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 All posts originally made by me are credited.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).
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(since Oct. 21th 2012)
As a child, Award-winning South African photographer Neo Ntsoma was only exposed to negative images of black people and as a result, Ntsoma dreamed of taking more positive and holistic images of black people and black life, something the Apartheid regime barred by maintaining a firm grip over the country’s media.
Transitioning from a systematically racially oppressive country to a nation with new possibilities for change, Ntsoma retraces the 20-something year journey of some of her closest friends, colleagues and peers as a way of celebrating the progress of black South Africans in popular culture.
Vintage colour black and white portraits take in Bobson Studio founded by Sukdeo Bobson Mohanlall in Durban, South Africa, in 1961.
Vintage colour studio portraits take in Bobson Studio founded by Sukdeo Bobson Mohanlall in Durban, South Africa, in 1961.
South African artist Khuli Chana’s brand new music video for his third single off of his award-winning album Lost in Time album.
This song, Mnatebawen, represents a celebration of the journey thus far that has seen Khuli Chana win a “Best Collab” Metro FM Award for Tswa Daar (ft Notshi); a “Best Rap Album” South African Music Award (SAMA); a “Male Artist of the Year” SAMA and the coveted “Album of the Year” SAMA (the 1st ever hip hop album to ever win this award in SA history).
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Cândido da Fonseca Galvão, also known as Oba II d’Africa (1845-1890) was a Brazilian man who fought in the War of the Triple Alliance (also called the Paraguayan War) and claimed to be the grandson of an African prince whose son had been brought to Brazil as a slave. Galvão himself was born a free man in Bahia, and enlisted in the military at a time when Black slavery was still legal in what was then the Empire of Brazil.
Galvão was the grandson of the powerful African prince Alafin Abiodun, who unified the Yoruba kingdom of Oyó in the late eighteenth century. Galvão’s father fought in the wars that raged in that region of Africa in the early nineteenth century, was captured in battle, and sold into slavery. He was then transported to Bahia. With the help of friends among the Yoruba community in Salvador, Galvão’s father quickly purchased his freedom. He then married and had children. As an offspring of freedpersons, Cândido Galvão was raised as a free black man near the town of Lençóis in the interior of Bahia.
Dom Obá II considered it his duty to fight for his country in the war against Paraguay. “As the patriotic soldier that I am, I understand that I have only been doing my duty in taking an active part in all the matters that I understand to be grave.” Enlisting as a Voluntário in the all-black Zuavo company that departed from Lençóis on May 1865, Galvão remained at the front until wounded in his right hand in August 1866. After his return to Bahia, where he remained through the decade of the 1870s, Galvão petitioned government officials for recognition of his service during the war and for monetary compensation. His experience in Paraguay inspired his commitment to ending slavery in Brazil and his pride in being a black man.
Galvão settled in Rio de Janeiro in 1880, where he gained renown. The wealthy considered him a “disturbed veteran” (uma espécie de veterano resmungão) and “folkloric aberration” due to his outspokenness and appearance in attire that included a long black morning coat, tall hat, gloves, umbrella, and walking cane. An activist of the first order, Galvão met personally with the Emperor [Pedro II of Brazil] 125 at public meetings from June 1882 to December 1884! Dom Obá garnered great respect among “the Blacks and the Browns” (the terms commonly used by Galvão) residing in the city. Slaves, freedpersons, and free persons of color all provided financial support that enabled the prince to publish articles in newspapers. In his writings, Galvão praised the contributions of black and brown soldiers during the Paraguayan war, condemned the racism he witnessed in Brazil, and called for an end to slavery.
(Source: Dale Torston Graden, From Slavery to Freedom in Brazil: Bahia, 1835-1900.)
Galvão died in 1890, shortly after the abolition of slavery in Brazil and the establishment of the Brazilian republic. An biography of Galvão, entitled Prince of the People, was published in 1993.](http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficheiro:Dom_Oba_II.jpg)
Cândido da Fonseca Galvão, also known as Oba II d’Africa (1845-1890) was a Brazilian man who fought in the War of the Triple Alliance (also called the Paraguayan War) and claimed to be the grandson of an African prince whose son had been brought to Brazil as a slave. Galvão himself was born a free man in Bahia, and enlisted in the military at a time when Black slavery was still legal in what was then the Empire of Brazil.
