Dynamic Africa
Formerly, "This is Africa/fyeahAfrica".
(Profile Photo by Mama Casset)
DISCLAIMER:
I do not endorse any of the products or opinions shared on this site, nor do I claim any of the work posted here to be my own - except where stated. All posts originally made by me are credited. If no credit is given then the work is either my own/written by me or reblogged from another source.
A LITTLE ABOUT ME:
Student, 24
Based in Cape Town, South Africa
From Lagos, Nigeria
Want to advertise through us? Send an email to dynamicafricablog@gmail.com
(As an unemployed media student, all donations go into ensuring my survival in this cruel world and future projects I hope to embark on).
hit counter
(since Oct. 21th 2012)
‘Angolan Women Building the Future - From National Liberation to Women’s Emancipation’, Organization of Angolan Women, Zed Books, London, 1984.
(via jadoreafrikque)
Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of a smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly. Philadelphia had the musty scent of history. New Haven smelled of neglect. Baltimore smelled of brine, and Brooklyn of sun-warmed garbage. But Princeton had no smell. She liked taking deep breaths here. She liked watching the locals who drove with pointed courtesy and parked their latest model cars outside the organic grocery store on Nassau Street or outside the sushi restaurants or outside the ice cream shop that had fifty different flavors including red pepper or outside the post office where effusive staff bounded out to greet them at the entrance. She liked the campus, grave with knowledge, the Gothic buildings with their vine-laced walls, and the way everything transformed, in the half-light of night, into a ghostly scene. She liked, most of all, that in this place of affluent ease, she could pretend to be someone else, someone specially admitted into a hallowed American club, someone adorned with certainty.
But she did not like that she had to go to Trenton to braid her hair. It was unreasonable to expect a braiding salon in Princeton—the few black locals she had seen were so light-skinned and lank-haired she could not imagine them wearing braids—and yet as she waited at Princeton Junction station for the train, on an afternoon ablaze with heat, she wondered why there was no place where she could braid her hair. The chocolate bar in her handbag had melted. A few other people were waiting on the platform, all of them white and lean, in short, flimsy clothes. The man standing closest to her was eating an ice cream cone; she had always found it a little irresponsible, the eating of ice cream cones by grown-up American men, especially the eating of ice cream cones by grown-up American men in public. He turned to her and said, “About time,” when the train finally creaked in, with the familiarity strangers adopt with each other after sharing in the disappointment of a public service. She smiled at him. The graying hair on the back of his head was swept forward, a comical arrangement to disguise his bald spot. He had to be an academic, but not in the humanities or he would be more self-conscious. A firm science like chemistry, maybe. Before, she would have said, “I know,” that peculiar American expression that professed agreement rather than knowledge, and then she would have started a conversation with him, to see if he would say something she could use in her blog. People were flattered to be asked about themselves and if she said nothing after they spoke, it made them say more. They were conditioned to fill silences. If they asked what she did, she would say vaguely, “I write a lifestyle blog,” because saying “I write an anonymous blog called Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black” would make them uncomfortable. She had said it, though, a few times. Once to a dreadlocked white man who sat next to her on the train, his hair like old twine ropes that ended in a blond fuzz, his tattered shirt worn with enough piety to convince her that he was a social warrior and might make a good guest blogger. “Race is totally overhyped these days, black people need to get over themselves, it’s all about class now, the haves and the have-nots,” he told her evenly, and she used it as the opening sentence of a post titled “Not All Dreadlocked White American Guys Are Down.” Then there was the man from Ohio, who was squeezed next to her on a flight. A middle manager, she was sure, from his boxy suit and contrast collar. He wanted to know what she meant by “lifestyle blog,” and she told him, expecting him to become reserved, or to end the conversation by saying something defensively bland like “The only race that matters is the human race.” But he said, “Ever write about adoption? Nobody wants black babies in this country, and I don’t mean biracial, I mean black. Even the black families don’t want them.”
