Year: 2013

Beyond Nollywood: Africans through the lens

I have always wanted to claim some kind of artistic savvy, the more so now that I write for public consumption. Alas, that is not the case. I live on a steady diet of DVDs and genre fiction, driven entirely by an insatiable appetite for entertainment that feels good. There is perfectly enjoyable high-brow stuff out there, but somewhere between having Salman Rushdie and Catcher in the Rye thrust upon me I learned discernment. I mostly read historical romance novels now, with a very light sprinkling of titles that are more admissible in public.

Up until three or so years ago, I cheerfully consumed Hollywood products. Something has happened to Hollywood, though, hasn’t it? These days only Robert Downey Jr., Star Trek and 007 will get me anywhere near a Cineplex. There is always a silver lining and in my case it has been the expansion of horizons. Now that I don’t care what Tinseltown does to itself, I am present enough to notice some of what is happening closer to home. Turns out that there are diamonds in my backyard after all.

I grew up in Brazzaville, Bujumbura, Mbabane and Dar es Salaam in the eighties and nineties on state broadcasters and the very occasional video that was deemed age-appropriate by the adult mafia. My parents especially made substantial contributions to the Disney empire. There wasn’t any opportunity to even imagine that the culture I consumed might reflect me in any way. The African female audience member? Laughable notion. The closest I ever came to relating to any character was the youngest Huxtable kid, and that was a stretch.

The thing is, no matter how open a person is to the range of human creativity, deep inside she craves the familiar. Everyone wants to see themselves on the page, on the screen. We want our stories told.

About ten years ago, a particularly involved conversation with an African American about depictions of black people in popular culture prompted me to dedicate my senior thesis to exploring depictions of Africans by Hollywood between 1930 and 2001. The only good thing I can say about this exercise is that I met a man from New York with an excellent collection of African cinema. The rest was tears and horror.

Things have changed – there was nowhere else for Hollywood to go but upwards. Nonetheless, the experience left me with a rather unfortunate prejudice: the idea that only Africans can make competent movies about Africans.

Well, I was wrong. There is no explanation for Nollywood products and their unfortunate imitations throughout Anglophone Africa. I tried to find something palatable in those eye-rolling, garish, tasteless and superstitious cretins that pass for “characters” and failed miserably. The depths of loathing that I reserve for Nollywood can only be matched by how I feel about stepping barefoot into a pile of thorn-laden, fermenting excrement.

Development cinema saved the day for me, since it is always too long between good pieces of African cinema. Listen, I am horribly surprised about this, and embarrassed. We’re all Africans here, we know the deal. The NGOs and the Breton Woods and the savior-complex poverty tourists equipped with cameras and an internet connection have been framing us, selling us and commercially spreading the gospel of their cause for years. Sweet ancestors: are these people for real?

But then one day there I found myself alone with YouTube and a link to some locally produced, externally funded efforts. Twenty four hours later I was sold on the television series Siri ya Mtungi. It had so much that my soul needed to see: gorgeous Tanzanian women who look like the plumptious, dark-skinned, beautiful, complex and intelligent people I know. Men as venal and stupid and morally bankrupt, as delightful and gentle and wise and generous, as I have ever encountered. Conflicts that I can understand. All to the tune of an excellently curated local soundtrack.

There is also lots of sex. We’re all Africans here so let’s tell it like it is. Our sex is always depicted as exotic, deviant, or fraught with danger and disease. Like I said: tears and horror.

Siri ya Mtungi is not exactly innocent. It aims to change the sexual behaviors of Tanzanians in order to curb the spread of HIV/Aids infections. Refreshingly though, there is no fire or brimstone here. Just good old fashioned storytelling spiked with provocation. They’re trying to throw condoms at the viewer, in the hopes that she might catch one like an unplanned pregnancy.

I literally watched my favorite uncle die of the slim disease in the nineties, slowly and painfully. Don’t need any additional behavior-change messaging, thank you kindly. Condoms come as naturally to me as eating my vegetables. Consequently I am not watching the series to learn anything new – I have a natural immunity to messaging – but I am very interested in the depictions of our sexuality.

Sex is a great lens through which to examine life. When someone gets your sex right, they get you right, donor-funded or otherwise. I hooked onto this series simply because it showed me … well, us. The smiles were familiar. The cadences were familiar. The settings are enchanting, the women feisty, the men handsome kinds of bad news. Finally. I can tell Hollywood and Nollywood to kiss my bountiful African posterior, for I have found some satisfying measure of truth on the screen.

