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Sean Jacobs, Founder-Editor of Africa is a Country, is on the faculty of The New School.
The artwork is a collaboration between the two Dutch artists Anton Corbijn and Berend Strik. (Via: ZAM Magazine)
* It would be appropriate to click through to our February 11, 2010 post "Songs for Nelson Mandela" (on the 10th anniversary of Mandela's release of Mandela). Here.
There it was spotted by the American blog, Jezebel (part of the Gawker empire). Once it became viral (and the couple their photographer and wedding planner were ridiculed) some of the photos (i.e. those with blacks in subservient positions or white people hamming it up in pith helmets) have been taken down. Here's a link to the "cleaned-up" cache-page since the page has been deleted. Luckily for us screen shots of the pictures exist. And the venue still has pictures of guests in pith helmets play acting shoot outs on its website.
Of course, not surprisingly, some white South Africans are defending the couple. Although one commenter to the Jezebel post did write the truth: "Most white folks' weddings in [South Africa] are colonial not by design, but by default."
Which is why we're surprised so few are asking--as RK points out in a comment on this post below--what makes venues like the Cow Shed (where the wedding was held and events company Pollination, think it is okay to throw colonial/Apartheid throwback weddings for white South African and European couples.
By the way, the Cow Shed has since issued a lame press statement to still defend its decision to host the party.
At least they can't blame the South African politician, Julius Malema, for this.
Some of the photos are on Jezebel's website.
More from the big blogs, here and here.
One in ten young people on Cape Town’s Cape Flats finish high school. The highlight of their school career – and sometime their lives – is prom, known as the matric ball.
The leftist and poet Jeremy Cronin speaks on identity politics and race in South Africa’s second city, Cape Town.
It does not matter how little the amount sent to foreign countries, it is the principal of the thing…why send aid to china, a country that continues to grow our debt and buy it up and yet we send them aid? why send aid to africa, we owe that country nothing, just as we owe nothing to every other country..we Americans fought our way out of our own tyranny and yet we did it…they should do the same without our help…we even had less and do less than those countries do now and yet we help them…why?
A few others think so too as we know, old school comedian Drew Carey (in this embarrassing video) and Sarah Palin, for example, have made the same mistake. Though he was not born in Kenya, at least Barack Obama knows it's a continent. H/T: Amanda Makulec
“As long as we think that we should get Mississippi straightened out before we worry about the Congo, you’ll never get Mississippi straightened out.”
A few of those things we missed, tweeted or could not get to this past week.
From a series by photographer Pete Miller (remember him?) of Dinka cattle raiders in Southern Sudan on TIME magazine's Lightbox blog. As Glenna Gordan comments on her blog, Scarlett Lion:
In addition to be technically superb photographs, what I really like about these images is the individuality and identity that each of the subjects has. And by viewing a series of portraits, I get a sense of a textured community of discrete individuals, rather than a sort of pre-historic and stereotypical horde of angry men with guns and cows. It’s difficult to make the same sort of sweeping statements all too common in media coverage when you as a viewer are offered the chance straight into the eyes of a young woman or check out a dude’s awesome aqua and pink shirt. These images aren’t of a “tribe,” but of specific people with specific personalities who make specific choices.
Hip hop is usually associated with revolution and counter culture. But American artists, who visit the content, usually side with power. Like Jadakiss did in Swaziland
... For obvious reasons that I’ve already alluded to, a great premium is placed on unity and loyalty within the culture of the ANC-led liberation movement. In the days of illegality and repression, carefree individualism could be a deadly indulgence. Unity and loyalty are still important. But national liberation movements, pre- and postindependence, also have a problematic habit of identifying themselves as “the nation.” There are numerous examples crystallized in once-popular slogans: “CPP is Ghana, Ghana is CPP”; “SWAPO is the Nation, the Nation is SWAPO”; “the Kenyan African National Union is the Mother and Father of the Nation.”
I have never heard anyone quite say these things of the ANC, but there are strong inclinations in this direction. To be politically outside of the ANC is still often characterized as being part of the “enemy” forces. To differ with the majority line within the ANC is sometimes to risk being accused of “siding” with the “enemy.” Lenin was fond of quoting [Carl von] Clausewitz’s maxim, “War is politics by other means.” But Lenin (even Lenin) never claimed that politics is war by other means. He quite correctly insisted on the primacy of a political understanding of war. Politicizing the military is one thing; the converse is quite another. Unfortunately, militarizing politics (at least discursively, by regarding all opposition as the enemy) is a natural but ruinous habit in political formations, particularly those that have waged armed struggles.
