treball

treballa

...E quando ci domanderanno che cosa stiamo facendo,
tu potrai rispondere loro: Noi ricordiamo.
Ecco dove alla lunga avremo vinto noi.
E verrà il giorno in cui saremo in grado di ricordare
una tal quantità di cose che potremo costruire
la più grande scavatrice meccanica della storia e scavare,
in tal modo, la più grande fossa di tutti i tempi,
nella quale sotterrare la guerra.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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Tag correlati: international, social, testi, repetita iuvant, multiculturalism, memoria, unforgettable, letterature, mad planet, human rights, collateral damages, resource wars, news, interviste, libri
giovedì, 11 settembre 2008
Continental Drift



Da revolution is on da phone 

BINYAVANGA WAINAINA 
Mail & Guardian, Sep 11 2008 

Sigh.

I do not come from the YoYo generation. So I had no idea dat P-Squared, a very phat duo of identical twins from Nigeria, had landed in Nairobi to give a concert that turned da city upside down. I had no idea that these twins had won a competition in Nigeria called "Grab Da Mike". I do not know da guy called DJ Space of MOB DJs, who worries about being lynched if a P-Squared song is not played every 15 minutes.

I suspect our ministry of education does not know who DJ Space is either. Nor does the music department of Kenyatta University. I can just see the course curriculum: Dis Hip-Hop Course aims to be da Bomb.

We do produce a lot of people who can play da flute. We also can do praise-singing choirs. In our National Schools Music Festival, there is no Hip-Hop category, or anything that came after 1930. There are choirs singing things such as Waltzing Matilda and "Were you ever in Quebec, rowing timber on the deck".

When I was in school, we had a teacher of great enthusiasm for what they called the set piece. Unfortunately he had a Meru accent which mangled all the hard consonants. The song went something like this: "A pigeon flew over to Galilee, Fre cru". The choir had to find our inner bird and trill, over and over again, "Fre Cru, fre cru, fre cruuuuuu." Poor man was only able to say Mblee Clu …

There are categories for sopranos, and altos and choral groups. There is no rhumba or benga. With the exception of the traditional music categories, there is nothing that in any way ties the tastes of any Kenyans or Africans, or even Quebec Canadians I know. There is nothing that ties any known market that has ever existed in Kenya: in pre-colonial Kenya, in post-colonial Kenya, in post-election violence Kenya, in science fiction Kenya. The buyers of the products of the music festival can only be dictators needing praise choirs and retired schoolteachers from small-town America in the late 1930s and the officials of the Music Festival.

For Kenya to become a middle income country by 2030, our government decided to remove music and art from our syllabus. The idea there I guess, is that there is no money or future in it. South Africa and Senegal make millions of dollars from cultural products - in part because their education systems celebrate local languages and culture.

The reason why Kenyans are bad musicians is because we are out of touch with our own tastes and instincts. The most important thing we learn in school is to demean who we are and where we come from. The reason why Kenyans are so culturally unconfident is because we stand in music halls and pretend to be rowing timber on the deck in Quebec. To this day the lobbies of our five-star hotels play this sort of music.

So while we were trying to be a sort of impossible and imaginary Western person - serving no market or idea - another billion-dollar market quietly landed at the feet of African artists everywhere a few weeks ago.

When the Zain group announced the arrival of a mobile phone network that covers 500-million people, from the Middle East to Nigeria, it fulfilled a vision by the founders of Celtel International to build the first true pan-African mobile phone network - inspired by the Nkrumahs and Marcus Garveys of this world.

Soon, and I mean in a matter of months, we will have a cheap, borderless platform from which to share ideas, music, words and conversations with millions of people. I will be able to produce a song and somebody in minutes in Nigeria or Congo or Gabon will scroll down his phone and buy it.

I will be able to do the same with animation, comic strips, graphic novels, romance ebooks, how-to multimedia and soap operas.

Many businesses are aware of this, as are many policy people, ICT experts and money people in London. But the producers of this content have been caught flat-footed. There is no partnership between capital, policy and artists. It truly escaped the minds of our foggy old policy people that this 20-year-old season called the Information Age is the one of the content creator: Da musician, Da writer, Da artist.

The mobile phone has brought the distribution we have all been dreaming about for over a century.

Already big British and American money is sniffing around to develop this content and sell it back to us. Most of Nairobi's animators have been bought up.

Harvard now has a team documenting the rise of African hip-hop. Meanwhile, our students stand on stage and sing, "Fre Cru, Fre cru, Fre cru". That Harvard graduate will be the guy to make the millions of dollars from our own cultural products.


