Koranteng's Toli

Road Trip

2011-12-21T04:55:00.000-08:00

It was a mere road trip to fetch my grandmother from our family's village in the Volta region for the New Year, yet it ran the gamut of emotions. Some impressionistic travel toli from the archives...

I. Sick

The motorcyclist didn't even try to avoid them - indeed it seemed as if he sped up to reach them. Coming up behind him, and taking furious evasive action, we barely missed adding to the desolating impact. A contest between a Honda motorbike and a hen and her four chicks will always be unequal. A week-old chick, half the size of a tennis ball was the fatal casualty, collateral damage to glib insouciance. The reaction to the death was all too familiar. The hen felt the maternal loss - there was that squealing sound, and the mortified look at the crumpled flesh was a recognizable universal. Yet there was no time to dwell on the damage and she gathered the remainder of her brood to continue crossing the road - presumably she would return later if at all possible, braving the traffic. We all felt sick in the car; we all felt angry. What kind of man enjoys running over a chick? As we overtook him, the wrathful thought crossed my mind, a slight swerve and it would be the same kind of competition between our four-wheel drive and his motorbike, roadkill revenge on this chick murderer on the main street of Anyiwarase. Such are the conflicted musings of a backseat driver... Instead, we mournfully averted our eyes as we passed: they say that, much like revenge, wrath is for the weak. In any case, the next town was coming up.

II. Sour

The mood in the car turned eerily reflective as we drove through the village of D. It took me half a minute to remember that its townsfolk had attempted to murder my uncle in the last elections, which explained the pregnant silence of his brother, who slowly drove the car through its only paved street - he'd had to retrieve him back then, bloodied and all - and the stillness of his 89 year old mother, who is still feeling the wound to this day. Try as I might, and I tried twenty times in a row, no photos that I took would come out right. It was as if the Gods of Nikon decided to forbid me a photographic record of this hamlet of trauma. Oh well, it would have to live on in my memory, live and not Memorex.

We noted that the electricity that my mother had sought to have delivered to the village had indeed been installed, and that the school now seemed well appointed and equipped and even had a fresh coat of paint. It was their just reward, a shower of love. The village is a religious settlement, home to an evangelical sect; the unkind call them a cult, but surely brands do not matter in Ghana's new Christianity. "Welcome to D. City of God. A holy town", proclaims the sign at the village entrance. "One whose folk do unholy things", I thought to myself...

Nothing was said for a long while in that car. Call it group therapy for three generations, a commemoration of a town we must pass whenever we want to see loved ones.

To salve myself, I remembered a lyric, nothing hits your heart like soul music, and contemplated a playlist - the lead track would have to be Portishead's Sour Times. My thoughts then turned to the climax of that Clint Eastwood b-movie, you know, the one in which the avenging gunfighter makes the all-too-fallible members of a town paint it entirely in red as if to commemorate the blood that spilled on the ground. Oh, and in that vein perhaps Gil Scott-Heron's Paint it Black, would fit the bill. And so forth... There was perfect silence until we reached the bridge.

III. Sweet

We stopped after we crossed the bridge at Atimpoku. As we slowed, thirty-five or more traders, mostly young girls, scampered in our wake and surrounded the car, arms outstretched, wares on the head, and tongues wagging. Some insistent, some seductive, some combative, the whole, a joyful cacophony.

They shouted, "Papa-le, Novi, Big Man. Hey. Honey. Over here..." Rolling down the window, I could see and smell the alluring prizes they presented: abolo and the red lobster, shrimp and crayfish - freshly caught and smoked from the river. And the pears of course. Indeed some shoved their wares into the car. Well the bargaining began in earnest. In Africa, a market forms wherever there is slowed traffic; one's car window becomes a temporary shop, the products thrust in your hands for brief evaluation. You have to bargain hard even though the prices are ridiculously low from your dollar-based standpoint. It is expected that even big men will barter.As they say, markets are conversations...

Stopping at the bridge to buy abolo and shrimp was a ritual my uncle and I have always performed. I remember especially vividly the road trips the two of us took in the late 80s and early 1990s. Back then, with the poorer roads and cars, we were guaranteed to break down and the food would prove essential as we waited at the roadside for someone to stop and help. As the bundles of food produce were handed over, the thought vaguely crossed the mind that most of these girls should be in school rather than hawking their wares. The warm, breadlike abolo — baked rice flour wrapped in fresh plantain leaves, smelled and tasted as I remembered: at once sour and sweet. And the shrimp! Well... There's a reason we always ate them even during the cholera scares of a decade ago... Ah foolish me, forgive me for thinking that cholera scares were a thing of the past, apparently they're back these days.

