Another mixture of music from the continent and diaspora with Batuk’s kudoro sounds, South African house from Kid Fonque, Nao, Mizan, Szjerdene, IDEH and JONES bringing in soulful R&B,
New tunes from Major Lazer who teams up with British-Ghanaian artist Fuse ODG, whose fellow countryfolk Lady Jay and Sarkodie spit fire on the Kuvie produced Venus, OMI’s new dance track – a follow up to his massive hit Cheerleader,M.anifest’s uber chill latest single featuring Bisa Kdei, and a self-love anthem from Santigold. Kranium’s Moonlight comes off his recently released project that makes for the perfect set of dancehall love songs, with production by Riky Blaze and LMR Pro.
But the stand out track for me comes in the form of a droned out remix of Snakehips’ brand new tune All My Friends featuring Tinashe and Chance the Rapper by NorthPoleChill. The original, produced by the London duo, is a catchy soon-to-be hit held together by a steady drumbeat, choral-sounding chorus and Tinashe’s complementary vocal delivery.
And of course, I can’t stop raving about the kid Sipho the Gift and his debut album Coming of Age, and he kills it on his track Come Thru.
“The Quiet Storm”…What is it exactly? And how did this concept of radio programming come about? Well….according to urban legend, it was a Disc Jockey by the name of Melvin Lindsey who developed this particular radio show format at Howard University’s radio station (WHUR-FM) back in 1976. I first became aware of this format when I was a young lad growing up in Chicago (around the age of seven) sittin’ in front of my GPX boombox to record songs off the radio. And usually around ten or eleven o’clock, the slow jams or “the quiet storm” shows would come on. The DJ of the hour would play any & every slow jam from whomever was hot at that time: Anita Baker, Freddie Jackson, Midnight Star, Atlantic Starr (keep in mind that this was during the mid-1980’s). But, then the DJ would dig deeper & pull out those slow jams from the ’70’s. And those are the ones that I really dug. The ones from Marvin Gaye, Teddy Pendergrass, Rose Royce…and, of course, ANY slow jam from the Isley Brothers’ catalog. Over the years, however, I started appreciating the more slicker slow jams from the mid-part of the 80’s. Maybe because they weren’t as bad as I thought…or maybe it’s because most of the so-called “R&B” slow jams of today are…trash (that’s the only polite word that I could come up with while I was writing this). Some of the tunes on this episode have become “quiet storm” standards over the years on radio stations in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles & worldwide. And the others have become some of my personal favorites. And, to me, they sound better when the sun goes down. But, I’ll let you be the judge of that. Enjoy….and stay tuned for “side 2”, DIG?
(A Poem With Substance But Without Form / It Made Itself As It Went Along)
“There is never any end. There are always new sounds to imagine, new feelings to get at. And always there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we’ve discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are. In that way, we can give to those who listen the essence, the best of what we are. But to do that at each stage, we have to keep on cleaning the mirror.”
—John William Coltrane
i am not certain what i am writing, where this task will take me, why and from whence the words stream forth, even what impels me to open my skin to the radiation from a computer screen–my style is such that i now reach for a keyboard before a pencil or pen, there is a sensation pleasingly tactile for me in tapping the keys, tactile in the same way i have heard others who don’t like computers describe the manual motion of noting, the heft of the fountain pen, ink flowing, or the scrape of graphite as the pencil marks the page, you can actually hear the pencil point swoshing bumpily over the paper without benefit of the liquidity of ink to smooth its moving—but i write anyway because beyond the creativity, the profession, the hosannas i sometimes receive for something i’ve written, beyond the mundane, exploration itself is exciting, especially when i am exploring what is presumably the known yet is ever changing and never accurately charted, when i am uncovering the interior me.
who—or should i say what writer, what serious artist?—does not know the self, has not examined closely, with or without aid of some kind of mirror, the mind being the chief reflector, but really candid talks with lovers, children, parents and lifelong friends giving a more true image, talks when words just tumble forth without the constraint of consideration weighing them, those freewheeling conversations where we actually say everything, withhold nothing, and leave with our mouths atingle, sort of like a sip of carbonated water rinsing away whatever taste was already there. what i’m saying is that—i mean what i’m writing, it’s just that for me writing is a form of “saying,” a textual sounding of what i feel or think or both—anyway, what i’m trying to get to is not only the old saw about the unexamined life not being worth living, i am going further, i am blowing trane’s tune when trane spoke about keeping the mirror clean, that’s what i want: unrelenting honesty with myself, the facing of all my foibles and fantasies, my accomplishments as well as my failures, especially my omissions when, for whatever reason, i lay back when i should have propelled myself forward. the exploration of the self is the intrepid journey, or at least one would like to think of oneself as being intrepid in investigating the self, but isn’t it true that if there is one spirit we all fear it is the shadow self, that part of us which usually goes unexamined, the persona whose face we deign not kiss for fear our lips land on the warty countenance of the frog that croaks inside everyone of us, the frog, the secret-knowing, fly-eating, maladjusted, toad-ugly, anti-social night creature who resides at the bottom of our personality wells, splashes around in our deepest water and just waits, just waits…
Repost: The comment section of the original post has grown too long and is still pretty active, so I am closing its comments and reposting here.
“Africans sold their own people as slaves” is a stock argument White Americans use when the subject of slavery comes up.
First, simply as an argument of fact it fails:
Africa was not a country. Africans were not selling “their own”, they were selling their enemies, just as the Greeks and Romans once did. Africa, then as now, was made up of different countries. They were no more selling “their own” than, say, “Europeans” were killing “their own” during the Holocaust.
And it overlooks a few other things:
Most African countries did not sell slaves and some even fought against it. But because Europeans back then could control the supply of guns there was little Africans could do to stop it.
The Transatlantic slave trade was on a much greater scale than anything the Africans or anyone else ever did in the history of slavery. Countries were destroyed and millions died. Over 12 million were sold in less than 400 years, something so huge that it changed the genetic map of the world.
The Transatlantic slave trade was racist. The African slave trade, for all of its other ills, was not that. Neither was the Greek and Roman slave trade. So slavery in places like Haiti, Barbados and America was much more cruel.
As a moral argument it fails too:
It uses what I call the Arab Trader argument: it excuses an evil of one’s own past by finding the same sort of evil done by others. Whites sold slaves, but Africans and Arab traders did too! Which, morally speaking, is at the same level as an eight-year-old saying, “He did it too!” when caught doing something bad. We do not accept this argument from eight-year-olds, nor from bank robbers or wife beaters. “Africans did it too!” is no better.
But it is as a derailing argument that it comes into its own:
Its main purpose is to draw attention away from what whites did by turning the tables. That part of their past makes White Americans uncomfortable. But instead of facing up to it, they have built up defences against it:
Africans sold their own people as slaves.
Africans are still selling slaves.
Arab traders sold slaves too.
Slavery goes back thousands of years.
All races have practised slavery.
Whites stopped slavery.
My family never owned slaves.
That was Ancient History.
You are living in the past.
Get over it!
It was the times.
Slavery did not make economic sense.
Whites got to where they are by their own hard work
Blacks are better off in America than in Africa
Africans were savages.
And on and on.
Why not just face up to it? Because part of their sense of self worth is built on being white and how whites are better than everyone else, particularly blacks. But it is a huge lie, a lie that can only be maintained by not looking at their past – and present – squarely and honestly.
Abducted as a child, forced to kill, Jose has a dream one night and decides to risk everything to act on it. These are the true casualties of war. Please share his story.
In her Los Angeles debut, Nigerian-American artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby brings her large scale works on paper, which combine collage, drawing, painting, and printmaking, fusing African and American influences and creative traditions, to the California gallery.