He told her that he and his wife had adopted a black child and their neighbors looked at them as though they had chosen to become martyrs for a dubious cause. Her blog post about him, “Badly-Dressed White Middle Managers from Ohio Are Not Always What You Think,” had received the highest number of comments for that month. She still wondered if he had read it. She hoped so. Often, she would sit in cafés, or airports, or train stations, watching strangers, imagining their lives, and wondering which of them were likely to have read her blog. Now her ex-blog. She had written the final post only days ago, trailed by two hundred and seventy-four comments so far. All those readers, growing month by month, linking and cross-posting, knowing so much more than she did; they had always frightened and exhilarated her. SapphicDerrida, one of the most frequent posters, wrote: I’m a bit surprised by how personally I am taking this. Good luck as you pursue the unnamed “life change” but please come back to the blogosphere soon. You’ve used your irreverent, hectoring, funny and thought-provoking voice to create a space for real conversations about an important subject. Readers like SapphicDerrida, who reeled off statistics and used words like “reify” in their comments, made Ifemelu nervous, eager to be fresh and to impress, so that she began, over time, to feel like a vulture hacking into the carcasses of people’s stories for something she could use. Sometimes making fragile links to race. Sometimes not believing herself. The more she wrote, the less sure she became. Each post scraped off yet one more scale of self until she felt naked and false.
The ice-cream-eating man sat beside her on the train and, to discourage conversation, she stared fixedly at a brown stain near her feet, a spilled frozen Frappuccino, until they arrived at Trenton. The platform was crowded with black people, many of them fat, in short, flimsy clothes. It still startled her, what a difference a few minutes of train travel made. During her first year in America, when she took New Jersey Transit to Penn Station and then the subway to visit Aunty Uju in Flatlands, she was struck by how mostly slim white people got off at the stops in Manhattan and, as the train went further into Brooklyn, the people left were mostly black and fat. She had not thought of them as “fat,” though. She had thought of them as “big,” because one of the first things her friend Ginika told her was that “fat” in America was a bad word, heaving with moral judgment like “stupid” or “bastard,” and not a mere description like “short” or “tall.” So she had banished “fat” from her vocabulary. But “fat” came back to her last winter, after almost thirteen years, when a man in line behind her at the supermarket muttered, “Fat people don’t need to be eating that shit,” as she paid for her giant bag of Tostitos. She glanced at him, surprised, mildly offended, and thought it a perfect blog post, how this stranger had decided she was fat. She would file the post under the tag “race, gender and body size.” But back home, as she stood and faced the mirror’s truth, she realized that she had ignored, for too long, the new tightness of her clothes, the rubbing together of her inner thighs, the softer, rounder parts.
Books
Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian history and thought Howard University Press. 1986. Allison Blakely Northwestern University Press, May 30, 2006
Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness. Northwestern University Press, May 30, 2006. Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Nicole Svobodny, Ludmilla A. Trigos
Gannibal: The Moor of Petersburg. Hugh Barnes
Beyond the Color Line: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922-1963 (Duke UP, 2002). Kate A. Baldwin
A Distant Front in the Cold War: The USSR in West Africa and the Congo, 1956-1964 (Cold War International History Project) Sergey Mazov
Soul to Soul: A Black Russian American Family 1865-1992 Yelene Khanga
Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union (May 1988) Robert Robinson
Red and Hot: The Fat of Jazz in the Soviet Union, 1917-1980 S. Frederick Starr
Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa: Three Centuries of Encounters (Editor Maxim Matusevich)
The Black Russian Vladimir Alexandrov (not yet released)
Negri v Amerike/Blacks in America - Claude McKay
Petropolis Anya Ulinich
Это я – Эдичка. Эдуард Лимонов
The Last Communist Valerie ZatoichiValerie Zatoichi
Original’nyi chelovek Leonid Andreyev.
Мистер Твистер Samuil Marshak’s poem «
Articles
Kesha Fikes and Alaina Lemon in their 2002 article “African Presence in Former Soviet Spaces.
W McClellan “Africans and Black Americans in the Comintern Schools, 1925- 1934.” (1993 (through jstor)
Rossiia i Afrika: Dokumenty i Materialy, XVIII v. – 1960 g. [Russia and Africa: Documents and Materials, 18th Century – 1960] Apollon Davison
Mazov’s “Afrikanskie Studenty v Moskve v God Afriki” [African Students in Moscow in the Year of Africa]
Julie Hessler’s “Death of an African Student in Moscow.”
Claude McKay - Soviet Russia and the Negro
And anything by Maxim Matusevich-
An Exotic Subversive: Africa, Africans, and Blackness in Soviet Popular Culture and Imagination
Probing the Limits of Internationalism: African Students Confront Soviet Ritual (find pdf)
Film/VIdeos
Black Russians. ThirdWorldNewsreel
“Black Russians -The Red Experience” documentary trailer
Circus
If you have anymore to add please let me know. I will be updating it regularly.
Also, if you want to get to it, I made a separate page for it.