Of course the packaging of the food wares on hand recalled the eternal tension between tradition and modernity. On the one hand, the organic plantain leaves that no one can imagine buying abolo without, and, on the other, the now-ubiquitous plastic bag or cling wrap surrounding the shrimp. Or indeed consider the sachet water industry that the young girls, the kayaye, that ply our streets embody. You can't avoid plastics it seems; the populace has seeming voted with its pocket books for sachet drinking water and the cottage industry it has spawned. We really must challenge ourselves to do better when it comes to packaging of our foods. The market hasn't changed in over a century except perhaps with this non-biodegradable detritus that mark out our modern age.

Newly repaired and resurfaced, the bridge looked better than I'd ever seen it. Deferred maintenance is the usual fare in our lands but some enterprising soul had managed to secure the funds to rehabilitate this bridge, allowing it to escape the lot of the numerous road and construction projects that have simply stalled in the past few years - even as they had been budgeted for. My uncle regaled me with the toli that the drivers of some of the very heavily loaded trucks that we saw parked nearby in the town, which are ostensibly forbidden from using said bridge, were known to lie in wait and pay lucrative bribes to pass during the night. Everyone knows it but no one does anything about it. Plus ça change, a routine story of law and disorder in Ghana.

The mood lifted as I took in the sights, sounds and smells of life around the river Volta. I remembered the great, restful feeling of earlier in the day. There's a reason everyone who visits loves this part of Ghana.

There's a certain freshness of the air once you cross the bridge and officially enter the Volta region. It's not that development has passed the place by but it does feel more unchanged. The nearby Ho hospital after all is testament to state-of-the art living (even if we discount its notorious 150 percent overhead - white elephant election gifts that World Bank directors would prefer you not to bring up in conversation). I recalled the majesty of the trees in our village commons, near the EP church (Evangelical Presbyterian that is). The trees that used to serve as facilities for the primary school all the way until 2002.

I remembered the sight of my grand aunt standing in line to vote in the day's district assembly elections, proud of doing her civic duty even amidst the shambles - the ballots had only arrived at 2 pm, and only in our village, not in the three surrounding villages. Her early-bird attempt at 9 am had been fruitless but hopefully by now she would have managed to cast her vote. Listening to her complain about the Electoral Commission and disorganization, I reminded her that she was the one who always said that democracy was a process, that we always had to fight for it. "Well it's getting tiring".

I was minded of the uncanny places you might come across a 1969 Opel, a vintage collector's item that deserves to be in a museum if not on the road.

I wondered about the lives of those who decide to retire to Ghana's villages. The old men sitting under the canopies throughout the day. Do they have places to go and people to talk to? Elder care ought to be a growth industry in Ghana, and professionalized too. Those traditional bonds that we have long prided ourselves as differentiators are a thing of the past.

But it was all about talking to family, young and old, and hearing about the changes we'd been going through.

Our village is always restful.

The once dense forest in the Abutia hills is slowly recovering from the depredations of the nearby human settlements.

Our houses are mostly unchanged.

We work with millet and maize in the same immemorial manner as if a little technology couldn't help.

Heading back home we reached the Tetteh-Quarshie roundabout, named after our country's famous scion (he brought cocoa, that other black gold to Ghana). Formerly miles of unused land, and notoriously the dumping ground for some of the laziest of Rawlings's death squads in the early eighties (the Affram plains being too far for their cargo of bodies), it has seen development - they now call it an interchange. On its margins still sits the unfinished hotel that the owner of Shangri La started against advice - until the marshy soil sank the buildings as if in rebuke. But there are now additions and, well, the sour memories are being eclipsed by the new additions to its environs, the new sweetness of Better Ghana.

We passed the Accra Mall that, much like Citizen Kofi's, is an attempt to bring an upscale Southern California aesthetic to Ghana. The middle class of a recently declared middle income country deserve their Apple i-shop and finery. Vlisco proudly display their new creations and Woodin had just opened a branch doling out their fabulous fabrics. A store manager would later admit that too many people were window shopping over the holidays. And so we have the mall as a youth hangout, thoroughly normalized in other words. In just a few years, we have developed a mallrat culture worthy of New Jersey. Globalization as the Mosquito Principle.

We are living multiple realities it seems.

We passed the Villagio sky scrapers under construction that expats are buying sight unseen - rumours of up to a million dollars for the upper floors. The bit about these being all-cash payments makes one wonder about where the money is coming from.

Some things are unchanged, mud huts compete with steelworks.

Just a few minutes later we passed the gleaming office building that my cousin's husband designed just a few doors down our street. The quite malicious toli is that it was a monument to Mum, that she was behind it, that it was proof of her millions. It's the name you see, The Elizabeth. If only they could see her bank account and what fleeing your home at your prime into 18 years of exile can do.

Shacks overlap with shining glass.

Life is sweet in Ghana (for some at least).

We came home that's all.

Soundtrack for this Note

File under: travel, Ghana, Volta, Accra, memory, observation, family, life, culture, Africa, rural, development, photography, toli

Parenthood

2011-03-08T18:50:00.000-08:00

So The Wife and I were blessed with a baby girl yesterday. A bundle of joy, 6 and a half pounds of loveliness, we couldn't be more elated. We'll have the outdooring (naming ceremony) in due course. Like all new parents, it's all about change, lots of change to our life, and an abundance of love.

