Do you remember Baloji, the hard-to-label Congolese musician fascinated by witchcraft? His brilliant Tout ceci ne vous rendra pas le Congo that I mentioned around here a while back, is still one of my favorite songs. Well, it turns out he's back: his second album is coming out next week - on January 27th. It's titled Kinshasa Succursale and watching the first video from it (or short film, as Baloji calls it), I'm already really looking forward to it.
The album includes some titles with popular Congolese bands Konono N°1 , Kasaï All Star, Zaico Langa Langa, as well as several local artists gathered during one week of recordings in Kinshasa. This 2010 the DRC is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its independence from Belgium, so Kinshasa's boulevard 30 juin (the date of independence) is naturally featured prominently on the video of this first single. Other popular sights of Congo's capital make an appearance (a bit like Youssoupha's The butterfly effect), so only for that it's worth watching.
The title of the song is Karibu Ya Bintou ("Welcome to Life in Limbo"), and in it Konono N°1 play the likembé (finger piano) which offers an interesting contrast with Baloji's hip-hop beats.
It's Friday night (almost Saturday morning) and it's been a while since I've shared some of the music I'm listening to. Just a band is not really a discovery, as I've been a fan for some time now, since I discovered the cool music videos of their debut album. This song, Usinibore, is the first single of their new album "82" released last October. Daft Punk anyone?
On Sunday I was invited to eat fish and attieké, ground cassava, (see a photo of the meal in this post) by a lovely friend of a friend named Raïsa. She was wearing a tailor-made dress that my expat friend and I admired, and since I have a few fabrics in need of inspiration to take to the tailor, I asked Raïsa to take a picture of her outfit. She happily obliged, and she enjoyed being in front of the camera so much that she decided to model some of her other tailor-made dresses for us. Such as this one:
Or this one:
Or this other one:
As you can see, Raïsa is a natural with the camera. I think she could have spent hours trying poses and changing dresses. In the end, she gave us a little Ivorian dance lesson while wearing a Rihanna outfit (her words):
She hopelessly tried to show us how to shake our asses properly while showing us a few Ivorian dance moves, which made for a few good laugs. In my case, though, I'm afraid this is a lost cause as I'm extremely intimidated to dance here. In between giggles she made us promise to go dancing with her and her friends next weekend. I hope I'll survive.
Abengourou, a royal city
After two weeks freezing my ass off in deep Northern California, it’s been a few days that I’m back in my temporary home in Abengourou. As usual, the excitement and longing of arriving in Côte d’Ivoire for the first time was replaced by anxiety and impatience to be already there. The more I travel, the more I dread the moving party of traveling - I wish teletransportation was already invented.
Before my arrival in Abengourou I spent a night in Abidjan, staying with random strangers found at the airport (but working for the same organization as me), and half a day spent fighting with bureaucratic inefficiency. At least I got to see a couple of friends and eat a 4 cheese pizza before heading to cheeseless Abengourou.
I’m very happy to be back in Côte d’Ivoire, although I’ve replaced cold and fog with dust and ashes in the air, from all the brush and trash burning on every street corner. When I stepped inside the house, my feet left white marks on the floor which was covered with a thick layer of red dust. And every door that I had left open seemed to have grown endless spiderwebs with invisible spiders that it took me forever to get rid of. Only after over two hours of intense moping and killing spiders, was I able to crash on my unbelievable dusty bed. My cold shower felt like heaven.
Typical trash-burning on my street
Surprisingly, my watchmen were still sitting in front of my house although I hadn’t told them when I was coming back. They even seemed genuinely happy to see me again, if only because that meant disrupting their boredom. They immediately requested a new broom to sweep the dust and debris in the terrace.
Besides buying myself a fancy new broom, the next day I also bought considerable food supplies to fill up my fridge again, including abundant chili peppers as is required here. 
The lady where I usually buy my vegetables also seemed happy to see me and wished me a happy new year. Instead of giving me some free lemons as usual, she gave me free mangoes. Mangoes! I keep saying the season is here but then I’m told it isn’t, so could it be finally it?
And asked a friend of a friend from Benin who cooks wonderfully well to teach me some of her specialties that I tried one day. I have been eating way too many mangoes and pineapples since I got back, instead of proper meals. Except on Sunday when I ate some attiéké and fried fish at a new friend’s house, whom I also asked to teach me how to cook some local dishes. I’m afraid I’m much more of an eater than a cook. She seemed more interested in meeting up for some dancing than for cooking. Seeing the way she can shake her ass, I’m terrified to go dancing with her.