...I know that in South Africa, many black intellectuals, in particular, have recently battled with the inner dilemma of disagreeing with the ANC government. There is a sense of betraying their own, of feeding the racial stereotype that black majority governments “are bound to fail.” The [former] vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town, a fine novelist and essayist, Njabulo Ndebele, wrote in 2003, “I increasingly experience the need to transgress but feel anguished by the thought that my transgressions, committed in the belief that they represent a process of democratic self-actualization, could be mistaken for the outmoded oppositions of old.” I would venture to say that increasingly among a wide range of black intellectuals and others, this sense of anguish is no longer so strong. Both from within the ANC-led movement and in other quarters, not least among a feisty new generation of black journalists and columnists, there are robust critical voices that are prepared to oppose government on many issues without being oppositionist for its own sake.
I have never quite shared Ndebele’s sense of anguish. Being simultaneously a member of both the ANC and its allied SACP (we are an interesting and, internationally, probably unique political alliance with overlapping memberships) has provided me with organizational spaces that are neither oppositionist nor monolithically univocal. Nelson Mandela, after I had unintentionally and unknowingly irritated him, and not for the first time, once told a comrade that he was convinced I had a “split personality”—good on some days, not good at all on others. In mitigation, I would argue that a bipolar disorder is a necessary attribute in our post- (or is it neo-?) colonial reality in which, to paraphrase Gramsci, we are living in a time when the old is dying and the new is still struggling to be born.
Source: Comparative Literature (You need a subscription and a password to read the full interview.)
She pronounced all of their names with perfect local diction. The audience laughed and clapped when Mrs. Obama mentioned a woman named Gqibelo Dandala and used the click sound in the Xhosa language from which the name derived.
Is that all Gqibelo Dandala is? A prop? What did she actually do to be invited to the Forum? In 2007. Gqibelo Dandala founded the Future of the African Daughter project, FOTAD, which works with girls, 12 – 19, from rural areas and townships. Ms. Obama talks about Dandala’s work, but all that’s reported is that that African woman sure has a funny name, and that `articulate’ African American woman did a helluva job pronouncing it. And the crowd went wild. The videos are no better. For example, Britain's Channel 4 News chose a two-minute part of the speech that focused largely on HIV-AIDS, and then ended with, “You can be the generation to ensure that women are no longer second-class citizens, that girls take their rightful places in our schools. You can be the generation that stands up and says that violence against women in any form, in any place including the home –- especially the home –- that isn’t just a women’s rights violation. It’s a human rights violation. And it has no place in any society. You see, that is the history that your generation can make”. But how can this generation of young African women be that generation? In Michelle Obama’s speech, the charge somewhat makes sense. It has a context and a history. In the constructions of the US-based media, there’s no context, there’s no historical justification. There’s only good will and good intention. The Forum has brought together 76 young women from across the African continent. Every one of them has a name. So do their mothers, sisters, aunts, daughters. Every one of them has done something. But don’t bother to look for their names in The New York Times or The Washington Post. They’re not there.
["The Brave Ones"] documents Zulu boys from the Shembe church wearing pink gingham or rich red tartan kilts with tribal hats, a mixed visual code that evokes the Scottish Highlanders who were deployed to the region in the late nineteenth century. The boys pose before the lush backdrop of the KwaZulu Natal, aka the “garden province,” making them appear timeless in an Arcadian landscape.
Source: Comparative Literature.... A sense of audience has always been important for me. When I write a poem, or when I go back to an old poem, I try to listen to it with the ear of someone else, perhaps an audience, real or imagined. One audience whose feedback and engagement I have always appreciated is the relatively small circle of fellow South African poets, critics, and academics teaching poetry. But I have also always wanted to write a poetry that is generally accessible to a wider audience.
In this I have not always succeeded, of course. The failing is not just personal; there are many objective challenges. There are, for instance, eleven official languages in South Africa, and while English is the major lingua franca, writing poetry in English is not necessarily an advantage. Afrikaner nationalism, with all of its reactionary tendencies and faults, was centrally a cultural and language-based movement, and poetry was (and still is) cherished amongst a broader Afrikaans-language public. This has never been the case with the often pseudo-cosmopolitan, white, English-speaking community into which I was born. Major English-language South African writers—like the two Nobel laureates, Nadine Gordimer and John Coetzee—tend to be much better known outside of South Africa and tend to write, one suspects, with a European or North American audience in mind. For me, oral performances, particularly in contexts which are not narrowly poetical (a trade union meeting, or a political conference, for instance), have been a very important means for reaching a wider, more diverse audience.