The Wife had also been labouring to deliver her book manuscript to the publisher and, in the race between baby and book, our child barely won by two nagging footnotes, it was a close run thing, you know. The one was all sweetness and the other is to be titled, Bitter Roots. My own role was minor: a shoulder to rest on, a hand to squeeze, a chauffeur, cheerleader, cook and a proud husband - oh, and a copy editor.

I expect to be spending lots of quality time with the new addition to the family so blogging and everything else will be fitful at best, and diaper-constrained for certain. In mitigation, I've written a whole lot already over the past 6 years and even have some toli queued up for episodic release.

In the meantime, allow me to bask in parenthood.

Soundtrack for this note

File under: life, family, baby, parenthood, birth, joy, toli

He of The Little Green Book

2011-02-22T04:27:00.000-08:00

Events are fast outpacing the best laid plans of both dictators and mere toli mongers, thus, although the theme fits the bill, I have had to bring forward the piece I promised almost four years ago as a follow up to the theater of that secret video of Gaddafi that was leaked to me. The current atrocities and low rent circumstances however necessitate light verse, or even doggerel, rather than the intended prose poem. Thus I give you another entry in the Things Fall Apart Series, file this under the banner of Fallen Angels.

I. He of The Little Green Book

He of The Little Green Book was in Paris the other day
A grand tour, part of an awakening some might say

Hospitality and social graces were extended his way
Amnesty International had to make do with dismay

Inconvenient topics, blood and sin, never to be discussed.
He went hunting, or, as his hosts put it, faire la chasse.

The tumult of the entourage and the ceremonial band
The customary bodyguards, as always, were close at hand.

He pitched his travel tent on the lawn of the Grand Palais
And lectured his hosts on human rights throughout the day

An oasis of oil and gas under his land
He'd built up a legacy of blood-soaked sand.

Self-importance, one can always understand
The revolutionary principles, however, damned the man.

Epigrams, ludicrous even without translation
And with translation, worthy of the blandest corporation.

Claimed to be a Guide with revolutionary notions
To life, the Brother Leader presented solutions

You've heard no doubt about the "Third Universal Theory"
And of course "The Solution of the Problem of Democracy"

"The Authority of the People" was his starting point
His modus operandi however was blood, from joint to joint

The social and economic basis of this here distributed theory
Was, in practice, a political axis of corruption, not the first in history

Newspapers throughout Libya were organs of adulation
He of The Little Green Book, officially venerated as a philosopher-king

...

Back home in Ghana at the depth of our despair
When books were scarce, and food shelves were laid bare

He of The Little Green Book made a donation
A token of the good Colonel's appreciation

A thousand copies of The Little Green Book
Brotherly solidarity, extended to the Ghanaian pocketbook

The generosity of his wisdom, to be shared far and wide.
Our universities, the recipients of his vacuous bromides

We'd learned heavy lessons about what he called revolution
"Crush the dissent", "Don't brook any opposition".

Thus, ever since the Flight Lieutenant's arrival
We'd had to develop a new philosophy of survival

At markets, we would fight over corned beef and sardine tins
Throughout I kept asking myself: why are these men laughing?

...

He of The Little Green Book was in Italy the other day
Introducing good old Silvio to a rarefied kind of play

Bunga bunga parties were on the menu
Gas and oil deals discussed, and matters of revenue

On Putin's bed, it was eroticism incarnate
Sexual gymnastics, the orgies very articulate

They were men who thumbed their noses at everyone else
Impunity their lifeblood, they were enamoured of self

A cushy life, lived surrounded by buxom Ukrainians
They were gremlins and parasites, or rather, rogue authoritarians

Mercurial, the journalists would call him, and I think it was a cop out
For he was severe in the application of power, of that there can be no doubt

Adept at the shell game of diplomacy in latter times
Don't forget the expedient dumping of allies at the drop of a dime

There's even an opera about him, Gaddafi, do take a look
Although it points out inconsistencies in The Little Green Book

Fear not, in the pantheon where Chairman Mao had his Red Book
You can share the luminous thoughts of He of The Little Green Book

A slight never forgotten, that's what brought him here
The clannish sensibility of a cold-blooded dictator

He of The Little Green Book thus always made it clear
He'd kill you and your family no matter when or where

Stories of plots to bomb dissidents in Kenya, Egypt or Saudi Arabia
Only made it clear to everyone that the world was his oyster

In newspapers, the subject was always elided:
The khat, and other drugs that made him funeral minded

Conspiratorial notions were his living condition
He ascribed drunkenness and drug-taking to any opposition

...

He of The Little Green Book met Vladimir Putin the other day
It was the usual circus, the large retinue come what may.

Luxurious modesty was how he liked to call it,
He lived for the bustle around him, confident he could take Putin's judo hit

Like a palm tree rising in an oasis surrounded by blight.
The other leaders would be shown in their proper pedestrian light.

