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?
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
And since a few days ago it was the International Day against HIV/Aids, here's a very popular song in Côte d'Ivoire advocating for more tolerance for Aids victims. The title is "Ne l'abandonne pas", don't abandon him/her.rn
It's been a while since the last Friday Evening music session, and I've missed it. So here's a great discovery: Youssoupha. He's French but of a Senegalese mother and a Congolese father - Tabu Ley Rochereau. The song is titled "L'effet papillon" (The butterfly effect) and it makes Kinshasa look like you've never seen it before. Enjoy!
It's Friday Evening, and so it's music time. Tonight with Tiken Jah Fakoly's Ça va faire mal (It's going to hurt), which it's not my most favorite song by him, but it has a very nice music video shot in 2005 during the African Reggae Festival in Mali.
In case you don't know, Tiken Jah Fakoly is a very popular reggae singer from Côte d'Ivoire (but who's living in exile in Mali since 2003 due to death threats). His big popularity is due to the political character of most of his songs. For example, in 1993 after Houphouët-Boigny's passing away, he wrote about the electoral situation and one of his albums is titled Françafrique which includes songs such as Le pays va mal (The country is not doing well) or Y'en a marre (We're fed up).
Bongeziwe Mabandla playing live on SABC 2 (South Africa TV) on some weekend morning show. Impressive.
It's Friday Evening, so it's time for some music. And what better than a video from K'naan, one of my favourite African musicians? It's from 2005, from his first album The Dusty Foot Philosopher and it's titled "Soo Bax", which is Somali for "Get Out". In it he criticizes politicians and warlords that perpetuate the conflicts in his home country of Somalia. At one point he says:
Mogadishu used to be a place the world came to see
And if, like me, you can't get enough of K'naan I recommend this interview on Democracy Now! where he talks about the Somalia of his childhood ("my environment was incredibly beautiful and poetic"), about the breakout of war when he was 9, migrating to the US, PSD & music as his therapy ("I hoped to survive through songs"), and US policy in Somalia.
I've been really enjoying the weekly Friday Afternoon Africana series over at Mo' dernity Mo' problems, and I have a big backlog of music that I wanted to recommend around here, so I decided to shamelessly copy him: here's your first Friday Evening Africana, for all three of you to enjoy.
This week has been a long week, and it's been rough, and there are many decisions to be made... but for now, for just a few minutes, here's some party music to forget about it all. Bassekou Kouyate from Mali, who plays the ngoni like on one else did before him: standing. As the legend goes, during one of his shows in the 1980s, Bassekou suddenly stood up and walked up to the front of the stage. For the first time a ngoni player strapped his instrument over his shoulder like an electric guitar and was playing a solo standing up. The audience was stunned. Traditionalists even started a debate after the concert about whether this young man was allowed to change the style of playing ngoni. Although now this has become common practice with traditional instruments, and nobody is shocked about it anymore.
Kouyate’s latest album I Speak Fula was released just a week ago, and is the follow-up to Segu Blue that he did in 2007, both with his band Ngoni ba. And it's no wonder that's the name of the band, since continuosly innovating with that instrument, made of a calabash and a dried goat skin. He even invented a bass ngoni even lower in pitch than the ngoni ba (low ngoni), and added extra strings to make their instruments harmonically more flexible. I like the title "I Speak Fula" because it refers to the relationship between the Bamana and the Fula, two of the ethnic groups in Mali. And Maneno is translated in both of their languages!
In the past I've come accross some of Miriam Makeba's songs here and there (especially the ultra-popular Pata Pata and Qongqothwane aka the Click song), but I have to admit that I never paid too much attention to her music - even when she died last year. Probably it's a generational thing, as I haven't paid much attention to political American music from the 1960s either. In South Africa, though, everybody adores Miriam Makeba and she's part of everybody's lives - even people of my age and younger. Nelson Mandela has streets, buildings and even geographic landmarks (like a whole Bay!) named after him all over South Africa, but Miriam Makeba has quite a few of her own too. In Johannesburg (where she was born), for example, I saw a street bearing her name in the artsy district of Newtown, including a mural of her (that you can see here).
Now thanks to the farewell gift from a new South African friend - a double CD collecting some of the best songs of her career - I had the opportunity to get to know Miriam Makeba better. And, like whole generations before me, I fell in love with this woman. How couldn't I? You just have to hear her sing. Like in this footage from the 1959 film Come back, Africa shot clandestinely in Johannesburg by Lionel Rogosin:
As a side note, it looks like the dress she's wearing on the film is the same one as on the CD cover photo taken by Jürgen Schadeberg (check out his whole series on the 1950s in Black and White in South Africa).
But it's not only her music that turned Miriam Makeba into such a South African icon, and into Mama Africa, but obviously it was also her political and civil rights activism. That brought her to exile for 30 years, only returning to South Africa in 1990 after the end of Apartheid (I read somewhere she had 9 passports throughout her life). During those years in exile her records were banned, while she toured the world with great success. She also addressed the UN General Assembly twice, always speaking out against the evils of Apartheid, and she received many awards for her outspoken opposition to that regime.
Here's an interview with her from a Swedish tv show in 1966:
And if after all this you're not feeling the urge to listen to some Miriam Makeba music right now, you should check out her page on Last.fm. Enjoy!