(via thefemaletyrant)
This year marks the centenary of the birth of Albert Camus, the great novelist of existentialism. It’s a movement that many Americans think of as quintessentially Parisian, born of cafe-table philosophizing and fueled by packs of Gauloises. But Camus wasn’t a native of metropolitan France. He was born and raised in Algeria into a pied-noir family (“black foot,” the phrase used to describe descendants of French settlers), grew up in working-class Algiers, and pined for north Africa long after he moved to the French capital in 1942.
His most famous novels — The Stranger, which depicts a senseless murder under the Mediterranean sun; The Plague, with its chaotic scenes of a quarantined port city — are Algerian to the core, and yet Camus has often been criticized, not least by Arab critics such as Edward Said, for paying too little attention to Algerians’ plight. It’s true that he was never a revolutionary, and that in comparison to fellow existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre he can seem almost conformist. But Camus was a far more engaged writer than his critics have allowed, and the essays, columns and speeches collected here make a strong case for his continued relevance.
Camus’ Algerian Chronicles, originally published in 1958 and now finally available in English, span two decades of colonial history, from before World War II to the foundation of the Fifth Republic. The author began his career as a young journalist in Kabylia, the mountainous coastal region populated by a Berber-speaking minority. There he witnesses a humanitarian disaster caused by severe drought, and he laments the inability of writers like himself to get anyone to pay attention. “The truth,” Camus thunders, “is that we are living every day alongside people whose condition is that of the European peasantry of three centuries ago, and yet we, and we alone, are unmoved by their desperate plight.” That theme of French indifference to Algerian life and suffering comes up over and over in this book. And things do not get any more amicable when the revolutionary National Liberation Front (FLN), which is still the largest political party in contemporary Algeria, begins its campaign of resistance.
The Algerian war, a conflict of devastating violence that saw the French army resort to , devastated Camus. His whole family still lived in Algiers. Though he did not support total Algerian independence (he believed in a quixotic, Swiss-style “confederation” of France and its former colonies), the French forces’ brutality horrified him. Acts of torture, he told the French, “do us more harm than a hundred enemy guerrillas.” At the same time, he refused to support the FLN’s use of terrorism; defending violence against innocent people in the name of anti-colonialism was “a casuistry of blood” that he had no truck with, unlike many French intellectuals of the time.
“I need to let you know how I feel,” Camus writes to an Algerian militant in a 1955 open letter. “Believe me when I tell you that Algeria is where I hurt at the moment, as others feel pain in their lungs.” It’s a hugely powerful simile, and not only because Camus suffered and nearly died from tuberculosis as a young man. Algeria was his oxygen — and between colonial repression and anti-colonial violence, Camus felt himself being asphyxiated.
When Camus published his Algerian Chronicles in 1958, the reaction in the French world of letters was distinctly muted. The author may have just won a Nobel Prize, but his moderate stance was unwelcome at a moment when France and Algeria were facing a state of emergency. That May, right-wing elements in the French army in Algiers, accelerating a political crisis that eventually led, in October 1958, to Charles de Gaulle’s installation as president. Four years later, Algeria won its independence, though Camus did not live to see it; he died in a car crash in 1960, aged just 46.
Today, although his failure to support full independence for Algeria seems off the mark, Camus stands as a powerful voice against violence and extremism, and the very late appearance of these essays in English could not have come at a better time. (Alice Kaplan, the book’s editor, provides an insightful introduction; Arthur Goldhammer, a Harvard fellow and an on contemporary French politics, is the translator.) With the future of the Arab spring uncertain and with terrorism back on the front page, these Algerian Chronicles are not only history. They’re also guides for how to be just in a difficult world.
NPR: Camus’ ‘Chronicles’: A History Of The Past, A Guide For The Future by Jason Farago
BOOK: Goatskin bags and wisdom: new critical perspectives on African literature
Came across this whilst looking for material on African Feminism. The book contains a chapter written by Anthonia Akpabio Ekpa titled Beyond Gender Warfare and Western Ideologies: African Feminism for the 21st Century.
It is 1971, and Nigeria is under military rule, though the politics of the state matter less than those of her home to Enitan Taiwo, an eleven-year-old girl tired of waiting for school to start.
Will her mother, who has become deeply religious since the death of Enitan’s brother, allow her friendship with the new girl next door Sheri Bakare?
This novel charts the fate of these two Nigerian girls, one who is prepared to manipulate the traditional system and one who attempts to defy it.
Currently on the press tour for her latest novel Americanah, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie stops by Nigerian local station Channels TV to talk about the inspiration behind her book and the multifaceted themes that it navigates through.
