Today is the DRC's 49th anniversary of their declaration of independence. On that day, Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the Congo, gave the following speech (full text in English can be found here):

[Video via Voice of the Oppressed]

Update: If you're interested in reading about the Independence celebrations in Goma, in North Kivu, read this blog roundup I wrote for Global Voices.

Thanks to this article, I found out about an exhibit that opened recently at the San Francisco De Young Museum called "Art and Power in the Central African Savanna" showing sculptures from four Central African cultures: the Luba, Songye, Chokwe, and Luluwa, which are all basically ethnic groups from what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Most of these sculptures were used by witchdoctors during religious rituals, or as the press release for the exhibit puts it more elegantly:

these power figures act as containers for magical organic ingredients and serve both religious and political purposes. According to traditional beliefs, the figures mediate between the human and spirit worlds to insure a healthy birth, successful hunt, or triumph over an enemy.

I have to say that I find it amusing that the press release quotes Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco director John Buchanan as saying, “This exhibition contains an extraordinary selection of rare works that will resonate dramatically with modern and contemporary tastes". Really? Resonate with modern tastes?

Anyway, I'll definitely check it out soon since I love Congolese art and I'm museum nerd. Also, it seems that this is the last stop of a lengthy US tour before the artworks return to various individual and institutional lenders from around the world, probably never to be seen together again.

Last week I visited for the first time the Jazz Heritage Center which is, on their own words, a non-profit housed within the new $72-million Fillmore Heritage Center, a mixed-use project at the corner of San Francisco’s Fillmore and Eddy Streets in the historic Fillmore District. I went there to see the photo exhibit "America's ambassadors embrace the world". The exhibit was about the jazz tours around the world sponsored by the US State Department during the Cold War years, as sort of public relations and diplomacy initiative. Because who didn't like American jazz during the 1950's and 60's?

The more than 100 pictures in the exhibit were little known images of famous American jazz musicians such as Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Benny Carter or Randy Weston, playing in the four corners of the world in front of the most diverse audiences. Some of the images predictably showed the musicians visiting touristic attractions or in meeting with Kings or government officials, but there was the occasional unexpected gem like the one showing Dizzy Gillespie with a pipe in his mouth driving Yugoslav musician Nikica Kalogjera by motorbike through the streets of Zagreb in 1956.

But the pictures that really caught my attention were, of course, the ones showing visits around Africa. I particularly enjoyed the 1960 Louis Armstrong African tour, which took him to 27 cities in 3 months, including Kinshasa in the Congo, then still called Leopoldville. As shown by the photo below, Louis was greeted in the Congo by joyous crowds, drummers, and dancers. Apparentley local talents, inspired by the story of Okouka Lokole, a legendary figure with powers to charm wild beasts with his music, composed a song in Armstrong’s honor with the words: “They call you Satchmo, but to us you are Okouka Lokole".

After Leopoldville/Kinshasa, Armstrong and his All Stars band appeared in Elisabethville in Katanga Province, now called Lubumbashi. Apparently, he was very proud that his concert had stopped a civil war when a day-long truce was called so both sides could hear them perform. Not only I had no idea that Armstrong visited the Congo, but through this exhibit I also learnt that singer Velma Middleton suffered a stroke and ended up passing away in Sierra Leone. Armstrong was ordered by a physician to take a break because of fatigue, but instead ended up filming Paris Blues in the capital of France. In January of 1961, Louis Armstrong and the All Stars crew returned to Africa for the final leg of the trip, which took them through Senegal, Mali, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Sudan.

This photographic collection fascinated me not only because of all the new information I learnt about the diplomatic role of (mostly black) American jazz musicians around the world at a time when segregation still existed in the US, but also because of the little knowledge and exposure I had to those events. We live in a world of excessive recording of minimal events, in which a celebrity generates an almost infinite trail of digital evidence. And so those times in which cameras were not constantly watching over the shoulder of famous musicians on tour, seems like a lost world in which imagination and discovery still had a place.

I found out by chance that this evening K'naan was playing for free at the Apple store in downtown San Francisco, I guess to promote his second album that came out in February Troubadour. Of course, I couldn't miss that. K'naan is a composer and singer with a very eclectic music style, that goes from hip-hopish spoken word to afrobeat, reggae and pop. He was born and grew up in Somalia, in Mogadishu, but moved with his family to New York city in 1991 when he was 13. Then the IRS "gave them problems" and so they had to move up to Canada where he resides now.

