To tell you the truth, I hadn't heard of Jacqueline Novogratz until a couple of weeks ago when someone invited me to a talk she was giving in San Francisco about her book "The blue sweater: Bridging the gap between rich and poor in an interconnected world". I had only vaguely heard about Acumen Fund, the non-profit that she founded about eight years ago. The blue sweater is a collection of stories that she started writing back in 1996 about her lifelong quest to understand global poverty and find new ways of tackling it, which she started writing while she was visiting Rwanda 10 years after working and living there.
The topic of the book intrigued me and after coming across a review calling it a "visionary" book, I decided to go to the talk. There were only about a dozen people at the bookstore where the event was taking place, in spite of being located in a shopping area of San Francisco, and they all seem to know Novogratz personally. She read two chapters of her book in a soft and nervous voice, something surprising for someone that is used to speaking in front of big audiences at the some of the world's most prestigious conferences. One of the stories was extremely sad, about a young woman she met in Rwanda named Honorata who lost her beloved twin sister during the 1994 genocide. The second story had a very different tone, and described how one day after work in Kibera (a township in Nairobi, Kenya) she was sitting in her car with frustration while it was pouring rain outside. Then an old woman tapped on the window and completely changed her mood - if you want to know what happens, I've uploaded the audio of her reading of the story, which is only 3min long.
The atmosphere of the book reading was almost intimate, and Novogratz words seemed genuinely filled with emotion. From her stories I gathered that although she seems quite shy and calm, even frail, she is quite the opposite. I have the impression she has had a very intense life in which she has accomplished a lot of things. Now Acumen Fund, with its bottom-up approach to development and its notion of patient capital, has become a model to follow to end poverty without creating dependence. I learned later, after googling her a bit, that Jacqueline Novogratz is quite a celebrity in the development world, and that she is one of the people responsible for changing traditional charity and old-fashioned aid.
She concluded her talk by these hopeful thoughts:
When systems are broken there is no better time to reinvent, to re-imagine and to innovate. There is such a groundswell of excitement and enthusiasm in the next generation, who don't want to just make money for its own sake but really want to use their skills and the resources they have to change the world. And that gives me great hope that together we really can. I'd like to leave you with a final thought, that I hope is in every page of this book: dignity, in the end, is so much more important to the human spirit than wealth, and if we could truly could create a world that extended the global economy to each and every one of us so that we could make our own choices and our own decisions, then we would see a world of dignity. Not only for the poor, but for each and every one of us.
I'll most definitely read The blue sweater at some point, but in the meantime I've been watching her talks at the TED conference in 2006 and 2007. Here's the first one, in which she tells the story of the blue sweater she had as a kid, the story that gave the title to her book.
It seems that right after I published this, TED posted Jacqueline Novogratz latest talk at their annual conference, I'm guessing from last February. In it she talks about the definition of "poor people" in development through the story of a woman she met in Kenya, and I recommend watching it too (it's only 7 minutes). But do watch this one below:
The World Affairs Council of Northern California is, according to their website, the largest international affairs organization on the West Coast of the US. Apparently it was founded by community leaders in 1947 out of the interest generated by the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945, and their mission is "to engage the public in the exploration of international issues and opportunities that transcend borders". Although it is on my street only a couple of blocks away, somehow I had never attended one of their events until last week for the screening of the documentary film Pray the devil back to hell.
Pray the devil back to hell is about the role of a group of women in ending Liberia's 14-year civil wars in 2003. They had suffered for too many years, and most importantly had seen their children suffer for too many years (war is all their children had known), and so they decided to get together and do something about it. The main narrator of the story is Leymah, who brought all the women of the Christian churches together into a group called the Christian Women's Initiative and began issuing a series of calls for peace. As the president of the Liberia Female Law Enforcement Association, a policewoman named Asatu was invited to the launch of the Christian Women's Initiative. She was so moved by what she heard that she stood up and pledged to mobilize the Muslim women of Liberia to help bring peace to Liberia. And she did, creating the Liberian Muslim Women’s Organization. Liberian Mass Action for Peace came into being when the two organizations joined. It was the first time Christian and Muslim women had worked together in Liberia.