Elsie Eyakuze is a freelance consultant in print and online media from Tanzania, working mainly in the development sector. She blogs at mikochenireport.blogspot.com. Connect with her on Twitter.

12 years ago

Not your average bikini wax

When talking about Africa, many people still wax lyrical about vast, empty savannahs, The Lion King, flies, drums and naked women. And then they share their fears of violence, disease and crime.

By far, my greatest fear in Kenya is Njeri.

She’s the mobile “beauty therapist” who makes sure my lady bits – and those of many other expats and foreigners – are under control. Call her anytime you need her and she’ll take a matatu (taxi) and come to wherever you are, with her equipment.

When she arrives at my house she immediately sets to work. She puts her pot of wax – which she’s made with sugar, water and lemon juice – on the stove, and takes off her top. The heat along the Kenyan coast is brutal and standing over a hot stove with no fan or air-conditioning is hard work.

The process is the same every time: Njeri tells me to place an old sheet on the bed and to drop my pants and lie down on it. Then she politely asks me to spread my legs.

She moves the boiling hot pot from the stove to the bed, places it between my legs, and tells me not to move. She dips an old rusted butter knife into the pot and blows on it in a feeble attempt to cool the wax slightly. Then she spreads hot wax, like butter on toast, onto my lady bits. I can’t move or scream without knocking over the pot between my legs. I have to stay deadly still and scream on the inside.

Njeri then takes a scrap of material that she cut up the night before. Her wax strips are cuts of fabric from old bed sheets, clothes, jeans, whatever she can get her hands on. She spreads it over the hot wax, rubs up and down, and starts making clicking, clucking noises and shaking her head.

It’s her way of preparing her client for the pain to come.

She rips the fabric and wax off my bits, and immediately pats my skin and shushes me, like a mommy placating a crying baby.

“Oh, shhhhh, shhh, shhhhhh.”

And she does it all over again. Once she has used up a strip of fabric she throws it on the bedroom floor, for me to walk around collecting afterwards.

(Graphic: Kenny Leung)

When she is done, it’s time for my legs. Half an hour later she showers my body with baby powder and tells me what a good girl I’ve been. She puts her hand out for her 400 Ksh (about R40) and heads out, leaving me on my bed, still sticky with remnants of wax, surrounded by strips of dirty fabric, and covered in powder.

Fast forward to the evening.

When my husband gets back from work, I tease him a little and tell him about my bikini wax. He doesn’t need much teasing and follows me into the room. Just as things are getting hot and heavy, Disco, our psycho cat (named such because she fell out of the thatched roof of the local bar and landed head-first on the dance floor), attacks me.

Turns out there is a stand of string from Njeri’s fabric strips still stuck to my butt. At first I didn’t realise that it was Disco who was clawing at me to get to it … so I scream.

I’m on my husband, the cat is on me, and in an epic climax (not quite the one I had in mind), in runs the security officer with his rungu (wooden baton) because he’d heard the commotion and thought something was wrong.

So much for a romantic night with my man.

Bash, from South Africa, is a freelance project development analyst based in Kenya. She spends most of her time snorkelling, is obsessed with giraffes, has too many tattoos and loves travelling.

12 years ago

Step out in style: Handmade Moroccan shoes

When designer Tory Noll visited Morocco, she found inspiration in a tiny, unassuming shoe shop in Marrakech. She got a few pairs of Oxfords made for herself, and then for her friends when they raved about hers. That’s how the brand TEN & Co was born.

Noll has cleverly mixed two different cultures by combining the classic British Oxford with the beautiful and original patterns and colours of Morocco. She and her team scour souks and auctions to find the best Moroccan rugs and blankets which are used to create the shoes. Each pair is then painstakingly handmade by a cobbler in Marrakech. No two pairs are the same, which adds to the charm and appeal of these soles.

Pink, black and sea foam stripes. Made of vintage kilim with rose pink suede detailing. Leather soles. $200 (Pic: ten-and-co.com)

TEN & Co’s 2013 Spring/Summer collection has just been revealed. If the shoes themselves won’t blow you away, the photography by René Cervantes and styling by Noll and Alex Brannian will.

(Pic: ten-and-co.com)

View the rest of the collection here.

12 years ago

Somalia’s eligible bachelors – and how to spot them

“London or Minneapolis?” a soft female voice asks. It comes from a few tables behind me at Village Restaurant – a popular hangout for Somali diasporans in Mogadishu – as I finish a call to my friend.