(Njideka Akunyili Crosby: “Nwantinti”)
Reflecting on contemporary, postcolonial African cosmopolitanism and her experiences as an expatriate living in America, her intimate paintings provide an important counter-narrative to the often troubled representation of Africa’s complex political and social conditions.
When: 03 October – 10 January 2016 Where: Hammer Museum
“ruby onyinyechi amanze
/ Salt Water”
at the Goodman Gallery,
Johannesburg, South Africa.
For this exhibition, amanze’s large-scale drawings foreground her concern with metamorphosis and imagination as a lense through which multiple and often, disparate layers of meaning, histories, and forms can be simultaneously read.
According to amanze, her work is “as much about beauty and make-believe, as it is a commentary on cultural hybridity” and it “isn’t social science, it’s magic-realism and the power of drawing to invent worlds for ourselves.” SALT WATER offers a metaphor through which to understand the oddity, absurdity, subtlety and power of elements that naturally co-exist in the world.
Ghanaian multi-disciplinary artist Serge Attukwei Clottey, who has, over several years, worked across a variety of mediums including painting, photography, performance, sculpture and installation, roots his art both in matters of deep self-reflection, as it relates to his experiences and immediate environment, as well as in the freedom of expression that experimentation brings.
Centered on the seemingly mundane yet complex relationship that exists between plastic gallons often sighted in his hometown of Labadi, Accra, for his project The DisplacedClottey recycles and recontextualizes the use of these waste hazards into a larger cultural narrative that are symbolic of trade and transportation along the Atlantic Coast.
The exhibition explores the idea of man in nature and includes works by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Verne Dawson, Peter Doig, NS Harsha, Alice Neel, Chris Ofili, Celia Paul, Tal R, Sarah Sze, Kara Walker, and Francesca Woodman.
When: 13 October – 14 November 2015 Where: Victoria Miro
“Alex Majoli & Paolo Pellegrin:
Another Congo”
at Art21, Lagos, Nigeria.
Magnum photographers Alex Majoli and Paolo Pellegrin, both Italian, exhibit their photojournalist works taken throughout the Democratic Republic of Congo.
When: 02 November 2015 – 07 November 2015 Where: The NEST Gallery
“Dis place” at
MoCADA, New York, USA.
Dis place, a play on the word ‘Displace’, maps the somatic, psychological and infrastructural violences that have become markers of displacement within the contemporary African Diaspora, from the perspectives of those living in its throes. Displacement, or a state of being rooted in uprooted-ness, is a consequence of colonial conquest in Africa and the Americas that has come to frame dominant perceptions of diasporic identity and nationhood.
(Mohau Modisakeng)
The exhibition features a collection of multimedia works by artists Aisha Tandiwe Bell, Kudzanai Chiurai, Mohau Modisakeng, Valerie Piraino, Sable Elyse Smith and Ralph Ziman, who render visible the power relations produced by and through displacement.
Vertigo Sea, which had its premiere at the 2015 Venice Biennale, the 56th International Art Exhibition All the World’s Futures, is a three-screen film installation that forms a meditation on man’s relationship with the sea: on the role of the sea for migration, in war and conflict, for the history of slavery and colonization. Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick and Heathcote Williams’ Whale Nation are two literary points of reference.
The presentation at Bildmuseet marks the first time Ghanaian visual artist John Akomfrah’s work will be shown in Sweden, before touring other future venues.
When: 25 October – 17 January, 2015 Where: Bildmuseet
“Awol Erizku: New Flower
| Images of the Reclining Venus”
at The FLAG Art Foundation,
New York, USA.
Hosted at the 10th floor gallery at New York’s FLAG Art Foundation, New Flower | Images of the Reclining Venusis the first presentation of Ethiopian artist Awol Erizku’s series of portraits taken in Addis Ababa in 2013.
The photographs, depicting women who work as sex workers in the Ethiopian capital, were conceptualized by Erizku’s attempt at challenging the mythologized art historical role of the Venus and the odalisque in Western painting, setting these tropes against the reality of one of the largest concentrations of sex workers in Africa.
A Constellation traces connections among twenty-six artists across various generations, all of African descent: eight who emerged in the mid- to late twentieth century, and eighteen younger artists whose works are being shown at the Studio Museum for the first time. The artists in the exhibition embrace a broad range of conceptual approaches. The works in the Museum’s collection serve as material and conceptual anchors exploring themes of the figure, formal abstraction, economy, African diasporic history and materiality. Newer works expand on these themes and prompt an intergenerational dialogue in visual space.
(Like A Pregnant Corpse The Ship Expelled Her Into The Patriarchy – Nona Faustine)
Artists in A Constellation: ruby onyinyechi amanze, Elizabeth Catlett, Torkwase Dyson, Melvin Edwards, Nona Faustine, Aaron Fowler, David Hammons, Ayana V. Jackson, Tony Lewis, Al Loving, Hugo McCloud, Troy Michie, Sondra Perry, Julia Phillips, Adrian Piper, Faith Ringgold, Andy Robert, Andrew Ross, Cameron Rowland, Betye Saar, Tschabalala Self, Talwst, Torey Thornton and Jack Whitten.
A photography exhibition with work from Andrew Tshabangu, Sabelo Mlangeni, Musa Nxumalu and Dean Hutton – five South African photographers from different generations, ON FIREbrings together various aspects of social life such as spirituality, identity, immigration, family and LGTBI life, their visual approaches document, question, reveal and/or reinterpret in different ways the notion of “community” in the specific context of the “Rainbow Nation”.
When: 24 October – 07 November 2015 Where: Grimmuseum
“Selections from Revelations”
by Kudzanai Chiurai at MoCADA,
New York, USA.
In Selections from Revelations, Zimbabwean artist Kudzanai Chiurai chronicles the rise of a fictitious African leader through a satirical lens, and constructs environments that feed the Western imagination about the state of the contemporary African continental politics.
When: 17 October 2015 – 17 January 2016 Where: MoCADA
“Kongo: Power and Majesty”
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, USA.
Aimed at radically redefining our understanding of Africa’s relationship with the West, Kongo: Power and Majestyis a presentation of that will features 146 works drawn from more than 50 institutional and private collections across Europe and the United States, “reflecting five hundred years of encounters and shifting relations between European and Kongo leaders.”
The exhibition claims to “focus on one of the continent’s most influential artistic traditions, from the earliest moment of direct engagement between African and European leaders at the end of the 15th century through the early 20th century.”
“To Be Young Gifted and Black”
Curated by Hank Willis Thomas
at the Goodman Gallery,
Cape Town, South Africa.
Nina Simone had an energetic and rousing approach to her seminal art which flexed all angels of being black in her time and beyond. The To Be Young Gifted and Black Exhibition at Johannesburg’s Goodman Gallery lends Ms. Simone’s song and motif in portraying the vibrancy of youth and complexity of being an artist of color in today’s world.
Visual artist and Curator Hank Willis Thomas brings the paintings, photographs and mixed media installations of 19 artists together in celebrating and probing the ideology of unrestricted expression among young artist. The exhibition is part of the ongoing Working Title series by the Goodman Gallery. It opens on Saturday September 26, 2015 and runs till October 24, 2015 in Johannesburg.
The artists whose work will need on display include: Nina Chanel Abney, Derrick Adams, Sadie Barnette, Zoe Buckman, Bethany Collins, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Omar Victor Diop, Titus Kaphar, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Yashua Klos, Gerald Machona, Toyin Odutola, Ebony Patterson, Adam Pendleton, Jody Paulsen, Tabita Rezaire, Jacolby Satterwhite, Shinique Smith.
When: 26 September – 11 November 2015 Where: Goodman Gallery
“Moffat Takadiwa: Foreign Objects”
at the Tyburn Gallery, London, Uk.
The first solo exhibition by the Zimbabwean artist in the UK, Foreign Objects includes a range of installations made of discarded and recycled goods, and that engages with issues of material culture, identity and spirituality as well as social practice and the environment.