Source: Mail & Guardian Online

http://www.mg.co.za/article/2008-09-11-da-revolution-is-on-phone

Postato da: treball a 11/09/2008 19:27 | link | commenti |
news, testi, africa, repetita iuvant, international, mad planet, multiculturalism, allusioni

mercoledì, 06 febbraio 2008
How Kenya exploded in my heart



By Petina Gappah
Chimurenga Online
Date: Tuesday, January 15 @ 23:49:12 SAST

My friend Yvonne once told me that it was only when she lived in my country's capital that she understood which city Nairobi was going to be when it grew up. Harare in the 1990s was funky and groovy and uncluttered and happening. Zimbabwe in the 1990s was a country in which people still dreamed and planned with the reasonable expectation that their dreams would come true, and if they didn't, they could downgrade them to less ambitious, but still acceptable versions. There was a flow of tourist money, there were film festivals, and arts festivals, there were world-class Manchurian restaurants and people speaking of all the things they planned. There were about 20 foreign airlines bringing the world to us. Now there are only four. Yvonne's words are always with me when I think about my home city, because when I think about her home city, I see the city that Harare could have been, and in Kenya, the country mine could have been.

I once lived in a European city that had so few black people that I was most people's only encounter with Africa. I was the Africa expert, giving little seminars on the genocide in Rwanda and the promises of South Africa's rainbow nation. Throughout that time, I felt like a poser – the one African country that I really knew was Zimbabwe, the rest were as foreign to me as Slovenia or Poland. I still feel I do not know Africa. I never can, but through reading, travel and friendships, I have come to love a number of African countries.

More than these, I love Kenya.

Kenya means very specific things to me. It means my friends at Kwani?, the hip literary journal which has opened a space in which the most moving and funny and lacerating and edgy writing is exploding out into the world. I cannot separate their kwaniness from their Kenyanness. Kenya means Lamu, a place like no other that I have visited. Kenya means all the amazing people that I have met in my travels there, filmmakers, and businesswomen, civil servants, media types, hotel staff, for I have stayed mainly in hotels, so that I am one of those for whom Kenya will always be the country of the permanent karibu, a county of the friendliest people in the world, an eye-rolling cliché that is nonetheless true. I have conversed with Luo and Kalenjin and Kikuyu and, on one occasion, what I took to be Massai teenagers, but who, according to my Kenyan companions, were Kikuyu dressed as Massai for the tourist dollars. On a beach in Mombasa, I cemented my Kenyan tourist credentials: I received the flattering attentions of a reed-thin "beach boy" with beaded dreadlocks.

To add to these associations with the people I have met are all the wonderful things that happened to me in Kenya. The thrill of my first ever public reading as a writer. The young men who asked me if I had ever visited Kibera because the slum I described in my reading sounded like their home. The ground of Kenya shaking beneath my feet as I fell in love on the shores of Crater Lake.

Every time that I have been to Nairobi, I have returned with a singing soul.

And when I am not there, Kenya follows me. The smiling man I met on the Number 8 bus to the United Nations is a Kenyan, he said. I swelled with pride when Kenya's Ambassador Amina Mohammed became the first African to chair the WTO's General Council, and the first African woman to be interviewed for a spot on the WTO's Appellate Body. Whenever I met Kenyans in Geneva and other places, I felt a strong tug of kinship. And at school, my four-year-old son Kush became best friends with a little Kenyan boy called Jacob.

Like Juliet did to the love-struck Romeo in the Dire Straits song, Kenya exploded on my heart.

There was an underlying ache.

I wished we had this in Zimbabwe, that a rainbow coalition of political parties could unseat a stagnant ruling party and still have a vibrant opposition. I could not help comparing Nairobi's greenness to Harare's drought dry grasses and trees. A friend once asked me what I thought we would talk about in Zimbabwe if ever we solved our crisis. In Kenya, I found some answers. Kenyans filled the streets of Nairobi at the weekend, their bars were packed with smiling happy people, troubled, it seemed to me, by no graver political issues than the antics of their health minister Charity Ngilu. On one weekend that I was in Nairobi, the papers were given over to a discussion of the school results. There were league tables, and pictures of beaming little girls and boys and agonising editorials about why some regions were doing badly compared to others. I remember a picture of a woman with a smile that showed the insides of her teeth as she embraced her son.

Future doctor, said the caption.

For one used to headlines from the Zimbabweans papers about inflation going up to 15 000%, and newspapers filled with the President's daily screeds against "detractors and would-be colonisers" and the empty promise that Zimbabwe would never be a colony again, this all seemed achingly normal.

Then came December 2007.

And suddenly, it was not of Zimbabwe that stern-faced British prime ministers, European Union observers and American presidents were talking, but Kenya. Suddenly, Nairobi was becoming Harare, and Kenya, Zimbabwe.

© Copyright is held by Chimurenga & individual authors of all material published in the mag. anyone wishing to reproduce material from this mag in any for should approach the individual contributors or contact the editors at chimurenga@panafrican.co.za.