“Eastleigh,” I respond, trying not to disclose my London background. Eastleigh is a district in Nairobi, inhabited mainly by Somalis.

Clutching a shisha pipe in her right hand that is patterned with henna flowers, she blows thick white smoke that fills up the dimly lit corner of the restaurant. “You may dress like a local but you don’t sound like the Eastleigh type. You definitely don’t look like one.”

Moving her chair to to my table, she introduces herself as Hamdi from Hamarweyne, a district in Mogadishu. In the dim lights her gold necklace and rings are hard to miss, and one can smell the incense smoke she perfumed her long, black, orange-highlighted hair with from a mile away.

Her two female friends soon join us. They’ve come here in the hope of mingling with their preferred type of men – diasporan guys.

With fragile peace holding up in Mogadishu, Somalis who have been living abroad are flocking back home for a visit. Most of them are single men – eligible bachelors. They are to Somali women what English Premier League footballers are to London women: the cream of the crop.

Most local women think Somalis living abroad, especially in the West, have lots of money. It’s easy for diasporan men to seduce them with cash, the perceived chance of a better life abroad or love. There are unproven theories that diasporan men are more romantic than local men; that only a diasporan man will drive for miles to the one flower shop in town to buy his lady flowers; that, unlike local men, diasporan men listen to their ladies while romantically gazing into their eyes.

I ask Hamdi how she knows I’m not a local. She smiles. “I can even tell what you do for a living.”

She and her friends reckon there are three types of diasporan men in Mogadishu. Like spots on the skin of a leopard each group has unique features, they say. They dress and carry themselves differently.

1. The government workers
This group is mainly made up of former taxi drivers from London, Minneapolis, Toronto and Sydney who have returned home to work in government.

They wear oversized two-piece suits and walk around with briefcases whose contents are a mystery. To finish off the look, they sport dark glasses (plastic). This group, the girls say, don’t have the most amount of money. They’re very visible at the beginning of the month just after they’ve received their meagre pay cheques. Their strong point is that they have access to power, which means they can potentially help you land a job if you play your cards right. This group attracts unemployed female university graduates looking for work in government offices, Hamdi’s friend Fartun reveals.

2. The business types/MBA
More often than not, these men are dressed in expensive sarongs and polyester shirts. They’re older than the government workers and tip the obese end of the scale, but they have deep pockets.

What they lack in looks and charm, they compensate for in gifts. They usually have at least one wife outside Somalia and half a dozen children. These men are commonly referred to as MBA – Married But Available. They attract women who dream of shopping trips to Dubai and are okay with being the second, third or fourth wife.

3. The cool guys
According to the ladies, this group has the most fun but the lightest pockets. They’re the new cool kids on the block, sent back to Somalia by their families because they’ve become too westernised in their adopted home countries. They depend on donations from relatives in the West and have the worst reputation among the locals.

Young and fashionable, they sport the latest hairstyles like mohawks and some have tattoos hidden under their long sleeve shirts. If they don’t conceal them, they risk facing the wrath of conservative Muslim locals.

You can find the cool guys chilling on Liido Beach or Hamarweyne, the most liberal district of Mogadishu. They know how to throw underground parties on a budget among the bullet-battered buildings of the city, and supply all kinds of illegal recreational stuff. To be seen with them is to play with fire but the girls who want to be “Hollywood cool” feel at home in their company.

Liido Beach, where the ‘cool’ diasporan men go to mingle with the ladies. (Pic: Hamza Mohamed)

Fartun prefers the business types because they can afford the things she likes in life, like dining at the few nice restaurants in town. A decent meal for two at one of these spots can start at US $25. In Somali culture men always pay for the meal, which means high-end restaurants are out of budget for many of the local men.

With the summer holidays coming up, an influx of diasporan men are expected in Mogadishu in the next few months. Hamdi and her friends say they’re happy about this – the more fish in the sea, the better the chance of a good catch.

Before leaving the restaurant, I again ask Hamdi what she thinks I do and what group of eligible bachelors she’s put me in. After inspecting me from head to toe, she says: “Judging by the sandals and the T-shirt you wearing, you look like they’ve deported you from London.”

Hamza Mohamed is an independent British-Somali journalist. Connect with him on Twitter.

12 years ago

Angola’s music and politics: An uneasy relationship

Urban music has always been a tool for political expression in Angola. Even before the country’s independence, musicians like Carlitos Vieira Dias, David Zé, and the iconic group N’gola Ritmos offered musical resistance to the colonial regime. Some were even arrested and sent to prison camps by the Portuguese.