The wall-hung sculptures in the exhibition are symbols of the cultural dominance exercised by the consumption of foreign products in Zimbabwe and across the African continent. Due to the country’s ongoing economic stability, from the change in currency to the obsoletion of much of the local economy, imported goods have become symbolic of the shifting power struggles within Zimbabwe, resulting in the uneven distribution of economic and cultural power across the country.
Greatly influenced by the Argentine semiotician Dr. Walter Mignolo’s scholarship on ‘coloniality’ and modernity, Takadiwa’s work is an explicit challenge to contemporary governments whose pledges on indigenous empowerment are failing to come to fruition.
When: 5 November 2015 – 9 January 2016 Where: Tyburn Gallery
“Retrospective by Jodi Bieber:
Between Darkness and Light:
A Mid-Career”
at the Iziko South African National
Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa.
South African photographer Jodi Bieber’s retrospective exhibition includes close to 100 photographs from eight of Bieber’s key projects, and shows a selection of works from both celebrated and rarely seen independent series.
Spanning 100 years of portrait photography in West Africa through nearly 80 photographs taken between the 1870s and the 1970s, In and Out of the Studio: Photographic Portraits from West Africa, the exhibition seeks to expand our understanding of West African portrait photographs, by rendering the broad variety of these practices and aesthetics. It juxtaposes photographs, postcards, real photo postcards, and original negatives taken both inside and outside the studio by amateur and professional photographers active from Senegal to Cameroon, and from Mali to Gabon.
(image: Seydou Keita)
These works, many of which are being shown for the first time, are drawn from the Metropolitan Museum’s Visual Resource Archives in the Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, with additions from the Department of Photographs. Among them are renowned artists, such as Seydou Keïta, J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, and Samuel Fosso, and lesser-known practitioners who worked at the beginning of the century, including George A. G. Lutterodt, the Lisk-Carew Brothers, and Alex A. Acolatse.
These photographers explored the possibilities of their medium, developing a rich aesthetic vocabulary through revealing self-portraits, staged images against painted backdrops or open landscapes, and casual snapshots of leisurely times. Regardless of their unique place in the history of photography in West Africa—from the formality of the earlier studio poses to the theatricality of Fosso’s fantasies—the sitter’s self-assured and unabashed presence fully engages the viewer.
“Zanele Muholi:
Somnyama Ngonyama”
at the Stevenson,
Johannesburg, South Africa.
In contrast to her previous bodies of work that featured portraits of LGBTQI South Africans, for which she has become well known for, Zanele Muholi’s new exhibition of photographs sees the artist turning the camera on herself.
Taken in different locations whilst travelling in South Africa, America and Europe, Muholi describes this process as one of self-discovery. Through this series, we see and experience the many ways she imagines herself, experimenting with different characters. Muholi portrays herself in a highly stylised and performative language that references the history of black and white fashion photography.
When: 19 November – 19 December 2015, 4 January – 29 January 2016 Where: Stevenson Johannesburg
“Zanele Muholi: Vukani/Rise”
at the Open Eye Gallery,
Liverpool, England.
Four of Muholi’s projects will be presented across Open Eye Gallery’s three exhibition spaces, accompanied by audio/video interviews and statements from those featured in Muholi’s work.The exhibition is the first major presentation of Muhli’s work in the UK.
Faces and Phases (2006–15) is an ongoing series of work, a collection of powerful portraits that not only highlight the importance of representation and stories of LGBTQI individuals in South Africa, but that Muholi embarks on a journey of “visual activism” to ensure black queer and transgender visibility.
ZaVa (2013) focuses on Muholi’s relationship with her white partner, and brings the notion of making the private public to the fore.
(ZaVa, Amsterdam, 2014)
Brave Beauties (2013-2014) is a series of 12 black and white photographs celebrating looking at the body – and the experience of being seen. Stylish, coy, subtle and proud, the gay and transgender men present a personal vision of themselves to the compassionate lens of Zanele’s camera.
(Eva, Somizy and Kat. photo shoot took place in Parktown, Johannesuburg on the 12th April 2014. Photo: Zanele Muholi)
Mo(u)rning (2014) evokes death but also suggests the cycle of life as morning follows night. Life and death, love and hate are themes that run throughout her work. Tragic loss is addressed in this series, the persecution of a community and the coming together to remember those who have passed.
For her exhibition at Victoria Miro Mayfair, Walker is showing a selection of preparatory drawings, sketches and models related to the production of Vincenzo Bellini’s two-act opera Norma she directed and art directed for Teatro La Fenice.
Her production moved the action from Roman Gaul to an unnamed west or central African colony under European subjugation in the late 19th century. The drawings and other studies show the artist’s detailed working process. The selection includes a number of works in pastel and watercolour, and demonstrates Walker’s facility with colour and line.
In celebration of his book of the same name, Paris-born Cameroonian photographer’s ‘Route du Jazz’ exhibition is currently on show at the Onomo Hotel in Bamako, Mali, and will be exhibited at the Durban Art Gallery in Durban, South Africa.
Featuring images, interviews and historical pieces, Kwa traces the history of jazz music to its African roots to its spread and evolution throughout the African diaspora.
Dates: 21 May 2015 – 06 January 2016 Where: Onomo Hotel
“50/50” at The New Church Museum,
Johannesburg, South Africa.
50/50 is a collation and juxtaposition of historical and contemporary works, all viewed through a responsive, documentary lens. As these repetitions and recognitions accumulate over time they come to bear on signifiers such as monuments, monumentality and iconoclasm, secrets and lies, the rise and fall of ideas, culture, cultivation, movement and mobility.
(Kemang Wa Lehulere)
Artists on show: Avant Car Guard, Willem Boshoff, Kudzanai Chiurai, David Goldblatt, Dumile Feni, Randolph Hartzenberg, Samson Kambalu, Kemang Wa Lehulere, David Mogano, Robin Rhode, Cecil Skotnes, Sue Williamson
The exhibition features 8 new paintings, which marry canonical imagery with contemporary references to blur fact and fiction, challenge cultural hierarchies, and offer alternate narratives. It also includes Bowland’s first major installation: a transformational bramble of US dollar bills folded into origami roses that twist throughout the gallery on barbed-wire stems, underscoring the dangerous allure of wealth and power.
Bowland’s paintings construct an anachronistic world dense with symbolic imagery. She employs a variety of sources, from the artistic production of the early modern Deccan plateau of India, to post-Renaissance European paintings, to today’s fashion magazine spreads. In this maelstrom of references, Bowland’s subjects bear the weight of complex power struggles, reckoning with enduring issues of race, gender and agency.
Composed of artifacts from the Schomburg collections that are connected to Afrofuturism, black speculative imagination and Diasporan cultural production, Unveiling Visions: The Alchemy of the Black Imaginationis a sci-fi and fantasy lover’s dream that aims to offer a fresh perspective on the power of speculative imagination and the struggle for various freedoms of expression in popular culture.
(Manzel Bowman)
The exhibition showcases a range of multimedia, from illustrations, film posters, fiction, comics, literature, memorabilia and other graphics that highlight those popularly found in science fiction, magical realism and fantasy.
When: 1 October – 31 December 2015 Where: Schomburg Center
“Esther Mahlangu 80” at the
Irma Stern Museum,
Cape Town, South Africa.
In celebration of internationally renowned Ndebele artist Esther Mahlangu’s 80th birthday on 11 November 2015, the artist will lauch a solo exhibition, Esther Mahlangu 80, at the UCT Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town, South Africa. The exhibition will comprise of recent paintings and three-dimensional works.
Ghanaian architect David Adjaye presents a series of curated textiles from West and Central Africa, all textiles from the museum’s permanent collection, in the latest installment of the Selects series.