This article comes from Chimurenga Online
http://www.chimurenga.co.za

The URL for this story is:
http://www.chimurenga.co.za/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=129

Postato da: treball a 06/02/2008 17:54 | link | commenti (39) |
testi, memoria, africa, social, letterature, international, mad planet, multiculturalism

martedì, 08 gennaio 2008
What Happened Next



Operation
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Granta 99: What Happened Next
Pub. date: Oct 5, 2007 ISBN: 9780903141963

Lagos in June is steamy. But that Thursday afternoon at the Champion newspaper office, I did not notice how difficult it was to breathe or how the air was like a hot, moist blanket. I swaggered and smiled, too full of a sense of accomplishment. I had just had my collection of watery poetry published by a vanity press in London. I was doing my first newspaper interview. I was nineteen years old.

Kate, the woman who interviewed me, was squat, friendly, full of praise for the poems although she had not read them. After the questions—Where do you get your inspiration? Do you write indoors or outdoors?—she told me I was a role model for young Nigerians. I glowed. She took me downstairs to have my picture taken in a wide room that smelled of chemicals. Matt photographs were plastered on the wall. Most of them were of prominent people—Fela, Abacha, Gani—but it was the more mundane subjects, beggars under bridges and children playing football and soldiers by the roadsides, that I stopped to admire.

‘They put up the best on the wall,’ Kate said.

Later, as we left, I turned to glance again at the wall of photographs and that was when I saw it, the photo of Nnamdi. I may have let out a sound, I may have only shivered, but Kate noticed and asked if something was wrong.

I pointed. ‘I knew him,’ I said.

Kate shook her head in the way people do to show sympathy.

‘Oh, sorry, sorry. It was an operation at the bank just across the road,’ she said.

I remember the splashes of blood on Nnamdi’s face, his head slumped against the front seat of the car; the blood was a deep grey in the black-and-white photo.

At my university secondary school in Nsukka, there were two groups of students. The staff group, which I belonged to, was made up of students whose parents were university lecturers, who lived on the campus and had little money and spoke good English. The other group was the Omata. They came mostly from Onitsha and the name Omata somehow conjured the chaos of that large commercial town. Their parents were rich, illiterate traders; they lived in the dormitories and often missed the first week of term. Most of us staff students thought, smugly, that they aspired to be like us: their parents had sent them to our school so that our university polish would rub off on them after all. We mimicked their mixed-up tenses and their saying SH for CH: sit down on that sheer. We laughed at their poor grades, their bush manners. We mocked their bluster. And, secretly, we coveted what they had: the gold watches that we saw only on the wrists of adults, the priceless gullibility of uneducated parents, the imported sandals that cost more than our families made in a month.

Nnamdi owned such sandals; his were a sparkly brown, almost orange, and had wedge heels. Nnamdi was an archetype of the unrefined Omata student, down to his inelegant swaying-to-the-side strut and his trousers pulled halfway up his belly. Of course this made him unsuitable for me, particularly since I was an academic star of sorts, and of course I found him terribly attractive.

Nnamdi was in Form 4, a popular senior student, while I was in Form 2, a junior student. Still, he must have thought me intimidating because it was his friends who called me at first to say, ‘Ima, Nnamdi really likes you.’ I was noncommittal, tough because I was expected to be. Finally, he came himself. I wish I remembered the first day I talked to him, or what we said. I remember his walking me home after school, though, and his saying very little. I knew him because he was the kind of student everybody knew and I had always thought him to be larger than life, taller than life. But there he was, shy beside me, looking down as we walked, reduced to a nervously solemn wreck. He had the strangest voice, so hoarse and scratchy it was barely audible, a voice that earned him a lot of jokes and that I would later fondly ape. That day, his shy muttering made it difficult to understand even the little that he said. I was attracted to this shyness. I was attracted, too, to his height; I barely reached his chest and there was something protective about his being so tall.

He took to walking me home. He took to calling me GB, like most of my family and friends. ‘Bikonu, please, GB, I want you to be my wife,’ he said nearly every day, in Igbo. And I would say, in English, with a thoroughly false coolness, ‘I have to think about it,’ even though I wanted nothing more than to be his girlfriend. I have come to reject the rituals of pretence that females are taught to practise in courtship: to say no when we mean yes, to be bashful and evasive, to coat our intelligence in coyness. Yet pretence was magical during those weeks when I said no although I meant yes. Nnamdi ‘chased’ me for a long time. Later, he would tease me about how I gave him a high jump to scale. I like to think now that he knew how much I liked him, from the beginning, and that we were both equal participants in the ritual.