Very appropriately, K'naan started tonight's concert with the energizing song In the beginning after which he added an anecdote about being in his hotel room last night in Santa Rosa (was he wine tasting, perhaps?) and watching the ending of Harold and Kumar 2. One of the two guys finally gets the girl, and they are in Amsterdam so they go smoke pot and bask in happiness while K'naan song plays in the background. So then he understood why during his concerts there are always so many stoners, which made me wonder why he was saying that since half of the audience seemed to be Apple-loving geeks and the other half seemed Somalis or of African origin. Perhaps we looked so enthralled by his music that we did indeed look high.

As expected, the concert at the Apple store was short, probably less than ten songs. But the small audience, the very laid-back attitude of K'naan and his musicians, and the intimate atmosphere (I think I was a mere few inches below them, sitting on the floor) made it very special. I particularly liked his little stories in between songs, and the combination of his feel-good melodies and sense of humor, with other more poetic and personal songs. I particularly liked the moving version of Somalia that he sung after explaining that he had been forced to tone it down and turn it into a happier song after his family and friends told him that it was cripplingly depressing. Although I didn't realize that the video setting in my little point and shoot was in compressed mode, which means not only a resulting bad image quality but also that it shuts down after three minutes of footage, you can get an idea watching my video below in comparison with the album version here.

I think that after the intro most of the Somalis in the audience (and a few other people too) were containing the urge to cry, especially with these lyrics (that don't seem to appear in the album version):

Somalia,

I cried today,

I saw you falling face down

and then dragged away

and then I told the world,

but no one would bat an eye,

they say since you know how to kill

you should learn to die

My other favorite song of the evening was the incredibly inspiring Wavin' Flag, which also has a great intro that goes like this:

When I get older

I will be stronger

they'll call me freedom

just like a waving flag

and then it goes back

I couldn't find a music video of Wavin' Flag, but here's a great live performance at the UN (jump to 1:30 for the song itself). On K'naan's official website there are a few more songs from Troubadour, and you can also follow him on Twitter and recommend him where to eat next time he's in your town like people did in San Francisco (he went to Farmer Brown).

The oddly named blog Afrikarabia at the Courrier International (in French) that focuses mostly on the DRC, recently posted a very interesting set of photos of Kinshasa. What's interesting about it is that the photos have been photoshopped to look like fake miniature models, with a technique known as tilt-shift that was all the rage a couple of years ago. In case you're interested in knowing how to do it, here's a little tutorial.

These photos of Kinshasa were taken in 2005 and 2006 by the author of the blog, Christophe Rigaud, and they show a really unexpected view of the city. Or as he says, "Kinshasa like you've never seen it before".

Below you can see a bird's eye view of the 30 Juin boulevard in the Gombe:

This picture shows a taxi-van "transport en commun" at the bottom of the 30 Juin boulevard near the train station:

You can see a slideshow of the Kinshasa miniature photo album here, you can go here, but Rigaud has been using other pictures distorted with this techniques in all of his latest posts at Afrikarabia.

Cancha is a Spanish word derived from Kancha in Quechua language , which means space to play sports. And Canchas is a cool website collecting stories and multimedia (mostly photos) describing spontaneous soccer fields and 'their human side’ around the world. They describe themselves as a 'an anthropological, social and cultural project to find a new medium of meeting and exchange'. The idea is that these improvised community canchas, the 'spontaneous soccer fields', serve as a starting point to show daily life around the world:

Canchas are the center of human stories and the personalities around the spontaneous soccer fields, most of them far away from famous players and the big arenas. It concerns canchas with trees, with abysses, in the water, on the mountain, in the desert and on ice, with camels, cars, inside factories and on skyscrapers.

Canchas is the joy and emotion of the people, who are in touch with football fields. It is an hommage to those fields and the daily life surrounding them.

I'm not a big fan of sports, but I have to say I loved the idea of an online network promoting cultural exchanges through something that everyone loves in all corners of the world: playing soccer. And, browsing through their database of spontaneous canchas I found quite a few cool ones in Africa! Quite unsurprisingly, the country with the most canchas is Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony. But there are also canchas from Senegal, Benin, Ghana, Namibia, South Africa, etc. One of my favorites is the one below from an unknown location in South Africa, but this one from Swaziland is among the best rated images.

According to their website Canchas will be present at the World Cup 2010 in South Africa and until then they are trying to collect as many more soccer field stories as possible. So they're inviting everybody to take part and contribute to the archive of canchas. The only requirement is that a cancha has to include at least one picture and a short story (personal observations, extraordinary features, how you found it, etc.) to be published on their website. They are also open to receive audio or video files besides photos, even soccer shirts, grass samples or a goal post!

Check it out!