The desert savvy, the endurance of those who were truly able
By sheer will to conquer the shifting sands, of that he was quite capable

For months at a time he would go out there on a bend
Then emerge seemingly untroubled if not exuberant.

Men of will who forced their views on clans and the whole world.
The caliber of revolutionary, visionary men on the road to hell.

Take The Little Green Book - a blueprint for life itself,
To be studied and internalized, it even dealt with public health!

An unbroken chain of leadership, he outlasted Chairman Mao.
Who else had such a claim? He even beat Omar Bongo.

And that kleptocrat, only the French cared about him
The real prize, as you know, was to indulge in blood and sin.

No, it was only right, he belonged in the history books.
In any gathering he would stand out, opinions as sharp as his looks.

And he had put them down - the opinions that is,
Distilled them for present and future generations.

The Little Green Book, the wisdom for the ages.
A guide for the world, a guide for revolutions.

Battle-tested in countless countries, comprehensive and worldly
Luminous as only the folk wisdom of desert guides could be.

...

He of The Little Green Book met Tony Blair the other day
That sad sack, for whatever reason, again thought he'd have some sway

He of The Little Green Book couldn't believe the ease of the bamboozle
Of course, we could have told him he was dealing with Bush's poodle

Then later, remember, there was an audience with Condoleeza
And a call subsequently for a United States of Africa

US policy to the dictator was clear: coddle and let's make nice
His gifts, in return, were choice to the talented Miss Rice:

Diamond trinkets, a locket, and a copy of The Little Green Book
A sidelong glance, oil and gas contracts were the inevitable hook

Those Swiss bank accounts, how prosaic wouldn't you think?
Well, even an uncommon criminal needs money to drink

A bloodthirsty murderer that we indulged like no other
Willing to shoot children before their own grandmothers

He'd even bomb bystanders, he didn't believe in innocence
The legacy of a pariah devoid of all human sense

Months later it was declared, and this was no small thing,
Colonel Gaddafi would be the king of kings

Thus, among traditional leaders on the continent, he was elected
Well, according to his bank statements, he was rather self-selected

...

But back to that time period I alluded to earlier
In a Ghana fraught with dubious revolution and political theater

Perhaps I should not venture into matters eschatological
As indeed my doggerel rather tends towards the scatological

Let me not lose the rhyming meter, indulge my light verse
I'm congenitally incapable of engaging in anything terse

My father, the law school dean, was very precise
And, truth be told, what he recalled back then wasn't very nice

Thankfully it flew under the radar of Rawlings' dispensation:
It was about the application of the good Colonel's donation

In Ghana's scarcity, nothing went to waste:
'Twas a grim outlook

He'd photocopy his lecture notes for students;
They'd have to do as a textbook

As he thumbed through thousands of the Colonel's pristine pages
He was minded that, in our country, there were even paper shortages

We really had no time for this Third Universal Theory
It was a undoubtedly a low moment in all of Ghana's history

The memory, then, should come as no surprise to you, Dear Reader:
The pages of The Little Green Book were used as toilet paper.

...

II. Excellent Discussions

The issue was blood and sin.

III. Lest We Forget

Field notes on a legacy of blood...

Prosecutor: Was there ideology taught in the camp?

Witness: Yes, what we learned in the Mataba was about how to share the wealth of your government - about the distribution of wealth.

Prosecutor: This Mataba, did you receive any books or lesson papers in that ideology?

Witness: The ideology was taught in Mataba itself. They had a school to learn the ideology. You learned about the Green Book. How governments are cheating other governments.

— Taylor's former vice president: governments of Libya, Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast supported Taylor's 1989 invasion of Liberia

Prosecutor: At what age do you say you were abducted by the RUF?
Witness: 11 years.
Prosecutor: Had you been to school up to that time?
Witness: Yes.
Prosecutor: In what languages were you taught at school?
Witness: English.
Prosecutor: From what age did you attend school up to the time you were abducted at age 11?
Witness: I don't know the age at which I went to school. I don't know the age.
Prosecutor: How many years had you been in school by the time you were abducted at age 11?
Witness: Six years.
Prosecutor: After you were abducted, at some point you have told us in evidence you had some lessons from the RUF. That's right, isn't it?
Witness: Yes.
Prosecutor: Were you at some time made to read passages of Colonel Gaddafi's Little Green Book by the RUF?
Witness: The Green Book. They called it the Revolutionary Green Book. They said it was from Libya, from Mohamed Gaddafi. Yes, I read that one.
Prosecutor: In what language?
Witness: In English. Everything was in English.
Prosecutor: So you speak good English, do you?
Witness: The English that I can speak is what I am speaking here. I don't have any other English. As you hear me speaking I don't have it above that and I don't have it below that. That is what I am speaking here.
Prosecutor: So, what was taught in English apart from the Green Book?
Witness: The Green Book when they read it they would read it in English and they would interpret it, because there were people who did not understand English and so they would interpret it into Krio to them, but some of us who were able to read a little bit when they spoke the English we would understand. That was why I said everything was in English.