Galvão was the grandson of the powerful African prince Alafin Abiodun, who unified the Yoruba kingdom of Oyó in the late eighteenth century. Galvão’s father fought in the wars that raged in that region of Africa in the early nineteenth century, was captured in battle, and sold into slavery. He was then transported to Bahia. With the help of friends among the Yoruba community in Salvador, Galvão’s father quickly purchased his freedom. He then married and had children. As an offspring of freedpersons, Cândido Galvão was raised as a free black man near the town of Lençóis in the interior of Bahia.
Dom Obá II considered it his duty to fight for his country in the war against Paraguay. “As the patriotic soldier that I am, I understand that I have only been doing my duty in taking an active part in all the matters that I understand to be grave.” Enlisting as a Voluntário in the all-black Zuavo company that departed from Lençóis on May 1865, Galvão remained at the front until wounded in his right hand in August 1866. After his return to Bahia, where he remained through the decade of the 1870s, Galvão petitioned government officials for recognition of his service during the war and for monetary compensation. His experience in Paraguay inspired his commitment to ending slavery in Brazil and his pride in being a black man.
Galvão settled in Rio de Janeiro in 1880, where he gained renown. The wealthy considered him a “disturbed veteran” (uma espécie de veterano resmungão) and “folkloric aberration” due to his outspokenness and appearance in attire that included a long black morning coat, tall hat, gloves, umbrella, and walking cane. An activist of the first order, Galvão met personally with the Emperor [Pedro II of Brazil] 125 at public meetings from June 1882 to December 1884! Dom Obá garnered great respect among “the Blacks and the Browns” (the terms commonly used by Galvão) residing in the city. Slaves, freedpersons, and free persons of color all provided financial support that enabled the prince to publish articles in newspapers. In his writings, Galvão praised the contributions of black and brown soldiers during the Paraguayan war, condemned the racism he witnessed in Brazil, and called for an end to slavery.
(Source: Dale Torston Graden, From Slavery to Freedom in Brazil: Bahia, 1835-1900.)
Galvão died in 1890, shortly after the abolition of slavery in Brazil and the establishment of the Brazilian republic. An biography of Galvão, entitled Prince of the People, was published in 1993.
Members of the Somali community in South Africa have marched to parliament in Cape Town to protest against recent attacks on foreigners.
Three Somalis have been killed this month and the Somali government has requested the South African authorities to do more to protect their nationals.
About 200 people took part in the protest, holding a banner reading: “Everyone is a foreigner somewhere.”
Correspondents say xenophobic attacks have increased recently.
Some of the protesters accused the authorities of not doing enough to prevent attack on foreigners, especially Somalis, or prosecute those responsible.
Two Somali brothers were allegedly hacked to death with an axe in the northern Limpopo province on Thursday night.
Last week, Abdi Nasr Mahmoud was stoned to death in Port Elizabeth.
Mohamed Aden Osman told the BBC that criminals saw Somalis as “soft targets”.
According to the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria, South Africans are becoming “increasingly desensitised” to attacks on foreigners, The Sowetan newspaper reports.
The BBC’s Mohammed Allie in Cape Town says the violence is linked to the massive unemployment among young South Africans.
In the past two decades, many thousands of Somalis have fled conflict at home and moved to South Africa, where many have opened small shops and kiosks in townships.
South Africans are becoming desensitised to crime and xenophobic attacks, the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria said.
Excerpt:
“We fear that xenophobic attacks are becoming regular phenomena, and the South African population is becoming increasingly desensitised,” it said in a statement.
“While the law prohibits heinous deeds such as sexual and violent crimes, the South African population has grown apathetic to these issues with little hope of them being addressed.”
It called on all tertiary institutions to address the issue.
“We need to start formulating plans on how to incorporate the issue of xenophobia into syllabi, create better awareness around xenophobia, and disseminate information about the scope and protection of the South African Constitution.”
These comments echo sentiments I voiced in this post a few days ago.
Photographs taken in South Africa during the 1950s or 1960s by Ernest Cole.
“Three-hundred years of white supremacy in South Africa has placed us in bondage, stripped us of our dignity, robbed us of our self-esteem and surrounded us with hate.” - Ernest Cole
Images of every day life for black people in South Africa under Apartheid, taken by South African photographer Ernest Cole.