Today, the most well known form of Angolan urban music is the ever more popular kuduro. Pulsating and powerful, kuduro is primarily associated with Luanda’s ubiquitous musseques, the teeming slums that house the city’s poorest residents. It’s blasted from candongueiros, the bright blue and white Toyota Hiace minivans that are the form of transport for the vast majority of Luandans, played in seemingly every party and pumped in Luanda’s clubs. Despite its rather middle-class roots, kuduro singers tend to belong to the lower classes and their lyrics cover a wide range of topics, from artists’ feuds to daily hardships.

Kuduro used to be the type of music that your parents would label as trash and tell you not to listen to – many of them still do. But remarkably, and perhaps due to its appeal across broad sectors of Angolan society, the genre has exploded to become a national phenomenon and a source of national pride. Bands like Buraka Som Sistema have helped internationalise kuduro through sold-out concerts around the world.

The proliferation of kuduro didn’t go unnoticed by the political establishment. Keen and adept at controlling all aspects of civil society, the regime saw in kuduro the perfect vehicle with which to reach the masses. Kuduro concerts are now standard fare in political rallies – politicians will actually use wildly popular kuduro artists as a way to get more people to attend their usually stale public events.

Kuduro fever even reached the presidential palace – by 2011, Coreón Dú, one of President José Eduardo Dos Santos’s sons, became one the biggest promoters of kuduro on the national and international stage. He even released a track of his own (I wouldn’t recommend it):

A singer, TV producer (his media and TV production company receives funds directly from the national budget) and the brains behind the annual “I Love Kuduro” festival in Luanda and abroad, Dú funds and promotes a kuduro troupe appropriately named Os Kuduristas. Last year they embarked on a grand, deep-pocketed world tour, performing extensively in Europe and the US. They were expertly represented by some of the best PR firms in the music industry and even offered workshops in the cities they visited.

Although the government was able to effectively appropriate kuduro for its own purposes, it has been much less successful with the other popular form of Angolan urban music: hip-hop. The youth movement protesting against the Angolan regime and President Dos Santos’s 33 years in power has numerous underground rap musicians among its ranks, including Ikonoklasta (Luaty Beirão) and Carbono Casimiro. Interestingly, Luaty also belongs to the kuduro group Batida, which dabbles in political themes. It doesn’t receive state funding and is not invited to kuduro festivals in the country.

Unlike kuduro, hip-hop is a form of urban music that the establishment has not been able to breach. The most popular Angolan rappers are the most critical of the regime, and yet they continue to sell out shows and sell out CDs. MCK, the sharp-tongue rapper from the Chabá slums of Luanda, is the most prominent example of this reality. He’s been offered half a million dollars to stop bad-mouthing government and faced death threats, but this doesn’t phase him.

What the government can’t do by peaceful means, it’ll do through coercion, intimidation, and outright sabotage. Last month, Família Eterna, an organisation of rappers from Lobito, a small city in Benguela province, wanted to celebrate their 10-year anniversary. They invited numerous artists, including MCK. Família Eterna followed every possible legal obligation and submitted a total of five different stamped documents (two of which explicitly stated MCK’s name) that gave them government permission to stage the concert.

It was to no avail. Having caught wind that MCK was due to make an appearance in Lobito, the central government began a chilling campaign of intimidation and coercion to force the organisers to cancel the show. According to Família Eterna, the organisers began receiving threatening phone calls in the days leading up to the show; undercover agents dressed in civilian clothes would come to the venue and inquire about the preparations, all the while threatening and intimidating workers.

On the day of the show, the ministry of culture frantically called the organisers in a last ditch attempt to have them cancel; the state-owned electricity company even shut down power to the venue. In the end, MCK still performed, to a much smaller but still energetic crowd.

When compared to kuduro, the disparate treatment of underground rap is evident. What is also evident is that politics will continue to play a role in urban Angolan music, and the regime will continue to interfere as they see fit. But it is comforting to see that even with these abuses against freedom of expression, urban Angolan music continues to impact the establishment. Through music, the disenfranchised continue to have a voice and a vehicle in which to air their grievances, much like their brethren David Zé and N’gola Ritmos did 38 years ago.

Claudio Silva is an Angolan living in New York City. He has also spent time in Washington DC, Lisbon, Reading (UK) and attended university in Boston. In 2009, he started Caipirinha Lounge, a music blog dedicated to Lusophone music. Claudio contributes to several other blogs including Africa is a Country and Central Angola 7311. Connect with him on Twitter.