— Transcript of child soldier's testimony. The special court on Sierra Leone, 22 August 2008

[Moses] Blah testified about the first time he met [Charles] Taylor during his military training in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and Tripoli, Libya. In Libya, he trained with a group of Gambians, as well as a group of Sierra Leoneans led by Foday Sankoh. Blah testified that Sankoh referred to Taylor as "chief." Blah recounted that the first time he saw Taylor, Taylor introduced himself as "chief" and named the soldiers the National Patriotic Front of Liberia. Taylor also appointed Blah as Adjutant General of the NPFL.

— Charles Taylor trial report (pdf), May 2008

After listening to 91 prosecution witnesses over the past 18 months, Taylor said people had referred to his forces as if they "were brutes and savages: We are not. I am not."

Still, the former president acknowledged that skulls of Liberian soldiers were displayed at strategic roadblocks in 1990.

"They were enemy skulls and we didn’t think that symbol was anything wrong," he said. "I did not consider it bad judgment. I did not order them removed."

Taylor, who earned an economics degree at Bentley College (now University) in Waltham, said he had seen images of skulls used in many "fraternal organizations" and Western universities.

He also acknowledged that atrocities were committed in Liberia by "bad apples" and renegade soldiers, but said he had taught his small band of rebels - from their initial training in Libya - to abide by the laws of war.

"We found out that they were taking place, and we acted to bring those responsible to justice," he said. Rebel soldiers who committed excesses were court-martialed and sometimes executed, but civilian judicial institutions were left in place in areas under rebel control, he said.

— Taylor defends displaying of human skulls at roadblocks, Associated Press / July 17, 2009

He of The Little Green Book and his brothers in blood will not be missed.

Soundtrack for this note

File under: rogues, Gaddafi, poetry, verse, humour, politics, culture, observation, blood, satire, hatchet job, Libya, cruelty, violence, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, history, Things Fall Apart, Fallen Angels, toli

All Available Indignities

2011-01-28T16:59:00.000-08:00

As the ghosts of numerous tyrants, from Julius Caesar to Benito Mussolini will testify, people are very hard on those who, having had power, lose it or are destroyed. Then anger at past arrogance is joined with contempt for present weakness. The victim or his corpse is made to suffer all available indignities.

— The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith

The growth of his power and fame was matched, in my imagination, by the degree of the punishment I would have liked to inflict on him. Thus, at first, I would have been content with an electoral defeat, a cooling of public enthusiasm. Later I already required his imprisonment; still later, his exile to some distant, flat island with a single palm tree, which like a black asterisk, refers one to the bottom of an eternal hell made of solitude, disgrace, and helplessness. Now, at last, nothing but his death could satisfy me.

— Tyrants Destroyed by Vladimir Nabokov

"The widespread anarchy and the disillusion of the masses... made this revolution necessary. In the years since independence, fundamental human rights were brutally violated by the government. People were denied the right to live in freedom and with mutual respect. They were not allowed to have their own opinions. Organized political gangsterism and the politics of falsehood turned all elections into a farce. Instead of serving the nation, politicians were busy stealing. Unemployment and exploitation were on the rise, and in their sadism toward the population, the small clique of feudal fascists in power knew no bounds."...

Optimism quickly turned to disenchantment and pessimism. The people's bitterness, fury, hatred was now directed against their own elites, who were rapidly and greedily stuffing their pockets.

— The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski. Here, he quoted a statement by a youth movement and observed the aftermath of Nigeria's 1966 coup.

There is no one, or hardly any one, so wicked or so stupid as to deny the democratic ideal. There is no one, or hardly any one, so perverted that, were he the member of a small and simple community, he would be content to forgo his natural right to be a full member thereof. There is no one, or hardly any one, who would not feel his exclusion from such rights, among men of his own blood, to be intolerable. But while every one admits the democratic ideal, most men who think and nearly all the wiser of those who think, perceive its one great obstacle to lie in the contrast between the idea and the action where the obstacle of complexity - whether due to varied interests, to separate origins, or even to mere numbers - is present.

The psychology of the multitude is not the psychology of the individual...

Look at a crowd when it roars down a street in anger — the sight is unfortunately only too rare today — you have the impression of a beast majestic in its courage, terrible in its ferocity, but with something evil about its cruelty and determination. Yet if you stop and consider the face of one of its members straggling on one of its outer edges, you will probably see the bewildered face of a poor, uncertain, weak-mouthed man whose eyes are roving from one object to another, and who appears all the weaker because he is under the influence of this collective domination....

Now it is peculiar to the French among the great and independent nations, that they are capable, by some freak in their development, of rapid communal self-expression. It is, I repeat, only in crises that this power appears.