Fried fish, chili sauce and attiéké, ground cassava that resembles couscous
Since I got back I've been quite tired, so I’ve been sleeping with earplugs to try to overcome my jetlag as fast as possible. I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but the morning roosters seem to be louder than ever. Also, since I brought a soft Ikea pillow in my suitcase to replace the hard foam one that seems to be the only available type in Abengourou, now after wearing earplugs my ears don’t hurt.
Life is quiet in Abengourou, but occasionally things get exciting like last Friday when Côte d’Ivoire beat neighboring Ghana at the African Cup of Nations. The whole town was celebrating the victory, no exceptions.
I’m also happy to report that since I’ve been back I managed to finally pass my driver’s license test to be able to drive here, which has all of a sudden made my life a lot easier. Although undoubtedly I’ll still be walking a lot and taking plenty of taxis, and not only because they’re red. But I can’t help being amused at the fact that after some 14 years of having a driver’s license in my possession, the last five days were probably the most I’ve driven in my entire life.
The always awesome Strange Maps blog had this great map sequence that gives a different perspective on the pre-historic earth puzzle which "reverses the drift that continues to widen the Atlantic Ocean, and returns to the age of the dinosaurs in another way". Here you have what the author calls the Afro-Latinosaurus Rex, in which the narrow southern strip of South America shared by Chile and Argentina is the beast’s lower jaw, Africa’s southern part its upper jaw. And "the big, blunt bulk of West Africa is the animal’s neck. Lake Victoria, the greatest of African lakes, doubles as the menacing eye of the Afro-Latinosaurus…"
I can't even remember the number of times I've seen the blog Journey without Maps recommended or linked to by people I like, or the amount of times I had a good laugh reading it. So of course I was pleased to see Côte d'Ivoire finally make an appearance there, even though in passing. The author, based in Liberia, describes his 35 hour bus journey from Abidjan to Bamako as "The most miserable bus in the world". Here's an excerpt to give you a taste:
We stopped in Yamoussoukro, the capital, but not really the capital since all the government buildings are in Abidjan, and Yamoussoukro only happens to be the birthplace of the first post independence president/despot. Check it out – he used his ‘personal money’ to build four lane highways, a four star hotel with an observation restaurant, and the world’s largest basilica. No one lives there.
While the bus was stopped and bus attendants reloaded luggage, I caught a glimpse of my bag and relaxed. After Yamoussoukro the bus stopped anywhere and everywhere for no apparent reason. People would buy fruit from the window and the bus driver would hop out and walk around. At no one point was the bus mobile for more than thirty minutes straight. It was miserable.
The trip was scheduled to take 24 hours, but at around midnight we consulted a map and performed accurate measurements with our fingers to work out that we were pretty close to Abidjan and not so close to Bamako. My legs cramped up, so I took advantage of every stop to stumble outside in a daze and stretch. At one point I realized how tired I was. This thought was immediately followed by the realization that after 18 hours on the bus, we had the same bus driver… Who was probably very tired as well.
Then it started raining and we noticed that the bus was actually speeding up, taking corners like an F-1 race car on a chicane. Was the driver trying to kill us? Instead of building a giant basilica, couldn’t the president have invested a little money in high school physics classes? Or a driver education program? I peered over the driver’s shoulder and discovered why he was going so fast: he had no windshield wipers. Now, we are in rainy season West Africa, it is literally a wall of water outside, and the driver is driving faster so that our speed forces the rain off of his windshield. I leaned over to Gunna and said over the noise of the pelting rain, “I don’t want to alarm you, but there are no windshield wipers.” Gunna was alarmed.
I'm planning to go to Bamako from Abidjan and, although Texas in Africa disputes the claim of being the most miserable bus in the world (on the grounds that the author had a seat and, apparently, no digestive disorders), I'm not sure I'm ready for such a journey. Read the rest of the post here.
Christmas was a while back, but cleaning up the pictures in my computer before starting the trip back to Cote d'Ivoire after the holidays, I found some that I had forgotten to post. Here are some of the gifts from Abengourou that I bought for various relatives, which I thought might be interesting for those lacking ideas for future gifts:
This is a traditional Akan claypot used to serve dishes with sauces (such as chicken kedjenou). The lid is, of course, to keep annoying flies or other bugs away, and is my favorite part. In this particular case it represents the royal seat that is the symbol of the Indénié Kingdom (and I think also of other Ivorian kingdoms as I've seen it often representing more than just this region). This type of pottery work, with the dark colour and all, is very typical in Abengourou and is commonly used in daily life. Even the simplest plates or kitchen containers are made with this style.
