour their children. The spoils go to the resolute, the patient, who know what they are pursuing and how to achieve it. Revolutions almost invariably are short-lived affairs, bursts of energy that destroy much on their pathway, including the people and ideas that inspired them. So it is with the Arab uprising. It will bring about radical changes. It will empower new forces and marginalize others. But the young activists who first rush onto the streets tend to lose out in the skirmishes that follow. Members of the general public might be grateful for what they have done. They often admire them and hold them in high esteem. But they do not feel they are part of them. The usual condition of a revolutionary is to be tossed aside.

That leaves "two relatively untarnished and powerful forces": the military and "Islamists." The Islamists are more concerned with how they're perceived in the West. As for the military,

[i]n Egypt, although closely identified with the former regime, they dissociated themselves in time, sided with the protesters, and emerged as central power brokers. They are in control, a position at once advantageous and uncomfortable. Their preference is to rule without the appearance of ruling, in order to maintain their privileges while avoiding the limelight and accountability. To that end, they have tried to reach understandings with various political groups. If they do not succeed, a de facto military takeover cannot be ruled out.

Agha and Massey concludes:

The Arab world’s immediate future will very likely unfold in a complex tussle between the army, remnants of old regimes, and the Islamists, all of them with roots, resources, as well as the ability and willpower to shape events. Regional parties will have influence and international powers will not refrain from involvement. There are many possible outcomes—from restoration of the old order to military takeover, from unruly fragmentation and civil war to creeping Islamization. But the result that many outsiders had hoped for—a victory by the original protesters—is almost certainly foreclosed.

Source.

 American photographer Lori Grinker's new project "Distant Relations" traces the diaspora--in 8 countries--created by the (largely forced) migration of her 19th century ancestors from Lithuania. Grinkers, most who don't know of each other, ended up in places as far afield as the UK, US, Ukraine, Australia, Argentina, Germany, and of course, South Africa. A first cut of the project--from photos taken in Lithuania (2002), South Africa (2005), Ukraine (2008), and the US (2011)--can be seen at a gallery in New York City since early September. Here.   As her cousin Roy Richard Grinke (an anthropologist) writes in an essay accompanying the exhibit,  Lori's aim with the project, he writes, is is to focus,

more on particular environments than people and practices. Paradoxically, however, the photographs, many without people or faces, challenge us to imagine. Who are the people who made these worlds? And how does someone experience a life through them? There is, in these captivating images, what might be called either a present absence or an absent presence. We are compelled to look beyond the shreds and patches that comprise our memories, like letters and photographs, to the unseen. These images, and the people and places they represent, are fragmentary, perhaps like the Jews themselves, but they cohere around their incompleteness and instability, characteristics that are the essence of diaspora.

As for her South African relatives, she tells The New York Times' Lens Blog:

In South Africa, she met Anthony Grinker, who had been a politician. He was married to Hilda Grinker, a black woman whose family had been politically active in the anti-Apartheid movement. Mr. Grinker, who contracted H.I.V. as a single man, was the first person in South Africa’s parliament to go public about having H.I.V. The couple had been trying to have a baby when he died tragically in a car crash.

There's an image of Anthony Grinker and his wife in a slideshow on the Lens Blog page. (He was an IFP MP in Cape Town and later a provincial MP before he briefly joined an IFP splinter group before his death.) I have vague memories of meeting through my old job. Friendly, descent man. There's also some video evidence of the South African Grinkers in this short video (the 5 minute mark). Here are some more images of the life worlds of the South African Grinkers (a rugby field, the coast, a synagogue).

http://vimeo.com/29513113 A video about the motivations and some of the demands of the people questioning Wall Street's control of American politics, wanting to make "a Middle Eastern style revolution" happen here and giving both the right, mainstream and American left headaches. Also, I think I heard someone blowing a vuvuzela the right way--around the 4 minute mark.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07QfPUyXQQg UPDATED: Black Atlas is an American Airlines special promotion for African-American travelers. You can see the series of videos on the program's Youtube channel. Sometimes the videos give the impression that African-Americans are new to a region. Like in this video about India. (In the video, alongside all the usual tourist stereotypes, the link is between the ideas of Martin Luther King Jnr and Mahatma Gandhi, is played up for example.) But that is such a misrepresentation about African American travel to South Asia. Just take jazz. Indian filmmaker Susheel Kurien's "Finding Carlton" about bebop guitarist Carlton Kitto and "the bygone age of jazz in India" will hopefully start setting the record straight. Jazz music in India (mostly in Lucknow, Delhi, Mumbai and Calcutta), dates back to pre-World War II American military presence there, visiting swing bands, and US State Department sponsored tours by African-American recording artists. The film will also explore the influence of American jazz on Bollywood. (BTW, on his blog, Kurien has a few posts about that connection.) Just on the basis of clips of the film, I can see the film starting to pop up at festivals soon. Tomorrow night a rough cut will screen at the monthly DocuClub, which screens work-in-progress documentaries--here in New York City. In the first clip (above) sax player Micky Correa talks about Bombay (Mumbai) big bands. A few other legends' names get thrown in. In the second clip Carlton Kitto tells a story about he played in Duke Ellington's band: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5h924X5iN5U The film's Youtube channel also have clips of Ellington playing in India, video cliff notes on the history of jazz in India by American academic Bradley Shope (parts one, two and three) and the new crop of Indian jazz musicians, like Sonia.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEvNu_rdhXk The period video for the recently released "Classic" by MED, featuring Talib Kweli.

Takun J, the leading proponent of the Liberian music genre, breaks down its essence for a group of visiting journalism students from Syracuse University. http://vimeo.com/25558922 * I would also suggest reading Boima's account of the social impact of hipco. Here's an excerpt:

Despite Hipco’s activist potential, it has not yet been able to exploit its positive social influence to the fullest. While it is helping to define a new national identity for an entire generation of young Liberians, the economics of the industry are still entrenched in the same old patronage systems. While home studios have allowed artists to record independently, CDs and tapes still dominate the market, as opposed to Ghana, where the MP3 is the most common currency, and one company holds a monopoly on the manufacture and distribution of CDs and tapes. A political system that has traditionally kept many Liberians from forming local businesses combined with the growing problem of local piracy has made independent music a risky enterprise. Cellcom, one of the only local corporations, does sponsor events, but they seem to be the only ones doing so. Other locally operating corporations like Firestone, Chevron, and various mining companies are foreign entities, who don’t tend to have much interest in connecting with local youth. As a result, the only way for many artists to make a living is through sponsorship by politicians or foreign businesses.