In this segment, she talks about her decade-long relationship with her natural hair, the politics of black women’s hair and ‘mainstream’ beauty standards, and the concerning approach that people have to natural hair in Nigeria - one that I wholeheartedly agree with her on.
Adichie then goes on to discuss the culture of reading in Nigeria.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on love, race, culture, immigration and hair - some of the central issues in her latest novel Americanah.
What she says when she expands on her statement, ‘I like America but it’s not mine…Nigeria is home to me…but I like that I can leave home’, is incredibly central to the experience of those of us who bounce between the diaspora and Nigeria, those of us who are constantly pulled between two very different worlds that can simultaneously feel like home and a foreign place, all at the same time.
I’m excited to read Americanah. I find myself relating to a lot of the central themes simply based on her interviews I’ve come across that Adichie’s given on her latest book.
Also, what the hell does he mean by a, ‘more organic love’?
FAIRYTALES FOR LOST CHILDREN
(Author’s Note)
Dear reader,
Five years ago I sat down to write my first short story. It was a 2500 word narrative loosely modelled on my own life. Although I had previously written two unpublished, structurally messy novels, this one piece of short fiction altered my life in ways I couldn’t have imagined. This particular story was about a Somali teenager who had immigrated to the UK and although discouraged by the unforgiving weather and poverty had found a great deal of solace in exploring his sexual identity away from the prying eyes of his parents and community.
As we mature and grow wiser, our perceptions shift and we begin to fully comprehend the risks we took in our youth and see them not as perilous acts of recklessness but as necessary rites of passage. That is the thrill I felt after writing my first short story because I knew it was the most honest representation of myself up until that point. I was gay and deeply closeted but this small act of putting pen to paper and telling my story freed me up, allowed me to push open the closet door and greet the world outside.
Since writing that piece many things have happened. I came out to my family. I lost my family. I fell in love. I fell out of love. I made new friends, I went to university and I kept writing. In short, I became an adult. It was a stressful way to grow up for sure but each challenging experience was character building, vital to where I am today.
My book ‘Fairytales For Lost Children’ is a chronicle of what it means to be young and endure struggle. It’s about being different, revelling in that difference and forging forwards despite the constant curveballs that life swings in our direction.
At a time when the youth in our collective global community are losing their lives to homophobic abuse and hateful dogma, it is important to remember our shared humanity, the fact that we all ultimately have the right to be who we are, regardless of our gender, sexuality, religious affiliation or racial makeup.
I hope you enjoy reading ‘Fairytales’ as much as I did writing it. And I hope it offers you solace and comfort in the same way that it did for me.
Yours,
Diriye Osman
‘Fairytales For Lost Children’ is available to preorder here
This post was inspired by a one entitled “Great Girls Your Daughter Should Know (Before She Reads Twilight)” by Molly of the blog, Molly Makes Do, recommending strong, relatable female characters. While Molly’s list does indeed include some inspiring heroines that I recall from reading lists in my youth, it’s missing the diversity that girls from world literature can offer us. My contribution to filling that gap is the following list of great girls and young women, from African literature, that all girls, young and old, should get to know.
In alphabetical order:
- Beatrice from Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe
- Dikeledi from The Collector of Treasures by Bessie Head
- Kainene from Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Mhudi from Mhudi by Sol T. Plaatje
- Nyasha and Tambu from Nervous Conditions (and Tambu again in The Book of Not) by Tsitsi Dangaremba
- Phephelaphi from Butterfly Burning by Yvonne Vera
- Sissie from Our Sister Killjoy by Ama Ata Aidoo
Novels 2, 6 and 7 are the only ones I’m not familiar with, but I most certainly agree with the rest of this list. ‘Nervous Conditions’ is one of my favourite novels.
An interview (in French and Arabic) with Algerian reporter, novelist and playwright Mustapha Benfodil.
Come read his nonfiction “The Last Six Days of Baghdad” In the April 2013: Iraq, Ten Years Later Issue of Words without Borders.
Unfortunately, I cannot understand the Arabic portions of the interview and as a result, I have no idea what the bulk of the interview is about. If anyone would like to translate or summarize it, I’d really appreciate that.
Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new book, is the story of Ifemelu, a young Nigerian who travels to America to study and stays there for 13 years before deciding to return to Lagos. The book is an atmospheric and vibrant love story – the love between Ifemelu and Obinze, the high-school sweetheart she leaves behind, the love between Ifemelu and her American boyfriend, the love she has for her young cousin Dike, whom she looks after in America, and the love of her homeland, Nigeria. It is also a novel about race and immigration and what it feels like to be black in America.