Now, this was my favorite gift but nobody in the family has yet dared to drink it. Supposedly, it's a type of whisky with coffee flavor, but what really made me buy it was the description underneath its name, 'Black power': it provides strength, energy and aphrodisiac vitaly. Is this supposed to be the first thing that comes to mind when you see the Obama picture? Ahem.
Oh yeah, the coffee packages in the background come from a coffee plant right outside of Abengourou. When I went to buy them they were just finishing roasting the beans and they ground them in front of me, and although I'm not a coffee expert (I'm more the tea-drinking type) I hear it's really good.
Although not pictured here, I also brought some delicious Mambo Ivorian chocolate and some local fabrics that are always a winner.
Here are a few links that I liked during the last days. Enjoy!
People who want to give me money, a great blog collecting emails of advance-fee scams. While not only African, this type of fraud is typically known as Nigerian scams or 419 fraud and a great deal in the blog are Africa-related.
Speaking of Nigerian scammers, apparently there are a few websites that like to take revenge on them by getting them to perform all sorts of tasks in order to get those bank details and ridiculing them. Such as 419 Eater, which recently saw one poster known as Nurse Nasty persuading all manner of scammers to dress up as superheroes of her design. Brilliant. (via A Bombastic Element & Bleeding Cool)
'In Africa they won’t feel lonesome tonight', an article about Africa's communalism that ensures that no one is left alone (I can assure you of that).
A video portrait of Raki, a Michael Jackson impersonator from Goma in Eastern DRC (by the way, the bit where he sings Billy Jean making up the words because he doesn't speak English reminded me of this old Italian video).
Speaking of the DRC, the trial of former Congolese militia leader Thomas Lubanga resumed today in The Hague. Lubanga is accused of enlisting and conscripting child soldiers and using them to fight for the Congolese militia group Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC) during 2002 and 2003, and if you're interested in his trial you should follow this blog by the Open Society Justice Initiative.
'Desert Flower', the autobiographical fairy tale-esque book by Somali super model Waris Dirie was one of the first African books I read as a teenager, if not the first one. So I'm really looking forward to watching the German movie adaptation (although shot in English) that came out in October. Here's the trailer (via Africa.Visual_Media)
Everybody's wondering if Nigeria's president is still alive, since he hasn't been seen in over 6 weeks.
Extremely useful fire mosquito catcher by Johannes Vogl (via Ryan Briggs), the perfect weapon to fight malaria in Africa.
Awesome new photoblog by Andrew Jones focused on Chantal Biya's, Cameroon's First Lady, crazy hairdos. Oh, and if you have any pictures of that work of art of a woman, email them to chantalbiyahair[at]gmail[dot]com
Most everybody in the US seems to define him/herself as a something-American, Chinese-American, Greek-American, Latin-American, etc. But I always wondered about the definition of African-American, not only because Africa is so vast and diverse, but also because the connection with the continent seems pretty distant for most African-Americans: no linguistic ties, nearly no knowledge (or not at all) of the precise region of origin, and for a vast majority no first-hand experience of Africa.
I often thought, with my superficial knowledge of African-American communities and shallow understanding of their identity issues, that their defining themselves as African-Americans had to do more with an opposition to the rest of Americans (especially white Americans) rather than with an actual feeling of belonging to Africa. Also, like blogger Landis Baker puts it, "since it was almost impossible, until recently, for African-Americans to know their true African identity (tribe/nation/ethnic group), African-American kind of became their tribe/nation". The relationship between African-Americans and Africa is complex, to say the least.
That's why I'm usually very interested to hear about the experiences of African-Americans who have actually traveled to Africa, like director Reggie Allen who went to Ghana as a student and documented it on film. I haven't seen the original footage yet, but this is a beautiful remix produced & edited by Sabrina Gordon:
Or like this clip of the visit to the slave castle in Cape Coast in Ghana, by Ralph Watkins.
This video was part of a longer post on Ghetto Radio about diaspora Africans settling in Ghana, which links to another interesting video featuring a woman named Seestah Imahkus talking about the difficulties she encountered in Ghana when she decided to make the move nearly 20 years ago. They followed up the debate on African identity with a recent post titled "Do you feel African? Roots and identity", which includes another video with interviews to African-American students held prior to a 3-week journey to Ghana; part of a Black To Our Roots educational program.
I believe in identity as being fundamentally an individual choice, not something that should be externally imposed by society. However, after discussing African identity issues with a number of people, I get the impression that a lot of Africans have a much more deterministic approach. You are what you are and there's nothing you can do to change it.