The exhibition is the 12th in the ongoing series, in which prominent designers, artists and architects are invited to mine and interpret the museum’s collection.
Dates: 19 June – 14 February 2016 Where: Cooper Hewitt
“Beauté Congo – 1926-2015
– Congo Kitoko”
at Foundation Cartier Pour L’Art
Contemporain, Paris, France.
With an emphasis on the rich cultural heritage of contemporary popular culture painting in the Democratic Republic of Congo from the 1920s onward, and also including other creative expressions such as music, photography, comics, sculpture and other mediums, this exhibition– which includes 350 works from 41 Congolese artists – seeks to highlight the country’s extraordinary cultural vitality.
Dates: 11 July – 15 November 2015 Where: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
“Zina Saro-Wiwa:
Did You Know We Taught Them
How to Dance?”
at Blaffer Art Museum,
University of Houston,
Texas, USA.
Centered on the relationship between the people of the Niger-Delta and their surrounding environment, largely tarnished by neglect from the Nigerian government and pollution from oil companies, Nigerian-British filmmaker and artist Zina Saro-Wiwa’s first solo exhibition at the Blaffer Art Musuem includes a series of video installations, photographs, and a sound installation produced in the Niger Delta region of southeastern Nigeria from 2013 to 2015.
The series cultivates strategies of psychic survival and performance, underscoring the complex and expressive ways in which people live in an area historically fraught with the politics of energy, labor and land. The exhibition uses folklore, masquerade traditions, religious practices, food and Nigerian popular aesthetics to test art’s capacity to transform and to envision new concepts of environment and environmentalism.
Dates: 26 September – 19 December 2015 Where: Blaffer Art Museum.
“Syd Shelton: Rock Against Racism” at Rivington Place, London, England.
Between 1976 and 1981, the movement Rock Against Racism (RAR) confronted the growing racist ideologies in streets, parks and town halls all over Britain.
(image: Syd Shelton)
Formed by a collective of concerned and affected musicians and political activists to fight fascism and racism through music, we revisit this pivotal time and radical period in post war British history and 20th century race relations through the first major exhibition of Syd Shelton’s photographs.
Dates: 2 October – 5 December 2015 Where: Rivington Place.
Explore the ART and EVENTS pages for more art and happenings around the world.
The grandson of a Congolese prophet, Armand Diangienda gathered musicians to glorify God. They have toured on three continents. CREDIT ILLUSTRATION BY JOSH COCHRAN
When Armand Diangienda picks up an instrument that he has never played, he looks for its hidden rule. There is always a rule, just as in math: a principle that tells him that when he plays one note, or one chord, the next one naturally follows. His fingers mimic how he’s seen others handle the instrument, and then they find the patterns themselves, gaining assurance on the strings, or keys, or valves. “I thank God for that talent, because I can just look at someone playing and I can figure it out,” he said. That skill enabled Diangienda to learn piano, guitar, cello, trombone, and trumpet, and it was crucial twenty years ago, when he started the Kimbanguist Symphony Orchestra, in Kinshasa, the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
On a muggy recent evening, he walked to the orchestra’s practice room, a few steps from his office in the compound that contains his family home and the church he helps lead. Dozens of men and women, including young teen-agers and middle-aged mothers, sat in plastic chairs and shared music stands that held the score to the “Marseillaise.” In keeping with church tradition, everyone was barefoot, and Diangienda slipped off his sandals as he passed through the door. Wearing a blue-and-white striped shirt and beige pants, he settled on a stool facing the musicians and wiped sweat from his brow. “Are you listening to me?” he called out. Musicians leaned into one another, talking and exchanging tips; the sounds of horns and strings clashed as players warmed up. The space was cramped; an oblong yellow-and-beige room with plastic flowers adorning the walls, it had transparent doors that let in a weak breeze from a courtyard. A small crowd from the church was watching outside. “I want us to be very focussed,” Diangienda said. “If someone feels this is not going to work, just tell me, ‘Papa Armand, this is not going to work,’ and I’ll find something else to do, because I’m a realistic person.”
Outside the compound, Kinshasa is a city perpetually under construction and in motion. Many intersections have no traffic lights, and so Kinois, as the residents call themselves, cross first with a few tentative steps and then at a full sprint. Venders dodge cars and buses as they hawk Ya Mado and Ndombolo CDs; music stalls blast Congolese pop—springy, guitar-driven rhythms made for dancing. One day, on the congested Avenue Kitona, I watched a man in a pin-striped suit elegantly balancing a bass in the midday sun. Soon afterward, a kid leaped toward my car window to try to grab my phone.
The city is divided into moneyed enclaves like Gombe—where the well-off live and where many Kinois work—and the cité, where everyone else resides. In the cité, people live nearly on top of one another, in a noisy, sleep-defying maze of eateries, bars, hair salons, street venders, churches, and shops. Diangienda lives in a quarter called Ngiri-Ngiri, near a vast market that sells meat and vegetables alongside electrical and plumbing parts.
The orchestra used to practice in a hall in town, but that arrangement fell through, so Diangienda’s home has become a conservatory and a practice hall, a place where music and singing are always heard. Diangienda never attended music school, and most of his musical knowledge comes from his childhood church. But Héritier Mayimbi, the concertmaster, told me that he was tireless: “He works only for musicians and his orchestra. He does nothing else.”
Diangienda has the look of a favorite uncle: a broad, genial face, with close-cut hair, a slightly grayed mustache, and an attentive manner. At the podium, he put on a stern expression. “Food is not going to come from Heaven like it did for the children of Israel,” he said. “Do not expect such miracles. People are making and inventing things of many kinds; you and I have chosen music. What I can’t stand is people saying that I’m not going to rehearse; I’ll just come for the concert.” He reminded the musicians that the French Embassy had invited them to perform, during a week of events promoting French economic and cultural activity in Kinshasa. “The compositions we are playing are becoming more and more complicated,” he said. “When you come here, some may come on time, but they take too much time chatting with others, and take more time laughing instead of rehearsing.” Everyone erupted into laugher. Diangienda allowed himself to smile.
He called out to Mayimbi, “Héritier, will you gather the strings to rehearse?” Mayimbi, short and slender, with a lisp, was floating in the black suit that he sometimes wears to rehearsals. He nodded. Diangienda held up his baton, and they began to play.
Diangienda was born fifty-one years ago, on the same land he
lives on now. His old house has been torn down, replaced with
a renovated family home and church—a sprawling concrete
building painted in the Kimbanguist colors of green and white
and surrounded by a green metal fence. In the orchestra’s general
office is a large portrait of Simon Kimbangu, the founder of the
sect and Diangienda’s grandfather: full face, hefty build, serious
but kind eyes. Kimbangu, who advocated a new African version
of Christianity, was regarded by his followers as a prophet
anointed by God. In 1921, the Belgians put him in prison, and
thirty years later he died as a martyr there, but his movement
only gained strength, and it now has about eight million
adherents throughout central Africa.
When Diangienda was born, his father had retired from civil administration for the colonial government and was helping to lead the church. His mother took care of the family’s seven children and ran a small business selling spices, doughnuts, and other goods. They were middle class, not rich but stable, and the church provided an enveloping community; Kimbanguists follow strict rules, which forbid alcohol, tobacco, visiting night clubs, and other licentious entertainment. Even while his parents were away, travelling the country’s horrible roads to visit branches of the church, there were always adults around—relatives, family friends, church members that his parents took in when they fell on hard times.
Shy and introverted, Diangienda clung to his older brother
Samuel, who had learned to play piano by watching their father
play. Diangienda started the piano, and then the guitar, picking
out church songs. It was an unsettled time in Congo. After the
country gained independence, in 1960, a promising leader,
Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated with the complicity of the
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Joseph Mobutu, who had
helped plan the coup, soon took power. He banned all political
parties and installed a kleptocracy, in which he and his cronies
stole so shamelessly that the country’s public infrastructure
began to collapse.