But the book’s biggest love affair seems to be Adichie’s enduring relationship with hair. Hairstyle is such a constant presence in the book that not a page goes past without a mention of it: straight weaves, box braids, cornrows, dreadlocks, afros, twists, raucous curls, kinky coils and TWAs (teeny weeny afros). Not to mention texturisers, relaxers, oils, pomades and hair butter. No character in her book gets away without having their hairstyle mentioned, and many are defined by it. And not just the girls. ‘The greying hair on the back of his head was swept forward, a comical arrangement to disguise his bald spot.’ ‘A dreadlocked white man sat next to her on the train, his hair like old twine ropes that ended in a blond fuzz.’
Chimamanda Adichie, 36, sits before me now in a hotel in London: contained, amused, sexy and intellectual. Her own hair is succinctly tethered, but it looks as if, were she to free it, it would be ready to spring into action at any time.
‘I am obsessed with hair!’ she exclaims, before settling happily into a long session on the subject. ‘As you can see I have natural, negro hair, free from relaxers and things. My hair story started when I was a baby. My mother had boys and she desperately wanted a girl, a girl with hair. I came out with a lot of hair and she was thrilled. As I was growing up she would do things to my hair but what I loved the most was when she stretched it with a hot comb. I was terrified too, because when the comb touched your ear it was so painful, but I loved the idea that my hair would then be straight. So when I was three years old I already had the idea that straight hair was beautiful and my hair was ugly.’
In secondary school her hair had to be natural or in braids. Even now, Adichie says, her two nieces who go to school near Lagos have to have their hair cut short, like boys. (‘They are continually texting me, to ask me to buy them a wig. I believe strongly that we should be proud of our hair, but if my 15-year-old nieces want a straight wig, I’ll buy them a straight wig! Life is short.’)
On the last day of secondary school Adichie ‘relaxed’ her hair. ‘It was this huge girl occasion for me and my friends,’ she says. ‘A relaxer alters the hair chemically and makes it permanently straight. But it also burns the scalp. And sometimes the hair just refuses to be totally straight, so they’ll use a tong and then it smells just like burning goat.’
She progressed through a series of hairstyles before she moved to America. ‘But here’s the thing – in America I suddenly found out I was black. I’m black! What does that mean? Suddenly I started thinking, why do I want my hair to look like white girls’ hair? This is absurd.’ In Americanah, after Ifemelu gets the relaxer treatment in the salon for the first time, the hairdresser says, ‘Wow, girl, you’ve got that white-girl swing!’Adichie writes. ‘She left the salon almost mournfully; while the hairdresser had flat-ironed the ends, the smell of burning, of something organic dying which should not have died, had made her feel a sense of loss.’
Adichie well remembers the day she cut off all her hair, and is now a keen exponent of the natural hair movement, though it is only popular in America; back in Nigeria hair is still straight. She has a friend who will not even answer the door without her wig, and ‘the salons there don’t know how to care for our hair any more. They only know about wigs and weaves and relaxed hair.’
Don’t get put off my the length, the entire article is well worth reading. I just wish Adichie would’ve addressed the real reason why Nigerians were upset about Thandie Newton being cast to play a Nigerian woman.
(via thefemaletyrant)
Afropolis
‘African cities are characterised by incessantly flexible, mobile and provisional intersections of residents that operate without clearly delineated notions of how the city is to be inhabited and used.’
—AbdouMaliq Simone
Metropolises often evoke images of flashy high-rise buildings, permanent background noise, backed-up cars and people moving quickly in all directions in their masses. New York, Tokyo, London, Sao Paulo. But what about Cairo? Lagos? Nairobi, Kinshasa, Johannesburg?
More than half of the world‘s population lives in cities. Countries of the South in particular are facing fast-paced globalisation, with the highest rates of urbanisation taking place in African cities. Beyond Western models of urban development, African cities are creating their own urban structures, topography and cultures. How do these structures work? How do the residents of these cities organise their daily lives? What discussions are taking place in Africa about the history and future of cities? And how are artists thinking about and representing urban life in Africa?
Lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched, Afropolis is the product of an exhibition developed by the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne, Germany. The book focuses on the Big Five of African cities: Cairo, Lagos, Nairobi, Kinshasa and Johannesburg, and brings together positions of artistic and cultural studies, as well as detailed histories and the specific dynamics of these African cities, in order to expand our understanding of the concept of urbanity and the phenomenon of the City from an African perspective.This is the first time the book is available in English.