Ernest Cole was born in South Africa’s capital city Pretoria in 1940. When Cole was 28, he applied for a job at Drum magazine and soon became the assistant of Jurgen Schadeberg, Drum’s chief photographer.
Cole had begin given a camera earlier in his life by a Roman Catholic priest and decided to receive some formal experience by enrolling in a correspondence course with the New York Institute of Photography in the 1960s. This encouraged him to begin to document the realities of Apartheid. In the early 1960s, after leaving Drum to work for Bantu World newspaper (now The Sowetan), Cole began to freelance for his former employer Drum as well as Rand Daily Mail and the Sunday Express, making him South Africa’s first freelance photographer.
With an urge to leave South Africa for New York in the mid-60s, Cole did something unheard - he somehow managed to get the South African Racial Classification Board to re-classify him from Black to Coloured. This enabled him to leave the country in 1966 taking his photographs with him. After showing his photographs to Magnum Photos, Cole published the book House of Bondage which was banned in South Africa.
Cole later moved to Sweden and in 1990 he passed away from cancer whilst living in New York.
Somalia’s president says he “wants answers” from South Africa after the brutal murder of a Somali man in Port Elizabeth, Al Jazeera has learned.
The Somali man, 25-year-old Abdi Nasir Mahmoud Good, was stoned to death on May 30 by a mob. The violence was captured on a mobile phone and shared on the internet.
Sheik Mohammed, Somalia’s president, called on his South African counterpart Jacob Zuma to “act immediately” to arrest those responsible.
Kamal Gutale, chief of staff in the Somali presidency, told Al Jazeera on Monday: “The president has asked Mr Zuma and his foreign minister to look into the matter and investigate the brutal killing and violence.”
The murder is the latest in a number of attacks on Somali immigrants in South Africa. Police are investigating the death but no one has been arrested.
Graphic footage
The Somali presidency said the issue was raised on the sidelines of the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) in Tokyo on Sunday, after the Somali community was hit by a series of attacks in South Africa over the last week.
The graphic footage shows the bare-chested Good lying in the middle of a street while a mob pelts him with rocks and boulders as pedestrians and vehicles pass by.
Local media said Good was attacked while trying to protect his shop from looters. He was also stabbed in the violence.
The Somali community in South Africa, which numbers a few hundred thousand, reacted with outrage.
The Somali Association of South Africa (SASA) told Al Jazeera that at least five other Somalis have been injured and about 40 shops have been looted in the four provinces across the country.
Government inaction
“At the time, President Zuma was not aware of the incident and expressed surprise,” Gutale said.
The South African president promised to look into the matter, he said.
But SASA said that the South African government has repeatedly failed to act on this and previous attacks on foreigners.
“This is not the first time; this is happening over and over again. The South African government is not taking action, the community is angry and every time this happens, nothing is ever done,” said SASA spokesman Ismaeel Abdi Adan.
The South African presidency was unavailable to comment.
The African Centre for Migration and Society at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, said in a report released in 2012 that Somali-run businesses suffered disproportionately from crime, including attacks by competing South African traders.
*The South African government has said that previous violence against foreigners was a result of criminality and not xenophobia.
In 2008, more than 50 foreign African nationals were killed in a spate of violence against foreign nationals across the country.
*Xenophobia is not the root cause for these criminal acts? Is that what the South African government is saying? Because I’m pretty sure the experiences of various non-South African African nationals living in South Africa, exposed to attitudes that are clearly xenophobic in nature, would counteract that statement. Unless I am misunderstanding the bolded statement, I don’t see this continued violence as simply an act of unlawful outbursts.
These heinous and disgustingly violent xenophobic attacks continue to happen and sometimes, one feels as though both the local media and the South African public have become somewhat blase about these incidents as they happen with very little expressed outrage from South Africans, at least in my experience. No substantial and progressive dialogue is initiated by the media about the roots, history and current factors that continue to fuel xenophobia in the country, that would both address these attitudes head-on and ensure that a critical consciousness about xenophobia is maintained in the psyche of the public.