When Diangienda was fourteen, his parents sent him and Samuel to study at a Christian boarding school in Belgium; some of his siblings had already settled in Brussels. “It was difficult to leave my parents’ home,” he said. “There was the joy of discovering something new, but we were also afraid, because we were wondering, What if we have no money, what are we going to do?” At school, they lived, studied, and ate in the same building; it was “like a small prison,” he said.
Diangienda understood that one day it would be his duty to serve the church. But, for now, he was interested mostly in flying. “The first time I conjugated a verb in the future tense in French, I said, ‘I will become a pilot,’ ” he recalled. When he graduated, he wanted to go to flight school in the United States, but his father refused. “Sometimes he said yes to things, but we knew him so well that we knew yes was a no for him,” he said, laughing. So he moved in with his older sister in Brussels and enrolled in a flight school there, attending class when he could afford it. In his free time, he played drums in a reggae group called Burning Ashes, and toured around the country, once opening for UB40 in Brussels. “Most of our songs were just spreading our message, which was peace, love, brotherhood,” Diangienda said. Bena Nsilu, a pastor who knew him at the time, said that Diangienda has always been driven, even when it came to spreading peace and love.
At twenty-six, he got his father’s approval to study at a flight school in Florida. What he liked most about being up in the air was the sense of control, and the discipline. Everyone was serious—otherwise you would end up on the ground. He enjoyed Florida, but after he got a commercial license he moved back to Kinshasa. “I had more chances of finding a job here, and I knew my country needed me,” he said. He married a childhood love and began piloting planes for TAZ airlines. The runways in the region were little more than strips of dirt, so he flew DC-3s, which could land anywhere. “It wasn’t the United States, but it was fun,” he told me.
In 1991, rioting soldiers destroyed TAZ’s offices and hangars, and
Diangienda lost his job. He got a new one at Scibe Airlift, and
then the brakes of a plane he was co-piloting failed on the runway
and he barely escaped crashing. Later, another pilot, flying a plane
that Diangienda normally flew, crashed near the eastern city of
Goma, killing everyone on board. Diangienda, with no plane to
fly, lost his job again, and he couldn’t find any more work as a pilot.
The orchestra began almost as a fluke. Diangienda, unemployed, was devoting his time to the church, and, as he thought of ways to make things better, he sat in his cramped but cozy home office, listening to CDs of classical music which he had brought home from the United States. Music has always been central to Kimbanguist worship. The church’s founder was an amateur flutist, and he and his followers believed that songs came to them through divine inspiration. They also had a repertory of songs from outside. During the colonial era, Catholic seminaries and missionary schools had taught European church music, translating choral hymns into Kikongo, the language of the Bas-Congo region, where most Kimbanguists come from. In one collaboration between a Belgian friar and Congolese musicians, the Latin Mass became the Missa Luba. Kimbanguist services were set to the soundtrack of flute-and-drum groups and brass ensembles, big-sounding bands meant to be heard from miles away.
“Their members would many times just play on the street for weddings, baptisms, or other religious ceremonies,” Kasongo Kapanga, a professor of Francophone studies at the University of Richmond, who grew up in Congo, told me. “They would parade in the cité. They became part of the musical landscape, and they added an ethical dimension to it, because music is part of their worship and discipline.”
Diangienda admired Handel, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky, and didn’t see why he couldn’t get the musicians he knew to play that same stirring music. With an accompanying choir, an orchestra could be a new means of fulfilling his spiritual mission. “At the beginning, the intention was religious,” he said. “The orchestra was the best way for me to do what my father always wanted me to do, which is to gather people together.” He also wanted to elevate the profile of his church. He knew that an orchestra would be impressive: Congolese had never seen their countrymen playing this music on this scale.
He recruited musicians from the church’s flute and guitar groups and from its band, and organized those who knew the rudiments of music to teach novices. Although Diangienda declared the orchestra open to anyone, nearly all the members came from the church. “When you start such a project, you need to be with people who share the same beliefs, because such projects require a lot of resources,” he said. “I found those people within our community.”
It wasn’t hard for Diangienda to attract people to the cause. His
parishioners see him as a teacher and a counsellor, part of the
key to their salvation. In any case, they listened mostly to
devotional music, and for many of them Handel seemed less
foreign than the music spilling out of the city’s bars. Diangienda
welcomed to the orchestra ushers, members of the church Scout
groups, security guards, whoever was interested.
“We mainly considered it Western music, but we thought it was a good idea that he was bringing something new from his time living abroad,” Seth Matumona, the secretary-general of the orchestra, said. Matumona, a forty-nine-year-old who works as a program assistant at the Swedish Embassy, had practiced English with Diangienda after he moved back from Florida, and the two were close. The idea of an orchestra seemed a little strange; no one had an orchestra. But if they were doing it for fun, without any expectations, why not?
Diangienda’s mornings are reserved for his “normal life,” apart from music. His children run into his bedroom for blessings, he visits with his wife and other relatives, and sometimes he watches science and history documentaries. In his office, where he works for the church, heavy dusk-colored curtains face a desk crammed with markers, pens, CDs of operas and classical music, a laptop, Bibles, a framed photograph of his father, and stacks of papers from parishioners—résumés, plans for projects—that they have asked him to bless. In 2002, the church underwent a leadership dispute, and Diangienda, along with sixteen of Kimbangu’s other grandchildren, formed an independent branch, taking with them several thousand followers. It’s part of his “inheritance” to pray for people who have come to tell him their problems, and give advice and encouragement. “We live in a tough country,” he said. “People sometimes need strength to continue living and not lose hope, and we’re here for that.”
Congo, a vast place that is home to some eighty million people, suffered centuries of exploitation by traders from East Africa and Portugal, Belgium’s King Leopold II, and the Belgian government—a succession of predators looking for slaves, ivory, and rubber. After independence, the Congolese struggled to build a functioning nation. During Mobutu’s tenure, a common joke imagined a constitutional provision—Article 15—that gave officials the right to solicit bribes and to steal. People in the church try to forget those years. Seth Matumona used to work for Mobutu’s extravagant, brutal shell of a government, but he claims to have forgotten exactly what he was assigned to do, and no one asks.
Mobutu was ousted in 1997, at the beginning of a series of conflicts with neighboring states that have raged intermittently for two decades, devastating millions of lives. Mobutu, seeking to prevent internal uprisings, kept state institutions powerless; successive leaders have done little to rebuild them, leaving Congolese to fend for themselves. The current President, Joseph Kabila, leads a weak administration, which has effectively ceded control of much of eastern Congo to militias. The government routinely tortures political dissidents. Recently, as the nation began preparing for Presidential elections next year, Kabila tried to extend his stay in office by pushing a bill in Parliament that required a national census before the next vote—a daunting feat in a huge country with rudimentary roads. Thousands of young Congolese took to the streets for four days in January to protest. Before the bill was abandoned, security forces killed dozens of protesters and arrested others.
Musicians and artists, like most of Congo’s citizens, receive little support from the country’s institutions; in Kinshasa, it is impossible to get a bank loan to open a small business, let alone a cultural venue. Congolese create anyway, despite the difficulties of living in a broken state. Yoka Lye, the director of the National Institute of the Arts, told me, “Art and music in our country are another way of breathing for people—another way of resisting.” The Congolese have long invented spaces in which they take refuge from the trials of their lives: exorbitant rent, overstretched public transport, no jobs, negligible social services. Many older people find their breathing room in the church. Younger ones distract themselves by taking part in sports leagues or in subcultures like la sape, in which men adopt dandyish clothes and aristocratic manners, parading through the streets in outlandish but immaculately tended suits.