The afternoon I said yes, we were standing in front of our garage and he went over and plucked a flower—one of my mother’s carefully preserved yellow roses—and held it out to me.

‘What is this for?’ I asked sharply. (I had said yes, but it didn’t mean I was no longer tough.)

‘A sign. I won’t leave until you take it.’

‘I won’t take it until you tell me what it means.’

We went back and forth until Nnamdi said, in English, ‘It means love,’ and I took the flower and he added, ‘If your mother asks who plucked it, say you don’t know.’

I left the Champion office and sat in a hot taxi and looked at Lagos inching past the window, the hawkers pressing sunglasses against my window, the buses spitting out thick, grey smoke, the cars stuck bumper to bumper in traffic.

‘See this stupid man! He wan scratch me!’ my taxi driver said, gesturing to the car beside us. Then he stuck his head out and cursed in rapid Yoruba.

I sat back, silent and sweating, and thought of Kate’s words, of how we Nigerians used the word operation to refer to armed robberies and how it had taken on an ominous pallor. Buses were stopped and people killed in operations on the Benin–Lagos expressway. Houses were broken into in night-time operations. Banks were raided in operations. One Christmas when we were travelling to our home town, Abba, our driver made a dangerous U-turn in the middle of the expressway. ‘There is an operation in front!’ he said, and my mother praised him for being so quick. Other cars were turning as well and we heard gunshots and, soon after, the swift crunch of metal as two of the cars collided.

My taxi driver had stopped cursing and asked what I had been doing in the Champion newspaper office. ‘Wonderful!’ he said when I told him. ‘Small aunty like you can write book. Well done!’

I thanked him. But my earlier glow was gone, my poetry forgotten. I was trying instead to remember what I had felt, to describe it to myself, when I saw the photo of the dead person on the wall and realized that it was Nnamdi.

My friends, my smug staff friends, were appalled by how much time Nnamdi and I spent together. Could he even make one decent English sentence? What did we talk about? they wanted to know. Even I hardly know now. He made me laugh. We kissed with me standing on the short steps in our backyard so that we could be the same height. We fought about things I no longer remember and sometimes, when I pretended to be angrier than I was, he would threaten to throw himself in the path of a car or to kneel, in apology, at the entrance of my class. He would say this so earnestly that I would laugh and laugh. Just as I laughed when he suggested we go to a dibia to do the igba ndu, a blood betrothal of sorts that would keep us from ever breaking up. I was not familiar with this; the people in my world did not do things like the igba ndu rite, they sniffed at the supernatural and had sanitized engagements when the time was right. But the simplicity of Nnamdi’s faith intrigued me. Nnamdi intrigued me. I did not tell my friends that I had heard stories of his stealing money from his father, bribing test questions from teachers, getting drunk in town. Or that he never seemed to study or take exams. Or that he told the most charmingly transparent lies. Once, after he missed an exam, he said, ‘As I was walking to school, I tripped and broke my leg and had to be taken to hospital, but they mended the leg right away and so I didn’t need a cast or bandage. You can ask Ojay if you don’t believe me.’

Ojay, his friend, corroborated this story and added that he had taken Nnamdi to hospital himself. Years later, when Ojay told me that Nnamdi had died, I remembered how people used to taunt him and call him Nnamdi’s houseboy, Nnamdi’s errand boy. It was Ojay who delivered Nnamdi’s letters to me. It was Ojay who wrote them, too, until I refused to read any more unless Nnamdi wrote them himself. So in the following letters, I could see that Ojay had written in pencil first and then Nnamdi’s shaky hand in ink had carefully gone over every word. It was Ojay who brought Nnamdi’s red sweater and gave it to me one cold harmattan morning. ‘Nnamdi thinks you look cold,’ he said. And I slipped my arms, my self, into that huge red sweater and felt safe. When the bitter harmattan morning had given way to a sunny afternoon, I still wore that sweater. Never mind that sweat had collected in my armpits.

Before I went to the Champion office that June day, I knew Nnamdi was dead. Ojay had already told me some months before. ‘Something happened to Nnamdi,’ he had said. His eyes did not meet mine as he told me that Nnamdi had just been at the wrong place at the wrong time, that the operation was over, the armed robbers had finished stealing from the bank, but Nnamdi happened to have parked his car in such a way that he blocked their getaway. I didn’t cry that day after Ojay told me. It seemed so distant, so unlikely, and I had not seen him in years, but as I walked past Freedom Square I stared at the grassy plains where, during the weeks of ‘chasing’ me, Nnamdi once bought me a whole pack of suya at a bazaar and then ended up giving it to a friend because he was too shy to give it to me.