Eventually thousands of women - ordinary mothers, grandmothers, aunts and daughters, both Christian and Muslim - came together to pray for peace. Then they decided to pressure the government publicly, by rallying every day at the market in front of the Presidential Palace. Wearing white t-shirts and signs with messages such as "Women are crying for peace" or "Our nation needs peace", they stood day after day, rain or shine, bullets or no bullets, demanding peace.
After ignoring them repeatedly and refusing to meet with them, they finally forced then President Charles Taylor to receive them and to promise to attend peace talks in Ghana. A delegation of the women then traveled to Ghana to continue to apply pressure on the warring factions during the peace process, which stalled for several months. In the end, the women got so frustrated with the lack of seriousness of the peace negotiations, that they locked all the delegates inside the meeting room and refused to let them go until they reached some agreement.
When the Peace Accords were finally signed and Charles Taylor was exiled to Nigeria, the women were satisfied with what they achieved but had no intention to continue their civil society work. One of them said "peace is not an event, it's a process", and so a lot needed to be done still for the peace to stick. A clear example of the importance of civil society came when a UN Peacekeeping Mission was created in Liberia and they started the DDR process (disarmament, demobilization and reintegration), not listening to anyone because they were the "experts" and so they knew what to do. However their first attempts at disarming the combatants failed, and the women had to advise them .
The website of Pray the devil back to hell describes it as:
A story of sacrifice, unity and transcendence, Pray the Devil Back to Hell honors the strength and perseverance of the women of Liberia. Inspiring, uplifting, and most of all motivating, it is a compelling testimony of how grassroots activism can alter the history of nations.
I usually find these kinds of descriptions to be exaggerated, but in this case I have to say I really did find the story of these Liberian women to be truly inspiring. Probably also because they are all also very charismatic and break all stereotypes about women and about victims of war.
At the end of the movie screening there was a discussion with Paul van Zyl, who is a lawyer from South Africa that at 25 was the Executive Secretary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. He's also a co-founder of the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), an organization which assists countries pursuing accountability for past mass atrocity or human rights abuse. During the discussion he stressed the importance of involving women in peace processes, because their huge knowledge and expertise has been historically completely ignored in that regard. It may seem obvious, but sadly "experts" often take things for granted and never ask or listen to the women.
One of the things he said that struck me the most was that while the filmmakers were researching archive footage for their movie, they found tons and tons of images of men with guns. But they could hardly find anything on the civic peace movement started by the women. So they had to look at discarded pieces of footage from various TV networks, and little by little collect small bits and pieces to tell the women's stories. Most journalists had been too busy talking about atrocities and power struggles to notice the peace efforts of the women.
A few years ago Timothée Rolin decided to start documenting his life through photographs in an ambitious project that he would carry on until his death. From the moment he wakes up until he's in bed about to sleep, he continuously takes pictures of his daily routine with a self-imposed discipline that includes photographing every object and person he interacts with, every unusual happening or any act of handwriting. I met him in August 2005 in Kinshasa, and at first I thought he was very mysterious and eccentric. But we eventually became friends and he hooked me onto photographing more of my daily life. I had always been into photography, but considered it more of an artistic media or a way to record special events for posterity. He changed that perception, and photography became an extension of myself. I even tried to keep up with his strict routine of 100-200 photos a day for a while, but ended up giving up for lack of discipline, or for fear of turning myself into an art object -or both.
I never quite understood what he was exactly intending to do with those thousands of photos of his life, since obviously they would be too boring and time-consuming to revisit. Sometimes he talked about a conceptual project based on "Crime and punishment" with very abstract details, and some other times I understood he was creating a bigger-than-life photo archive of his existence. Searchable by date, location and people so that he could use it as a reference library for his memories. He could do stuff like: "What was I doing on the 18th of March 2002?" "Oh, I watched a movie with Aurore". "And how many times did I do something with Aurore last year?" "127". He could draw stats on his life, find patterns, or simply keep track of little events. But I always had the impression he was up to something much more philosophical that he was not entirely sharing.
Although I'm still unsure about the bigger scheme of things, a few months ago I saw one of the forms of his life project: Six Mois (Six Months). It's a site where he's been uploading several videos made up of hundreds of pictures, each condensing portions of 6 months of his life in about 30 minutes. Of course, I had to watch the two videos comprising 2006, a year he spent in Kinshasa for the most part and in which I made a few guest appearances. The pictures flicker really fast at the sound of a melancholic tune, faster than the eye can grasp. In spite of that I recognized many faces, places and emotions. At the risk of sounding cliché, it all seems like it never happened. It all seems so far away it hurts.