— A Force in Gaul by Hilaire Belloc (from On Something)

As the Tunisians, and now Egyptians, are currently demonstrating, this quality of "rapid, communal self-expression" is certainly not a Francophone singularity. History, contra Belloc, has forever shown that crowds can turn from inchoate to determined in mere hours. All tyrants and their Lady Macbeths are on notice. Still, a little sweat on their part, and the dismayed sensitivities of onlookers at the sight of turmoil in their marriages of convenience, are, all things considered, a small price to pay.

He who tests the depth of a stream with both feet must be prepared to swim.

— Ewe proverb, Ghana

File under: tyrants, rogues, literature, quotes, history, dissent, anger, revolution, groups, organization, crowds, culture, observation, perception, zingers, toli

Best of 2010

2011-01-24T00:04:00.000-08:00

My customary list of things that moved me in 2010...

Truth be told, I was mostly consumed by the World Cup last year especially since Ghana were bona fide contenders and could have/should have gone further/won it outright. Well the boys did great: Andre Ayew, Asamoah Gyan and all. I still haven't recovered from the Ghana-Uruguay match...

So, the year in numbers: I read 37 books, watched 100 movies (blame Netflix) and attended 12 concerts and 1 play.

I didn't write as much as I hoped and one reason is that I now also subscribe to about 1300 feeds; the resulting onslaught of information coming my way makes me lean towards consumption rather than production. Here's hoping for a different balance in 2011.

Books

Novels led the way in the 37 books I read (Incidentally two of these were e-books: Hilaire Belloc's essays and Charles Dickens's serial novels were great reads for the mobile phone moments, the interstices of modern life). The highlights in print were the young African writers.

Nii Ayikwei Parkes - Tail of the Blue Bird
Call it a case of deep empathy; it was the shock of the familiar. It's not often that I recognize myself on the book shelves. It was bracing to read a young Ghanaian writer, a modern traveler, equally at ease in London, the US, and my childhood neighbourhoods in Accra, and even someone who'll head up to the mountains near Aburi and make them the setting for his novel. Nii Parkes loves language and plain storytelling. My friend isn't afraid to take his time and tell stories and let them take us where they may, with humourous anecdotes and elliptical discursions thrown in for good measure. The genre and the form - the crime procedural, are almost unimportant even if finely detailed, it's the underlying story that matters. We are children of Ananse, lovers of social living, and the stories we can share. I have a deep and specific connection with his artistic impulse even when I disagree with him. To cap things off, The Makings of You, his poetry collection finally got its release in the US. Needless to say my man had a great year. I dig his brand of toli and recommend it to you. A head nod in your direction, brother.
Petina Gappah - An Elegy for Easterly (mini review)
Brian Chikwava - Harare North
"They" kept saying that I should read the new crop of Zimbabwean writers, that life in the shadow of Robert Mugabe was proving to be a fertile artistic ground, that the future of African literature lay in their palms. And there was a lot to their argument, these two wrote of dark matters and it was a tonic to read them. With a blast of furious energy, their voices asserted themselves immediately. Where Gappah was wry and humanistic, Chikwava's tone was utterly bleak, filled with irony and the darkest humour. Mugabe's victims are manifold but we can always fall back on this artistic response to his reign.

Let me digress about book covers for a minute - as you may know I have an interest in the types and faces that represent writing about Africa. Consider the journey from the cover photo in the English edition of a London market

to the following illustration in the US Edition

"Fine", you say, there's a transformation from the photo of a street scene to a quite clever montage in the illustration that further manages to throw in a few more references to London: Big Ben, tube signs and all. "I get it".

But look closer, if you will, at the bottom corners of the latter, and note the giraffe on the right and the tree in the savanna that has materialized on the left.

Chikwava's book is a novel about Zimbabwean immigrants in London. True, there are plenty of predators in the book but they are all too human - there is no wildlife to be found in its pages. What scenes there are in Zimbabwe are all urban.

(Incidentally, I can understand that the same tree and savanna appear on the cover of Gappah's book since at least one of her stories has that kind of backdrop.)