It was in the taxi from the Champion office that I began to cry. I thought about the last time I had seen him. It was at a beach in Lagos and he was riding a horse and we had not seen each other since his father transferred him to another secondary school. We were both self-consciously, unconvincingly mature about things at first. He said he was trying to get into the University of Lagos. I said I was preparing to take my final secondary school exams. He had not changed; the tall, thin body, the narrow face and hooked nose, the hoarse voice were all the same.

‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ he asked finally.

‘Yes,’ I replied, although I did not.

He had a girlfriend, too, he said, many girlfriends in fact. Before we parted, he added, ‘You can have as many boyfriends as you want to. But when it comes to marriage, it’s me and nobody else. God made you for me. If we marry other people, thunder will strike us down.’

We were no longer young teenagers, we were old enough to be truly separated by our different interests, but he spoke with that old earnestness on his face and I laughed.

On my birthday, the last birthday before Nnamdi left my school, he gave me a scented satin rose in a gilded case. I hid it from my mother: it looked expensive and I feared she would ask me to return it right away. Later, when he gave me a ring, with gold strips that curved across my finger, I hid that too and wore it only in school. But I did not hide the card he brought when I was sick with malaria. It looked like an ordinary get-well card, one of the many my friends had sent. When you opened Nnamdi’s card, though, it sang: an upbeat take on Für Elise. Inside the card, Nnamdi had written in his unformed, childish hand, ‘To my one love GB. From your own Nnamdi.’

In memoriam: Nnamdi Ezenwa

http://www.granta.com/extracts/3055

Postato da: treball a 08/01/2008 19:57 | link | |
testi, africa, letterature, international, multiculturalism

venerdì, 14 dicembre 2007
Come siamo buoni



Non potete farcela da soli. Abbiamo dedicato la nostra vita a voi. Venite qui, micetti

Binyavanga Wainaina
Internazionale 723, 13 dicembre 2007

"Secondo una statistica di una decina di anni fa, il quoziente d'intelligenza medio degli americani bianchi era 103. Quello degli americani di origine asiatica era 106. Quello degli ebrei americani era 113.

Quello dei latinoamericani era 89. Quello degli afroamericani era 85. Gli studi condotti in tutto il mondo arrivano più o meno alla stessa conclusione: 100 per i bianchi, 106 per gli asiatici, 70 per i subsahariani". Dall'articolo di William Saletan Created equal, pubblicato dalla rivista online Slate.

Ehi, micio? Sei un orfano? Sei sudanese? Sei ciadiano? Sei un abitante dell'Africa subsahariana che soffre di un leggero ritardo mentale? Sei una donna africana che soffre a causa di un maschio africano? Vuoi un biscotto della Oxfam? Antiretrovirali biologici? Sei stata violentata? Forse non lo sai, ma sei un orfano, un rifugiato. Possiamo portarne 103 in Francia per dargli un po' d'amore?

Possiamo anche allattarti. Possiamo fare di te un orfano del Darfur. Se sei nero e hai meno di dieci anni, vieni a parlare con noi. Vieni, micio, vieni. Possiamo salvarti da te stesso. Possiamo salvare noi stessi da noi stessi. Aiutaci a salvare tutto il mondo nero come fa Oxfam, aiutaci a farne un posto migliore.

Vogliamo darti più potere. No, tua madre non può farlo. Il tuo governo non può farlo. Il tempo non può farlo. Sembra che neanche l'evoluzione possa farlo. Né l'istruzione. E neanche il tuo quoziente di intelligenza può farlo.

Nessuno può darti più potere, tranne noi. E se non vuoi ascoltarci, i nostri cattivi, quei razzisti repubblicani-conservatori-cinesi-petrolieri verranno a prenderti: puoi scegliere tra il nostro compassionevole seno e le loro forze di mercato. Tra le nostra braccia compassionevoli sarai un vegano.

Elimineremo la tua impronta ecologica, il tuo testosterone, la tua dipendenza dalle religioni. Ti terremo lontano dai cattivi, cioè da tutti gli altri uomini. Noi non viviamo in armonia con la natura e scoreggiamo gas serra ovunque. Ti insegneremo a vivere senza scoreggiare gas serra.

Chiuderemo tutte le vostre fabbriche e costruiremo nei vostri parchi nazionali le nostre scuole biologiche progettate da Jeffrey Sachs, dove potrete restare in contatto con la natura, coltivare prodotti che non danneggiano l'ambiente, commerciare in modo equo e solidale con gli ecoturisti e ricevere ogni mese visitatori delle Nazioni Unite che batteranno le mani quando danzerete.

Invece delle fabbriche dove vi sfruttano, ci saranno botteghe Ubuntu dove potrete andare in perizoma biodegradabile a fabbricare gioielli di osso per persone compassionevoli che guadagnano un milione di dollari all'anno, vivono a San Francisco o a Città del Capo e per questo si sentono in colpa. Nel nostro mondo futuro avrete tre pasti equilibrati al giorno.