Nathalie Bahati, who has been playing flute in Diangienda’s orchestra for nineteen years, told me, “When I pick up my instrument and start playing, I forget everything. It takes away all my difficulties.” A soft-spoken single mother of two, she works as a seamstress. Other players in the orchestra are teachers, market venders, electricians, doctors, or nurses; some are students. Most originally saw the orchestra as something to do along with other church activities but came to appreciate the music on its own merits. Mananga Ndudi, a music teacher who plays the French horn, said that performing “makes me pure.”
Membership in the orchestra has spread through families. In the early days, Diangienda enlisted Albert Matubanza, a science teacher and a church guitar player, to play in the orchestra and to instruct rookie musicians. Matubanza taught himself the violin, and then the bass. Looking for other players, he turned to his wife, Josephine Mpongo. “He asked me, ‘Why don’t you learn to play an instrument?’ ” she recalled. Mpongo, an animated, open woman, with her hair pulled back in a bright scrunchie, told me that she had grown up singing in the church choir. “I thought, Why not, let’s give it a try,” she said. She selected the cello and fell for it quickly. She quit her job as a nurse and started a business that gave her more time to refine her playing; her shop sells curtains, clothes, cosmetics, and home goods. During my visit, her family was staying at a cousin’s house, having been forced to move because of an increase in the rent. But she had made sure that her son—a thirteen-year-old named Armand, after Diangienda—had strings for his violin.
When the orchestra started, instruments were scarce. Most musicians got them from abroad, by a circuitous route. When Congolese asked relatives in Europe for money, sometimes the relatives instead shipped over valuable objects that they had around the house—which might include a castoff violin or clarinet. “People had them at home, not knowing what to do with them,” Matumona said. When they heard about the orchestra, they brought the instruments to sell to the new players. “It was very tough finding instruments’ spare parts, so we would manufacture them on our own,” Mpongo said. String players went to the National Institute of the Arts and collected discarded bows. Some musicians made their own instruments; Matubanza, the bassist, took his bass apart to see how it was made, and then cut out patterns from paper, which he laid on sheets of wood as a guide in cutting. When the percussionists needed chimes, they tested pieces of scrap metal until they found that the wheel rims from a minibus produced a pure-sounding D natural.
Sometimes the players shared instruments, taking shifts during rehearsals. Once, Mpongo told me, an alternate violin player took a rival’s bow and hid it in his shirt before a performance. When the violinist who was supposed to perform opened his case and saw that the bow was missing, he got up to look for it—and the alternate slipped into his seat, said, “Oh, I can play,” and pulled the bow out of his shirt.
After six months of individual training, then another six of rehearsal, the orchestra gave its first concert, at the Palais du Peuple, the pale, columned Parliament building in downtown Kinshasa. Diangienda played the cello, which he had just learned, and Matumona played the flute, with about sixty other amateur musicians. “Several choirs were singing, and we were the surprise—no one expected us,” Diangienda told me. They played church songs, a piece by Joaquín Rodrigo, Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.” The audience watched with curiosity, and then with approval. “I remember, after playing the first song, the reaction of the audience was encouraging,” Diangienda told me. In the best seats, officials from Mobutu’s government listened attentively; behind them sat church members and choral-music fans. “It was a great evening,” he said. “People told me that this was what was missing in the church.”
In the beginning, only a fifth of the audience at the concerts was black, and some Congolese complained that classical music put them to sleep. Mayimbi, the violinist, said, “They used to tell us it’s not African music, it’s not our culture.” Mayimbi rejected that idea. What was Congolese music, anyway? Even Congo’s best-known music, its effervescent version of rumba, incorporated influences from the Caribbean, Europe, and the rest of Africa.
The music that the orchestra was playing had a complex legacy in Kinshasa. Under colonialism, knowing the classics was a way to present yourself as évolué—of adhering to a system of behaviors that the Belgians considered “evolved.” The évolué colonial citizen spoke perfect French, knew the right fork to use at dinner, dressed in European fashions, and refrained from dancing expressively or listening to Congolese music in public: he disguised nearly everything that made him Congolese.
After Mobutu took power, he enforced a policy of “authenticity”—a rejection of colonial values that obligated his citizens to embrace local cultures. (When Mobutu’s soldiers grew angry during periods of no pay, he sent a band to play Congolese rumba for them.) Western pop was discouraged, but classical music lingered, mostly in the church. For decades, the main radio station in the country, run by the government, played classical and church songs after public figures died. When Mobutu’s wife died, the station kept up a musical elegy—Beethoven, Verdi, Mozart—for days.
Serge Bango-Bango, an interpreter and an occasional musician, told me that some Kinois were initially skeptical of the orchestra: they saw it as church music, not as something you’d listen to for pleasure. Many early performances took place at churches, weddings, anniversaries, and events held by nonprofits and by foreign embassies. Diangienda called the venues concert halls, but they were really just rooms, whose acoustics weren’t intended for instrumental music. The musicians held free concerts outdoors, begging dance clubs nearby to turn down their music during performances. Still, they were excited. They had taught themselves and were already teaching others. People in the audience were often astonished, less by the sound of the music than by the ambition of the orchestra: Congolese performing in a difficult, exclusive genre. “Classical orchestras have always been considered music of a certain social class, which requires lots of training and a lot of money,” Diangienda told me. “And we have proven that we could do it.”
In 2008, Diangienda, Mayimbi, and the principal violist were invited for an internship at a conservatory in Evry, in the southern suburbs of Paris. They were nervous and curious; they wanted to compare themselves with French musicians, and to learn. After German filmmakers made a documentary about the orchestra, “Kinshasa Symphony,” a few of the musicians went to Germany for a screening and a performance, and German musicians came to Kinshasa to give workshops. More European tours came, and they went to California, playing at a TED conference and with Peter Gabriel at a private concert in Malibu. “People are surprised because we’re all black,” Matumona said. “If there was one white guy as a maestro or musician, they would say, ‘O.K., it’s because that white guy is there—that’s where it all comes from.’ ”
The orchestra developed a pre-tour ritual, in which the members all head to a rambling farm that Diangienda’s family maintains outside Kinshasa. For a week, they eat, pray, and rehearse in an intense boot camp, sometimes taking breaks to work on construction projects and feed the livestock. In 2014, they travelled to the U.K. to perform with several ensembles, including the BBC Concert Orchestra, in a tour of English cities. “When we went to London, they just looked at us,” Mpongo recalled. The Congolese musicians settled in awkwardly next to their English counterparts. They thought that the two groups would be practicing together, but instead the English gave them a piece to play, in order to judge their abilities. “We were almost a hundred black orchestra members, and they really wanted to see what our level was,” she said. “When we played, they were satisfied.” During the tour, the Congolese musicians received guidance, and occasionally instruments, from their European colleagues. One of the Congolese, Johnny Balongi, told me, “As a self-taught bassoonist, I wanted to see what a professional musician could do. I was jealous of their training, because in Congo there are no other bassoonists outside of the orchestra.” As they played in the commingled groups, some of them nodded and smiled, as if to say, “So this is how the piece should sound.”
Mpongo viewed the European players’ skill with equanimity. “They started very young, from childhood,” she said. “Here, I wake up at four, I take the kids to school around five, I go to the boutique around six or seven, and the whole day I spend in business, and then in the evening I go to rehearsal, so my head is loaded with so many things. Abroad, they only play music from morning to evening. Of course the performances cannot be the same. But we have improved a lot.”
One evening in December, the orchestra celebrated its twentieth anniversary with a concert at the Béatrice Hotel, a towering structure of glass and taupe brick near the Gare Centrale, the site of a defunct train station and a fountain commemorating Congo’s independence. Inside, the musicians, dressed in black suits and dresses, set up their stands in a cavernous room with a deep-red carpet and a gaudy chandelier.