Apparently it isn't enough to have Harare in the title, and the black head and anomic eyes of the main protagonist as a signifier; that would be too subtle an indicator of Africa. I wonder if that giraffe and savanna detail was part of the cover artist Yuko Kondo's initial vision or whether it was the publisher who needed to remove any doubt about provenance. I wonder, must every African novel face the world with wildlife or the savanna as its backdrop? I'm not a big fan of the safari quotient.
James Ellroy - Blood's A Rover
I am a big fan of Ellroy's Underworld USA trilogy and the intricate worlds of bad men (and women in this final part) that he has constructed: "a new myth from the gutter to the stars". Indeed I read this twice in a feverish haze. He didn't disappoint; the trilogy will stand as one of the most ambitious and resolutely executed works of the past 20 years.
Geoffrey Philp - Who's Your Daddy? and other Stories
Call it Jamaican Gothic, a collection of stories full of wit and perception. His roving eye and his sharply attuned ear for dialog make for vivid reading. I also happen to love Geoffrey Philp's poetry.
Heinrich von Kleist - The Marquise of O and Other Stories (mini review)
Luminous stories that linger in the mind. Plots that swirl every which way, with turns at once startling and engrossing. Writing that leaves you breathless, von Kleist was peerless as an artisan of literary tectonics.
Geoffrey Household - Rogue Male
A story so stripped down and spartan that the reader wants to apply metaphor to gain comfort. On the surface it's a hard-boiled thriller about life at the extremes, I came to read it as a prescient warning about the relentless challenge that Hitler's fascism would pose. What is your interpretation?
Meja Mwangi - Going Down River Road (mini review)
A deep dive into the slums of Nairobi. An exacting and brilliant novel that manages to find soul and brotherhood among the futility. Gappah is to Chikwava - and Kenya is to Zimbabwe in our millennium - as Going Down River Road is to Thomas Akare's The Slums.
Alain Mabanckou - Black Bazar
Reads almost like a follow-up of his 1998 tour de force, Bleu, Blanc, Rouge, wonderful writing all around.
Emmanuel Dongala - Johnny Chient Méchant
There's a fine translation, Johnny Mad Dog of this look at child soldiers and the damage they leave in their wake. I read also that it has been made into a film that is about to be released. I have a pending piece on the novels about child soldiers in Africa. Powerful stuff indeed.
Sarah Ladipo Manyika - In Dependence
The Nigerian writers are making us all of us proud. I thoroughly enjoyed this love story full of missed opportunities.

Theatre

The sole play was Marcus Gardley's ... and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi, a funny gumbo of a play with soul food, slavery, Greek choruses, and Michael Jackson's Billie Jean song and dance routine at its core. Homeboy's got a unique vision.

Movies

Two trilogies brought forth the heat in my film watching.

Carlos the Jackal
Olivier Assayas's take on that gremlin of terrorists featured a startling and dizzying performance by Edgar Ramirez as the eponymous Venezuelan revolutionary. There was no higher achievement in cinema.
Stieg Larsson's Millenium trilogy saw Noomi Rapace embody that girl with the dragon tattoo with her singular talent. Actress of the year
State of Play
This BBC Miniseries was so engrossing that we had to watch all 6 hours in one sitting. Fodder for those with the journalistic impulse.
Prince of Broadway
Sean Baker's vibrant take on the hustle of Ghanaians in New York is almost too realistic.
The Death Of Mr Lazarescu
Quietly devastating and Kafkaesque.
The Secret of the Grain
I want to eat some couscous with everyone associated with La graine et le mulet.
Boardwalk Empire and Treme
The Wife and I fell for these HBO series, what can I say.
Bela Fleck: Throw Down Your Heart
A great documentary on musical exploration. For me it stepped into high gear from the moment when Oumou Sangare picked him up at the airport. I saw him in concert with Toumani Diabete the previous year; it was a great collaboration, banjo met kora and all was well.

Music

I attended 13 concerts - but only blogged about one - adding to the pile of lost reviews that I keep meaning to publish.

Amel Larrieux
The highlight of my year was watching Amel Larrieux perform for two magical nights in August. I still have an orange glow from those sessions. Her 2006 album, Morning, has proven to be a fantastic bed of creativity, reinvented on stage. It was the album of the year in 2006 and, well, let me not beat around the bush, it is one of my two favourite albums of the decade - the other is Voodoo. The listening statistics seem to bear that out. The songs she previewed from next year's album ought to bring her to the wide acclaim she richly deserves.
Van Hunt gave a solo performance almost exactly a year ago. He playfully alternated between acoustic guitar and grand piano and treated us to a tour of his soul songbook. It is deep and his musical vision is captivating.
José James and Jef Neve For All We Know
José James - Blackmagic

Hands down the most romantic thing I did was to attend the concert José James and Jef Neve gave at the Gould Theater at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. The classic setting, and the music, mon dieu, the music. I stand by my immediate reaction:
Impossibly talented, extravagantly empathetic, lushly lyrical: the golden voice meets the angular piano. Loved it.
It was really hard to believe that they had only played together twice before stepping into the studio. I'll have more to write about these young lions - José James especially (he had a busy year) deserves considerable critical attention, for this is the future of jazz.
Dwele - Wants World Women
Dwele still has that swagger - he deserves it needless to say. This year in addition to the seductive poses he struck on stage - a Dwele concert in Oakland is an event to behold. He brought some social observation into the mix - as ever it was over an infectious beat. Consider his take on our ongoing Great Recession in How I Deal
See, I was employed
But not today
See Bush came and made all that go away
Now I'm the crib with the fakest grin
Waiting for Obama to kick in
The chorus starts aptly enough with "I'm losing my power, chasing the almighty dollar". With unemployment at 10 percent and underemployment pervasive, we are all "waiting for Obama to kick in".
Bilal - Airtight's Revenge
In concert he was wild and fabulous and the new album was solid. It's great to have him back. The one-two combination of Restart and All Matter was exhilarating, Bilal went into a trance and we followed
John Legend & The Roots - Wake Up!
These guys deserve the Grammys they will be getting in the next few weeks.
Hindi Zahra - Handmade
We managed to catch Hindi Zahra live at Le Bataclan in Paris and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. I guess you'd call it world music, it was worldly, grown folks music. Norah Jones watch out.
Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings - I Learned The Hard Way
How can one not love The Game Gets Old?
Eric Roberson put the Music Fan First and continued to build his independent soul movement.
Corinne Bailey Rae, mourning her late husband, found a way to sing again and released a set, The Sea, full of elegiac balladry.
It was a year of returns. Massive Attack gave us Heligoland, Sade was a Soldier of Love and Gil Scott-Heron said I'm New Here - his take on Me And The Devil rocked hard.