Ogni pomeriggio, Jeffrey Sachs verrà e insegnerà ai ragazzi come costruire un villaggio senza povertà e senza discriminazioni sessuali, dove tutto è in comune e dove i sentimenti umani più spregevoli – la lussuria, l'ingordigia e la competizione – verranno sviluppati in modo sostenibile nella vostra testa, accanto a idee veramente pericolose come quella di ribellione.

Dopo aver fatto qualche gioco non violento (come il salto della corda e il gioco degli abbracci), scriverete lettere ai vostri amorevoli genitori adottivi a Toronto. Per un'ora al giorno vi insegneremo a fabbricare vestiti, scarpe e capanne con i nostri tappi di bottiglia riciclati.

Abbiamo capito qual è il vostro destino osservando le persone e i bonobo che vivono in armonia nelle foreste e nei deserti, e vi aiuteremo a realizzarlo. Quando avremo finito, avrete tutti orgasmi multipli non sessisti, sarete pacifisti, danzerete e farete baldoria con vino di mango riciclato con l'aggiunta di erbe, che vi farà provare un improvviso e travolgente amore universale.

Alcuni di noi sono convinti che se rinuncerete all'industrializzazione e coltiverete erbe innocue, il vostro quoziente d'intelligenza aumenterà del 30 per cento, perché non assorbirete tossine. Altri pensano che, se l'alto quoziente d'intelligenza dell'occidente è insostenibile, è importante abbassare il livello d'intelligenza di tutto il mondo.

Qualunque sia la nostra opinione in proposito, pensiamo tutti che voi siate speciali. Se noi siamo scimpanzé, voi siete bonobo. Gli scimpanzé sono violenti perché sono più intelligenti dei bonobo.

Se alcuni di voi hanno il petrolio, vi aiuteremo noi a utilizzare questa risorsa – in modo sostenibile, naturalmente – per accendere le vostre eco-candele e per produrre olio di capelli a livello locale. Il resto del petrolio è cattivo, cattivo, cattivo. Lasciatelo stare (lo prenderemo noi).

Terremo alla larga i cinesi. Guardate come stanno soffrendo per aver abbandonato il buddismo. Permetteremo solo agli ecoturisti e ai turisti della povertà di visitare i vostri paesi.

Fidatevi di noi. Non potete farcela da soli.
Abbiamo dedicato la nostra vita a voi. Venite qui, micetti, venite dalla mamma.

Internazionale viale Regina Margherita, 294 - 00198 Roma
tel +39 06 4417 301 • fax +39 06 4425 2718 • email posta@internazionale.it
Copyright • Privacy © Internazionale

http://www.internazionale.it/firme/articolo.php?id=17832

versione originale:
Oxfamming the whole black world

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=326628&area=/columnist_wainaina/

related:
The power of love

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=277510&area=/
insight/insight__comment_and_analysis/#

Postato da: treball a 14/12/2007 18:30 | link | commenti (216) |
testi, africa, repetita iuvant, social, international, mad planet, multiculturalism, allusioni

martedì, 04 dicembre 2007
Oxfamming the whole black world



 “Among white Americans the average IQ, as of a decade or so ago, was 103. Among Asian-Americans it was 106. Among Jewish Americans it was 113. Among Latino Americans it was 89. Among African-Americans it was 85. Around the world studies find the same general pattern: whites 100, East Asians 106, sub-Saharan Africans 70.”
- “Created Equal” by William Saletan in Slate magazine

Binyavanga Wainaina: CONTINENTAL DRIFT   
Mail & Guardian, 03 December 2007

Hello kitty kitty kitty … Are you an orphan? Are you Sudanese? Chadian? Are you a sub-Saharan African suffering from mild mental retardation? Are you an African woman suffering from the African male? Would you like an Oxfam biscuit? Organic antiretrovirals? Have you been raped? You might not know it, but you are an orphan, a refugee. Can we fly 103 of you to France to be loved? We can breastfeed you. We can make you a Darfur orphan. Even if you are not. If you are black and under 10 years old, please come talk to us.
Come kitty kitty.

We can save you from yourself. We can save ourselves from our terrible selves. Help us to Oxfam the whole black world, to make it a better place.

We want to empower you. No, your mother cannot do this. Your government cannot do this. Time cannot do this. Evolution, it seems, cannot do this. Education cannot do this. Your IQ cannot do this.

No one can empower you except us. And if you don’t listen to us, our bad people, those RepublicanToryChineseOilConcessioningIanSmithing racists will come to get you: your choice is our compassionate breast or their market forces.

In our loving breast you will be a vegan. We will eliminate your carbon footprint, your testosterone, your addiction to religions. You will be kept away from bad bad people, like ALL MEN.