During the first half of 2006 I spent more time in Kinshasa than in the second half, since I was living in Bukavu then. But the video that really transports me to those strange days is the second one, copied below. It is said that when you are about to die life flashes before your eyes really fast. I'm sure that when I die my flash about Kinshasa will pretty much look like this.
About two weekends ago I attended Africa Rising, a party at a new art gallery in San Francisco called Project One described in their website in a way that immediately made me want to go:
Africa’s rich cultural heritage has produced some of the most flavorful food, rhythmic music, and vibrant art in existence. The continent’s influence on other cultures has been profound; there are very few corners of the world which have not been touched in some way by Africa.If you’ve dreamed about Africa but haven’t yet visited the Motherland, you are invited to sample a spectrum of the best the Diaspora has to offer at “Africa Rising,” a new event combining food, music, art, and fashion – all with an African theme.
The blog Stuff white people like humorously described San Francisco as an ideally diverse city with its perfect balance of whites, Asian and gays. And the truth is that I had oftentimes wondered about the African Diaspora in this area, as it all seemed to be concentrated in the US East coast. So this event was the perfect opportunity to finally find out about the African community in the Bay area, and it didn't disappoint me.
The food was provided by Africa Radio & Kitchen, a popular nomadic restaurant by charismatic chef Eskender Aseged who is originally from Ethiopia. His food is inspired by old world recipes of Mediterranean and Red Sea countries, but there's something about him and his way of seeing food and people that struck me as essentially African. He served the food at the gallery himself, and he took the time to talk passionately about food to everybody that he saw eating, for example about his project to bring a certain type of cheese from Mauritania to San Francisco. He also told us about his vegetable garden in his city apartment, which made me really curious.
On the walls there were all sorts of interesting artwork, such as paintings by Nigerian-born Francis Simeni or an African inspired fashion exhibit by David Timehin who is also half Nigerian. Later on he also had a little fashion show with some of his designs, under his label ican iam (you can see pictures of some of his designs in this post).
I should say that the Project One Gallery is not only an art gallery, but also a lounge bar, with a comfy sitting area, a dancing space and of course, a cocktail bar. So the music was a very important part of the evening. Even more so since the main organizer of the event was Maisha Productions, an entertainment company co-founded by two musicians: Jeremiah Kpoh and Sila Mutungi.
Jeremiah Kpoh is an ecclectic DJ originally from Liberia and Sila Mutungi, who is from Kenya, is the leader of the band Sila and the Afrofunk Experience (I highly recommend to visit their website and to start enjoying their music there). In addition to the Maisha Productions duo, another musician made the attendees vibrate: British-Nigerian singer Siji, who was displaying a cool Cleveland vs. Lagos t-shirt, as well as a very hipster hat as you can see in this picture.
Although I didn't stay until the end since the event was planned to last until 2am and I had to work the next day (and it probably ended even later), I had a blast. I only hope there will be more.
As a side note: while writing this post I discovered that Africa Rising is not just a descriptive common phrase to talk about the current "hotness" of Africa especially in business, but it is also the title of a book by Vijay Mahajan (you can read an excerpt published at Ode Magazine), and also the name of an interesting-looking non profit organization. This post from their blog captures a lot of what I think too:
When a Western charity makes an appeal for funds with the photo of a seemingly helpless African child, the Western donor is cast in the role of the strong, generous, and righteous person helping the lowly and needy. Strength, generosity, and righteousness are all good things, but I fear that an unrighteous pattern has developed. The West and Africa have become type-cast into strong and weak, resourceful and helpless, giver and receiver, parent and child.To cast whole continents and cultures in such starkly contrasting and fixed roles is an untruth and an injustice. There is strength in Africa, and there is resourcefulness, generosity, and righteousness. Africa Rising exists to make those strengths known, to extend their reach, and to help Westerners move beyond stereotypes of Africa to relationships with Africans.