“Are you afraid?” Diangienda asked them from the podium. “Forget the audience; just pretend we’re playing by ourselves, for ourselves. Don’t look at the people, look at me.” He becomes so anxious before their performances that he has nightmares about an audience waiting impatiently as the orchestra scrambles to get ready, or about going to a concert and forgetting his suit.
The players were restless. “We were wondering whether the guests were going to be there, if it would be good—it was like planning a wedding,” Mpongo, the cellist, said. Diangienda and Matumona no longer allow the orchestra to play for free; they are trying to raise money for a music school they want to build. Tickets that night were a hundred dollars, and the banquet hall was almost full, with an audience that was more black than white. People sat in rows of straight-backed red-and-gold chairs; children in church clothes squirmed in their seats.
The orchestra’s success has inspired copycat groups. The other Kimbanguist church branch now has an orchestra of its own. “They’re not as good as us, though, so it would be difficult for us to play together,” Mpongo said. These days, the orchestra often supplements its programs with compositions by Diangienda, who describes his music as “classical with an African touch.” He knows that this kind of synthesis appeals to foreign audiences; when Peter Gabriel invited the orchestra members to play, it was at least partly because of the novelty of their origins. But, Diangienda said, “I cannot compose if I don’t bring something from my own identity.” Recently, at a funeral, he heard a band from the Tetela ethnic group, and he was attracted to the percussion, a two-note pin pin sound. Now he was tooling around with the keyboard on his iPad, trying to integrate it into a piece. “We have a lot of variety in Congolese music,” Diangienda told me. He mimicked the songs of the Luba people, undulating phrases built on a five-note scale—like the black keys of a piano but with pitches bent to suit the emotion of a phrase. “I’m trying to find out how to bring out the particularities of our cultures within the compositions. I believe the classical composers of Western music brought the influences of their environments into the music, and I’m wondering how I can follow the same path.”
A decade ago, in the traffic circle outside the Béatrice Hotel, Congo’s culture minister had erected a statue of King Leopold, suggesting that his countrymen temper their memories of the horror of the colonial era. There was an intense outcry against the celebration of a génocidaire, and, hours later, the government removed the statue; the minister said that it had been put up as a “trial to see if the concrete could support the weight.” Now, inside the hotel, Diangienda’s musicians saw a more natural blending of the Congolese and the European. Mayimbi, the violinist, told me, “Of course we have borrowed classical music from the Western cultures—but then what are we doing with it?” Mayimbi, who also composes for the orchestra, told me that when he listens to Beethoven he can hear a way to weave in Congolese rhythms.
The junior orchestra opened the program, and then the main group played, intently working its way through Schubert, Gounod, and Bizet. When Diangienda conducts in rehearsal, his feet lift off the floor, his knees dip and rise, and then the movement goes through his hips, ending in his hands. He sings the players’ parts aloud, snapping his fingers from side to side, swaying and clapping. During the performance, his face was serene, as he mouthed notes, sometimes slipping into a smile, eyes watchful. After each piece, the crowd applauded enthusiastically.
When the concert was over, the audience chanted, “Encore, encore!” The musicians turned and asked their fellow-players how they felt about the performance. People approached Diangienda to give praise, and he greeted them smiling and bowing his head. “Music has become, for me, a way of communicating,” he said later. “It’s a way of expression, sharing my wishes, my ideas, with other people, and an internal strength for me to continue moving forward.”
Since 2013, half a dozen musicians have left the orchestra: some won the U.S. visa lottery; others took on time-consuming jobs or had children. Now there are eighty performing musicians and a hundred and five singers in the choir. Rehearsals are not easy; the musicians can be unfocussed, because they are preoccupied with worries from their real jobs and their personal lives. But, Diangienda said, “without money, without making any false promises to people, without people understanding exactly where they are going, for them to be patient enough to be here after all these years”—he stopped, shaking his head. “And seeing what is happening—it is a great success.” ♦
W hat makes a good #basketball movie?
Check out these films to find out…
(l to r) Andre Braugher in PASSING GLORY; Darnellia Russell in THE HEART OF THE GAME; art for SNEAKER STORIES – courtesy of Hank Willis Thomas
Welcome back! As I mentioned in part one, with the 2015 NBA Finals currently happening, and the ongoing anticipation that the long-awaited biopic of Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, the first Black player of the NBA, will go into production this year with actor Wood Harris (The Wire, Above The Rim) as the lead, we felt it would be the ideal time for a focus on basketball films.
As “Yes! No!! Why?!?” traditionally highlights lesser-known fare, some of the obvious films like Love & Basketball, Hoop Dreams, Blue Chips, or even Cornbread, Earl & Me (“They killed Cornbread!) will not be highlighted, but we did profile Above The Rim, Heaven Is a Playground, and (ugh) Thunderstruck in part one, and have more goodies for you now.
PASSING GLORY (1999)
This made-for-television movie has a trailer that restores my faith in a basketball movie being worthwhile. It has an extreme advantage though: Andre Braugher. Advantage number two is his booming voice taking over the entire narrative, with co-star Rip Torn accompanying his measure.
A 1960’s Civil Rights Movement period piece, Passing Glorycenters on Joseph Verrett (Braugher), a Jesuit priest in New Orleans who teaches history at local Black-student attended St. Augustine High School. An ardent believer in education, he balks at being offered the position of basketball coach, but eventually accepts. Seeing the confidence playing basketball gives his team, Verrett tries to set up a game between his unbeaten team and the undefeated Jesuit High all-white prep school team, and this is where the main tension of the film takes place.
This true story of New Orleans’ first integrated basketball game may come off a bit milquetoast, but the trailer/commercial isn’t as heavy handed as similar television and feature film fare promote themselves. The supercharged 1960’s soundtrack helps of course, but so does the lack of pity displayed. There’s a strength and confidence to it which mirrors Verrett and his team and so sells this movie quite well.
Passing Glory was also directed by Hoop Dreams director Steve James, so it has an even higher pedigree to it. Also, actor/producer Harold Sylvester (best known as Griff from Married, With Children), the film’s screenwriter, played basketball for St. Augustine and was the first African-American student to receive an athletic scholarship from Tulane University. He would graduate from Tulane in 1972 with a degree in theater and psychology. He also appeared in the 1979 basketball comedy Fast Break, starring then TV comedy “it-man” Gabe Kaplan from Welcome Back, Kotter, basketball player Bernard King, and Michael Warren (Heaven Is a Playground). Laurence Fishburne also has a cameo, and I believe its him right HERE.
So yeah, I give Passing Glory a big YES!
THE HEART OF THE GAME (2005)
High school sports documentaries tend to take on a special significance in the hearts and minds of the viewer given the often fresh-face idealism of the youth involved, especially following the success of 1994’s Hoop Dreams, the pinnacle of the genre.
The Heart of the Game follows a similar tone to Hoop Dreams, but instead of focusing on two male players in the inner city it shifts to Seattle, Washington to follow a coach and star player and coach of high school female basketball team the Roosevelt Roughriders.
Darnellia Russell is said star player, full of natural yet nurtured talent for the game, and recruited right out of the junior varsity team to varsity in her freshman year. Alongside her is Coach Bill Resler, a tax law professor at the University of Washington who is recruited a few years earlier to direct the team. He often tells them to think of their opponents as prey, using animal themes to motivate them and gets his team just short of winning the state championship, largely thanks to Russell’s talent. By her junior year, Russell herself receives multiple letters of interest from major university basketball programs…but then becomes pregnant by her longtime boyfriend.
Yikes.
The film’s major drama involves Russell’s attempt to return to the team following her daughter’s birth, and her re-enrollment being blocked by a local sports association who contend that students can only play for four years, unless a hardship is involved. Russell’s lawyers alternatively contend that her pregnancy is such a hardship, and legal battle begins.