The fact that African nationals who come from countries outside of South Africa are still viewed in a manner that brings about such acts is a very serious matter that needs to be addressed with depth and caution, something the government does a very good job of not doing. Xenophobia also needs to be combated with the help of African leaders and their ambassadors/embassies based in South Africa who should both warn and provide assistance for their citizens emigrating to and currently living in South Africa who may be the victims of xenophobia but do not feel safe reporting these issues to local authorities.
Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse spent much of the years 2008, 2009 and 2010 engaged in the quixotic task of taking a photograph out of every window, of every internal door, and of every television-set in Ponte City. This circular 54-story building has been the subject of their three-year investigation of its structure and its position as the crucible of Johannesburg´s urban mythology.
The result is three light-boxes, each measuring almost four meters, which tower above the viewer in similar proportions to the building itself. The photographs, taken with as much formal consistency as was possible in a chaotic building, are presented exactly in order, floor above floor and flat by flat.
Pointe City Background (from Artist’s Website):
The fifty-four-storey Ponte City building dominates Johannesburg’s skyline, its huge blinking advertising crown visible from Soweto in the south to Sandton in the north. When it was built in 1976 – the year of the Soweto uprisings – the surrounding flatlands of Berea, Hillbrow and Yeoville were exclusively white, and home to young middle-class couples, students and Jewish grandmothers. Ponte City was separated by apartheid urban planning from the unforgettable events of that year. But as the city changed in anticipation and response to the arrival of democracy in 1994, many residents joined the exodus towards the supposed safety of the northern suburbs, the vacated areas becoming associated with crime, urban decay and, most of all, the influx of foreign nationals from neighbouring African countries.
Ponte’s iconic structure soon became a symbol of the downturn in central Johannesburg. The reality of the building and its many fictions have always integrated seamlessly into a patchwork of myths and projections that reveals as much about the psyche of the city as it does about the building itself. Tales of brazen crack and prostitution rings operating from its car parks, four storeys of trash accumulating in its open core, snakes, ghosts and frequent suicides have all added to the building’s legend. Some of these stories are actually true, and for quite some time most of the residents were indeed illegal immigrants. And yet, one is left with the feeling that even the building’s notoriety is somewhat exaggerated – that its decline is just as fictional as its initial utopian intentions were misplaced and unrealized.
Celebrating the Freak: Images of Two Township Genderqueers
Luciano and Lunga are biological boys living in Alex and Tembisa. They identify as both male and female. While the way they express their gender and their sexual orientation could get them beaten and/or raped and/or killed, they choose to be themselves, to “celebrate The Freak”. These images are a celebration of The Freak, a celebration and salute to them being them, to their integrity, honesty and bravery.
Images by Germaine de Larch
These photographs, and a range of Germaine’s other work will be on display and for sale at her first solo exhibition: #rediscoveringtheordinary
@ Studio23, Arts on Main, Sunday 16 June, 3pm. Johannesburg, South Africa
NEW MUSIC: Goapele - Undertow
Simply beautiful.
As a child, Whitaker’s character Ali narrowly escaped being murdered by Inkhata, a militant political party at war with Nelson Mandela’s anti-apartheid ANC. Now, as chief of Cape Town’s homicide branch, his quest to bring the perpetrator to justice leads him on a path that uncovers the unhealed wounds of post-apartheid South Africa.
“Zulu’’’s explicit, and, at times even gratuitous, depiction of violence and inter-human relations, paints a highly cynical picture of post-colonial Cape Town, one in which authorities are corrupt and vigilante justice is king.
Whitaker won the Oscar for his mesmerizing portrayal of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in 2006’s “The Last King of Scotland,” and is known for adopting a method-acting approach to his roles. In preparation for “Zulu,” he met with real-life Zulu gang members — some just out of prison — and went inside local communities to immerse himself in the character who suffers personal tragedies both in childhood and as an adult.
“I met the actual gang members from the different communities: the Zulu gang leaders, and the different members out of the prisons… I find that it helps to find the source of the character,” the actor said.
“The violent crimes unit took me around quite a bit … which helped me understand what it was like to be around the townships,” he said, adding that he also learned Zulu and Afrikaans in the weeks up to filming.
Though the film’s barbaric depiction of torture and murder has been panned by some critics as too showy — severed heads, rapes and graphic mutilations — Whitaker said the film is accurate in its portrayal of gangland violence.