I think everybody knows by now about how much I like giraffes, and not only because the name of this blog which means precisely giraffe. But in case someone isn't aware of it yet, I'll be posting a few giraffe-themed pictures in the next weeks, starting with these two graffiti seen on the walls of two different cities in two different continents. The one on the left was taken in Barcelona, and the one on the right in San Francisco. And although they are both cute, I have to say I prefer the left one. What do you think?
Africa, the forgotten continent. I mean, we think about zebras and about cooperation projects, about trips and travelers. It's a bit harder to realize that in Africa people make movies, people write, people make music, people live. Living the African way, and so cinema is made the African way, music is made the African way and literature is made the African way. Although Kapuscinski, who knew Africa much better than I'll ever know it, warned that Africa doesn't exist.
This Spanish friend asked if we had cars in Senegal. Jokingly, I said: " but of course!! The diference is that, since we are so poor and have no shoes, the engine is made out of wood, and in steep slopes we push the car ourselves. She answered: "wow, that's so sustainable!!" I couldn't believe my ears, she thought I was serious!! And really, that's our biggest problem: that in Africa we think that money grows from the trees in Europe, and in Europe you think that all Africans wear a loincloth and live in the jungle. We won't be able to solve any problems until we sit down and learn about each other.
I never imagined that in Africa they also celebrate Carnival. The images and the news that we receive from the media about that continent usually speak of disasters, famines, armed conflicts, killings and epidemics... But the truth is that living in a country like Senegal gives you the opportunity to discover another face of this territory, that is unknown to most people.
First of all, in Europe the weather is too cold for us, and also the way of living here has nothing to do with how we Africans live. When we are in Africa we think that everything is wonderful and perfect in Europe, but that's far from the truth. In Europe it's harder to get anything than in Africa, where not much is needed to live happily and where life is simpler. Here we end up in an endless spiral of looking for money for everything, and if you don't succeed it's easy to fall into tragic situations that make you prey to mafias or even to go to jail. For us Africans, the only reason worth coming to Europe is acquiring knowledge and then going back to our countries to make good use of it.
I often find gems in my old Delicious bookmarks, as was the case a couple of days ago when I rediscovered the song below by the band Staff Benda Bilili from Kinshasa. During my last trip to the DRC in May, a friend told me about a documentary film that had just come out about the music scene in Kinshasa in general, and about one of their most charismatic figures in particular, a funky guy named Jupiter Bokondji. So a few weeks after the trip I tried to watch the film, which is called Jupiter's dance, but all I could find was this trailer that really got me interested. Jupiter's myspace page only got me more hooked.
And so, from link to link, I stumbled upon Staff Benda Bilili which is a band that Florent de la Tullaye and Renaud Barret (aka Belle Kinoise) encountered while they were filming their Jupiter's Dance. Formed by four homeless handicapped singers/songwriters on hand-built tricycles and accompanied by a young, all-acoustic rhythm section, with stand-out, 17-year-old Roger Landu playing the satonge, a one-string lute he designed and built himself out of a tin can, a bit of old basket and a lone electrical wire. In Lingala Benda Bilili means “look beyond appearances”, literally: put forward what is hidden. In one of their songs they states that the only real handicaps are not in the body, but in the mind.
Due to the success of Staff Benda Bilili, they have now released an album titled Très, Très Fort, not surprisingly produced by Vincent Kenis, already responsible for introducing and producing Konono N°1, Kasaï Allstars and the Congotronics series. The songs were recorded out in the open, mainly in the zoological garden near where the musicians live and where the video below was also filmed.
But as amazing as the back story, the music surpasses it all, as this recent article from The Times UK so well put it:
All bands need a back story, a carefully constructed series of ever more improbably tumultuous events and circumstances that aim to grab as much of the potential audience as possible. In the history of back stories, however, none has come close to the Congo’s Staff Benda Bilili, and the more you read about them, the more you listen to them and watch them, the more you think none ever will. How could they?[...]
If this all sounds a bit hair shirt, a bit worthy, it isn’t, because, most important, Staff Benda Bilili are a really, really good band, the sort of band who, from the moment you hear them, make all the rest of their story, as amazing as it is — this is a band that sued the UN for $100,000 in a royalties row over their song Let’s Go and Vote — simply fall away.
So enough reading already. Just enjoy the music.