We don’t live in harmony with nature and we are farting greenhouse gases all over the place. We will teach you how to live without farting greenhouse gases.

We will shut all your industries and build our organic Jeffery Sachs-designed school inside your national parks, where you can commune with nature, grow ecologically friendly crops, trade fairly with eco-tourists and receive visitors from the United Nations every month who will clap when you dance.

Instead of sweatshops, we will have Ubuntu shops where you can arrive in biodegradable loincloths to make bone jewellery for caring people who earn $1million a year, live in San Francisco or Cape Town and feel bad about this. In our future world you will have three balanced meals a day.

In the afternoons Jeffery Sachs will come and show the boys how to build a gender-friendly communal anti-poverty village where all base human emotions - lust, greed and competition - will be sustainably developed out of your heads, along with truly dangerous ideas such as rebellion. After playing non-violent games (rope-skipping and hugging), you will write letters to your loving step-parents in Toronto. For an hour a day we will teach you how to make clothes, shelter and shoes out of recycled bottle tops in Ndebele colours.
We have learned from people and bonobos living in harmony in forests and deserts what your fate is and we will help you fulfil it. By the time we are done you will all be having non-sexist multiple orgasms, you will be pacifists (we make and market organic pacifiers), you will dance and make merry with stone-milled, recycled mango wines that contain herbs to make you experience sudden and overwhelming universal love.

Some of us believe that if you all abandon industries and grow gentle herbs, your IQs will increase by 30%, because you are not eating toxins. Others believe that if the high IQ of the West is unsustainable, it is important to lower the level of world IQs.
Whatever side we are on here, we think you are special. If we are chimps, you are bonobos. Chimps are violent because they are smarter than bonobos.

For those of you with crude oil, we will help you use this resource - sustainably, mind you - to light your eco-candles and to make locally produced hair oil. The rest of the oil is bad bad bad. Leave it alone (we’ll take it).

We will keep the Chinese out. Look how they are suffering because they abandoned Buddhism. We will allow only eco-tourists and poverty tourists in your countries.

Trust us. You can’t do it yourselves. We have dedicated our lives to you. Come kitties, come to mummy.

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=326628&area=/columnist_wainaina/

Postato da: treball a 04/12/2007 15:01 | link | commenti (1) |
testi, africa, repetita iuvant, social, racism, international, mad planet, multiculturalism, human rights

lunedì, 05 novembre 2007
Hot wheels



The art of mammy-lorry
painting offers keen insights into
the politics of ordinary Africans

Wole Soyinka
New Statesman, 1 November 2007

Let us visit the realm of a specialised art form that some might refer to as "naive art". It is certainly not the kind of artistic production that attracts much criticism, deriving from the stress and strain of proletarian existence. It is an art that is familiar to the African continent, west, east, or central, and a genre that I have always considered more profoundly political than much of the art that is born of western middle-class radicalism. While post-colonial ideologues argue over what is committed or uncommitted in art, these artists appear never to have been in any doubt.

I often describe this genre as "mobile murals", or travelling illuminated manuscripts - to borrow from the work of those medieval monks of Europe who spent their lives decorating divine manuscripts for the edification of the faithful and seduction of unbelievers or sceptics. Most Africans have certainly seen them; several more have even travelled in them. I assume that you have never been knocked down by one of them or you would not be here reading this today. They exist also in Latin America. Often brash, crude, exhibiting an untutored draughtsmanship and flaunting bizarre colour sensibilities, they are nonetheless statements of great political astuteness, pithy comments on day-to-day realities as well as aspirations.

I am not the first to have remarked upon the trenchant politics of these popular art forms. The Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah constructed his scatological narrative, including his choice of a title, around one such inscription in his famous novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Those who have read that novel, or have simply travelled on West African roads, will certainly have deduced from that final clue the kind of mobile mural I have in mind. Ayi Kwei Armah's title was taken from an inscription on one of the locally built transport lorries that are variously known in Ghana as "trotros", or in Nigeria as "mammy-wagons", "bolekajas" or "danfos".

Their inscriptions have formed the subject of quite a few monographs on culture and social mores, as well as coffee-table publications. The inscriptions on these trucks are often taken from proverbs, expressions of traditional wisdoms, soundbites from the most unlikely sources, wrenched from their original contexts - which may vary from Shakespeare (one favourite is Julius Caesar) to the Bible or the Quran, not omitting Indian, western or kung fu films, or even a commercial jingle heard on television. The Quranic inscriptions sometimes appear in Arabic, the Arabic script being a favourite not only for what it actually says, but for the attraction of its calligraphy. But it does not matter in what language it is written - Ewe, Twi, Yoruba, Igbo or Hausa; the calligraphy is, literally, a blinding piece of art. The more complex pieces have accompanying illustrations which help the illiterate to understand immediately what social comment is being made.