The trailer is exciting and condenses all the film’s major themes into a taut two minutes. It puts on full display Resler’s and Russell’s personalities, giving the audience a perfect look at why they are leaders. And it does not shy away from expressing that race may be a motivating factor for Darnellia Russell being blocked from playing the sport she finds the most passion from. Director Ward Serrill, who followed the Roughriders for six whole seasons, deservedly received major adulation for Game, and continues to work steadily as a documentary filmmaker.
So I give The Heart of the Game an enthusiastic YES! (two previews in a row!)
Before we go, we must give some Honorable Mentions to other standout basketball films:
Sneaker Stories (2009), is a documentary taking place in Vienna, Brooklyn and Accra as three basketball players – Adrian, Karl and Aziz – struggle to find a place for themselves within an international cycle of control and commodification. Trans- global in execution, and smartly directed by Katharina Weingartner sans talking heads to break up the thoughts and actions of each young man as they deal with how their dreams conflict with the business reality of the game they love so much.
Rebound: The Legend of Earl “The Goat” Manigault (1996), an HBO film of the titular real-life character whose drug addiction ruined his 1960’s basketball career, but who returned from prison to help his Harlem community. Aside from covering the storied Manigault, the film succeeded in turning working actor Don Cheadle into one of the most sought-after thespians of this generation.
Coach Carter (2005), while very much a studio film, makes this list because of the stand the titular character takes in this dramatization of a true story. Samuel L. Jackson portrays high school coach Ken Carter who benched his undefeated team after they broke his academic standards contract. While it is full of many familiar basketball movie and television tropes (bad attitude players, pregnant girlfriends, drug dealing close friends/family), the performances by Jackson, Rob Brown, Rick Gonzalez, Antwon Tanner, Robert Ri’chard, Debbi Morgan, and Octavia Spencer carry it through.
Also, check out my write-up on the powerful doc Lenny Cooke.
Go Man Go (1954) is a hard to find film about Abe Saperstein and his founding of The Harlem Globetrotters. It gets a mention here simply because of this really cool clip of a young Sidney Poitier as one of the film’s characters playing basketball in a swimming pool. Pretty cool.
++++++++++++ Curtis Caesar John is the Film Editor for Bold As Love Magazine. He
also covers film and culture for Limité Magazine as well as for Shadow
And Act, for which he created the regular feature ‘This Week in Black
Television.’ He is born, raised and resides in Brooklyn, NY, of course.
Follow him on Twitter at @MediaManCurt.
Date TBC May 2016University of Sheffield, Interdisciplinary Centre of the Social Sciences (ICOSS)
‘The Battle of Algiers at 50: Legacies in Film and Literature’ is a one-day symposium organised by postgraduate students from the University of Leeds and Sheffield from the fields of Francophone studies and Geography. The symposium will offer a transdisciplinary platform for bringing together researchers at all stages in their careers who are interested in transcultural politics, literature and film, with the specific objective of considering the legacy and the futures of the anti-Colonial epic The Battle of Algiers 50 years since its release in 1966.
The formative effect that The Battle of Algiers hashad on cinema in North Africa cannot be underestimated. It has largely been celebrated as an accurate and balanced depiction of violence during the battle of Algiers, and by extension, the Algerian War for Independence (1954-62). However, The Battle of Algiers is a film that has led many afterlives which transcend national and cultural borders. Both celebrated as an anti-colonial epic and example of Algerian nationalist heroism, the film, conversely, has also been held up as a document of French military expertise. The Criterion Collection’s 2004 re-release of the film in the United States demonstrates the constantly shifting status of the film on the global stage, featuring commentary from contemporary directors such as Spike Lee, but also interviews with counterterrorist experts in ‘The Battle of Algiers: A Case Study’.
This symposium is a unique opportunity to consider how these various legacies of The Battle of Algiers continue to inform understandings of Algerian history, but also influence perspectives on political violence and national identity throughout North Africa and beyond. What does it mean to consider the film as a ‘case study’ in terrorist and counterterrorist activities? How can we think about film as an alternative historical narrative of decolonization? In what ways has Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers influenced cinema and the arts in Algeria and beyond?
Confirmed Keynote
We are delighted to welcome Dr Jamal Bahmad from the University of Leeds as the keynote speaker.
We particularly welcome proposals for papers which explore the following areas:
The spectacle of political violence
Colonial legacies in film and literature
Memories of colonialism and anti-colonialism
Postcolonial and/or transcultural cinema(s)
‘Accented’ cinema
Transvergent filmmaking
Gender in revolution
Queer perspectives on the nation
Alternative histories in the arts
The screen as veil
Please send abstracts for papers (300 words) to Alex Hastie, Beatrice Ivey and Takfarinas Abdiouene at batailledalger50@gmail.com by the 15th January 2016.
While the principal language of the symposium will be English, the organisers welcome contributions in French and Arabic.
Writing is an expression that serves to elaborate how we feel, and its beauty can convey messages and information we dare not speak. Indeed, writing prose is an art, an art that very few possess. It is said that words have the power to transport you to another place, in another time. Do you believe you possess the power of painting with words? Is writing a favourite hobby of yours, or an essential form of self-expression? Have you been plying your friends with stories you have written? And do you teachers take you time in class to quote and praise your essays?
Are you tired of reading out your stories to your younger siblings, or the kids you babysit after school? Are you craving the fame of winning a competition with your remarkable writing progress? Look no more, we have just what you need!
NO ENTRY FEES!
We are organizing a Annual Writing contest, and each and every one of you is invited. There is absolutely no eligibility criteria, provided you can write well, that is all we need. Furthermore, there is no entry fees, you do not have to pay us anything to take part in the contest. However, we will only allow one writer to apply one paper at a time. All submissions must be made before the deadline has passed.
We will provide you with a platform where you can outshine your abilities and, make the first step towards establishing yourself as a literary genius. We have a profound appreciation for the talents of writer, and we aim to root out the writers in every house, and encourage them to participate in our contest which will assist them in analyzing their writing abilities and motivate them to make serious considerations about their future.
Now, let us discuss some of the basic requirements that you need to know regarding the rules and regulations of the contest.
Guidelines
You are required to write an essay consisting of 900-1000 words, following the MS Word Format. All work must be composed in English language, and you are required to mention all your contact info on a separate page. We a have strict policy against plagiarism and we advise the candidates to refrain from engaging in plagiarism, as we will thoroughly examine each essay to ensure that the writers have produced original content. Your essay will get disqualified if it is suspected to be plagiarized. Remember, make sure to provide us with an essay that has not been published before, so even if you are an employed blogger or writer, we want you to provide us fresh and original content.
Topics
Is globalization good or bad?
Should animals be used for research?
Should Video Games Be Considered a Sport?
How Should Children Be Taught About Puberty and Sex?
Are Children of Illegal Immigrants Entitled to a Public Education?
Can Money Buy You Happiness?
Should Marijuana Be Legal?
Should Students Be Required to Take Drug Tests?
Should Euthanasia Be Legal in Every State?
Do Poor People ‘Have It Easy’?
How to apply?
You can apply for the contest using the simplest and easiest methods, it’s only a matter of few clicks! All you have to do is to upload your paper with the title “Essay Writing Contest” below.
Judging
Upon submission, your essays will be evaluated by our highly qualified, renowned and competent team of writers, who will grade you according to the work you have produced.
Deadline
Submissions are accepted till March 10, 2016. 11:00 PM UCT
The winners will receive e-mail notifications by March 20, 2016
Prizes
The winners will be awarded prizes, the 1st winner will be awarded $500, and the 2nd runner-up will be given $300 while the 3rd runner-up will be awarded $100.
And that’s not all, the top 10 contestants will be reviewed and shortlisted to receive a job offer from us!
So, don’t hesitate, and join us to win the most coveted writing contest of the season, which will not only assist you in getting recognition as a writer, but may also serve to advance your career possibilities.