A favourite and eloquent image is of David routing Goliath in single combat with a reinforcing inscription: "Ewe nla ko ni ru wewe", which translates as "The big leaf shall not crush the small". We shall return to that saying in a moment, though not much comment is necessary to grasp its political message: the championship of the "little man", the powerless citizen, with whom the painter clearly identifies. The idioms of action in some of these paintings are as fascinating as they are unpredictable; these are artists of the modern world. Don't think David armed with a slingshot - no, you are more likely to encounter our diminutive champion directing a Bruce Lee flying karate kick at the neck of Goliath, with that unfortunate giant buckling at the knees and staggering backwards.

I have always considered these murals as instructional, open-air panels on sociopolitical ethics. I have proposed in the past that African leaders should be compelled to ride the length and breadth of the country over which they exercise power in one of those mammy-wagons, with a booklet of the inscriptions, preferably changing conveyance every twenty kilometres or so. Not only would they acquire a very real lesson in "how the other side lives", they might begin to understand that these crude inscriptions express the world-views of their companions in the rickety, tumultuous, and often fatal, contraptions. They would experience the environment over which they preside as "the other side" does, with all the bumps, corrugations, filth, edge-of-survival commerce, raucousness, uncertainties, real-time tragedies and petty triumphs, but, above all, a resilience that is often the sole surviving element as society itself collapses. In short, they would experience not only "how the other side lives", but how it dies.

Sample a few of these inscriptions: "No Telephone Line to Heaven"; "Chop [eat] small, no quench [die]" - or its variant "Chop small, quench small; Chop big, quench big". There is the fervent prayer to the responsibility of elders (this might have a special resonance for European and American Green campaigners for clean air and pro tection of the ozone layer): "The young shall grow." This is a direct admonition to those with political and economic power to remember that there are generations after them who also deserve a place in the sun.

I wish to pause over the saying "Ewe nla ko ni ru wewe" - "The big leaf shall not crush the small". You have to concede to the anonymous originator of that saying a gift of observation and the political wit to transfer the lessons of nature to the social arena. It is utterly graphic and trenchant. The phenomenon of creativity, we know, is closely related to the ability to yoke together separate, and even seemingly incompatible, matrices. This is the essence of satori, the moment of illumination when a mundane event unveils profound truths of the nature of things.

Here is my own fictional reconstruction of the political satori that led to the extended poetic image in that Yoruba saying, "Ewe nla ko ni ru wewe". I picture a farmer, taking his rest under a banyan-type tree. A broad, fleshy leaf detaches from its moorings and zigzags gently down. Unlike Newton's apple, it does not smash against his head but, indeed, settles down on a smaller leaf without so much as dislodging or bruising the latter. Cut to some power tussle in the community, perhaps his feudal chief using his position, influence and resources to smother the aspirations or appropriate the entitlements of another peasant, perhaps of that very observer. His thoughts are: "Look at that leaf. Yes, it is larger, heavier than the other, higher up in the hierarchy of leaves, but look at the way it simply occupies the same space, settles on the smaller one gently, protectively."

In that moment, he espies the ideal in governance, the responsibility of the more powerful towards the weaker: to protect it. The immediate yoking of two matrices, nature and politics, offers us a good example of the creative tension that is the true nature of art. It may extend into other creative modes, as it is appropriated by the urban transport worker as the motto of his own existence, painted on his rickety truck - which is how you and I, travelling along the coast of West Africa, first encounter it.

Easy to understand why it remains my favourite, maybe a neck-and-neck rival of that other inscription, "No condition is permanent." These two vie for primacy in my political reckoning. Some African leaders actually dare to suggest that democracy is a concept alien to traditional African society. This is one of the most impudent political blasphemies I can think of. You can debate, analyse, reify or mystify that ideal called democracy as elaborately as you wish. But, simply place your average citizen in a Nigerian motor park with public transportation vehicles decorated with dozens of these inscriptions, and ask that worker or peasant to point out a single item that accurately defines democracy for him. The odds are he will point at that lorry bearing the inscription: "No condition is permanent." No condition is permanent. The unparalleled Shakespeare played numerous dramatic variations on that theme, yet even he did not quite transmit its essence to us in those memorable words. But then, there were no trotro lorries in the Elizabethan age.

© Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka will be participating in the Freedom and Culture International Creative Forum at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1, on 10 November, as part of the "Passage of Music" season marking the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. For more information, log on to: www.passageofmusic.org.uk

http://www.newstatesman.com/200711010032

Postato da: treball a 05/11/2007 20:02 | link | commenti |
testi, africa, repetita iuvant, social, letterature, international, multiculturalism, allusioni

 

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