Erykah Badu came back to us and even went nude for the love of the music.

Habib Koite and Bamada were mellow men as befits a band that has been together for 25 years. Like Sade, they were a seamless unit.

Finally two acts I caught at the end of the year who will be making waves in 2011:

Les Nubians will be giving us a Nu Revolution in coming months. We caught them live as they readied a new stage show.
I'm looking forward to Rhian Benson's Hands Clean, her first album in 7 years. Asked why she made us wait, she explained, "I had to do some living that I could then put in the album". She gave a short set at her release party in Accra - and even had a couple of wardrobe malfunctions, but it was worth it to hear her sing Say How I Feel and preview a few songs from the new album. Valentines Day is only weeks away.

Song of the year: Bilal - All Matter

Dearly Departed

In letters, Ferdinand Oyono, Robert Parker and gold old José Saramago passed away and are sorely missed.

In music, we lost Teddy Pendergrass - black masculinity incarnate, Gregory Isaacs - the cool ruler with the golden voice, Willie Mitchell one of the best music producers we have known, the ever versatile Lena Horne. The loss I took most personally was Abbey Lincoln; I'll forever miss her vibe.

For a playlist in memory of these greats, consider these albums: Joy, Night Nurse, Let's Stay Together and A Turtle's Dream.

File under: review, literature, appreciation, culture, observation, stereotypes, music, soul, movies, film, theatre, Africa, toli

Electoral Fictions

2010-12-23T04:30:00.000-08:00

Shamelessness is an essential component of the how to hand over to yourself blueprint but, as our Ivorian brethren are currently demonstrating, there is still room for innovation within that framework, and depths of crassness that can yet be plumbed. We live in a world of politics as theater and where elections are the ultimate in stage-managed human drama. Suspension of disbelief is essential in any fiction, and disingenuousness mandatory in electoral fictions.

I write this of course after watching events in Côte D'Ivoire over the past few weeks. The initial emotion was bemusement and indeed laughter - how can one not laugh at the spectacle of someone literally tearing up election results to prevent them from being declared. Still the inept antics only brought back the automatic, unrequited cringe I've had at Ivorian politics for the past decade. I remembered that I'd even awarded Laurent Gbagbo, his wife and their death squads an award of sorts, and looking over their 2004-5 citation, all the elements were there: the needless waste of everyone's time, the hubris, the threats and the violence. Still I have been holding my breath, a neighbour's house is still on fire.

Of course we've long since moved beyond laughter to the realm of tears. It's the usual litany, the West African yearning for normalcy: why should the conduct of elections be cause for fraught headlines? Why seal borders? And those death squads and the obligatory evacuation of foreign nationals? And so forth, it's a depressing lament. Most Ghanaians are gearing up to receive the refugees who have already started leaving the place. Sidenote: if refugees are leaving Côte D'Ivoire to go to Guinea and even Liberia, a country recovering from 14 years of civil war, how many more can we expect in ostensibly stable and oil-producing Ghana?

Incidentally, we were on notice as to how ugly things might turn out. Recall if you will, the September story about that Ivorian man arrested in California attempting to buy arms to smuggle in contravention of the UN embargo. The salient quote:

"$1.9 million wired to the US as a 50 percent downpayment on the weapons... the shipment of 4,000 handguns, 200,000 rounds of ammunition and 50,000 tear gas grenades to Ivory Coast."

As you watch the distressing news footage, imagine the additional damage this consignment would have wrought in light of the violence, reports of militias, mercenaries and nighttime disappearances. The fact also that millions of dollars were so readily transferred surely indicates the importance the old government placed on the military option and indeed the kind of planning that was involved (the International Criminal Court should take note). But anyway all that is a matter of ruthlessness, let's deal with lighter topics: shamelessness, political theater and electoral fictions.

We have seen problematic elections in this season - consider Burma as the archetype, or might you prefer the thuggish Egyptian variant held on the same day, or perhaps even the Belarusian just this past weekend. It is striking that Ivory Coast takes the cake even in such abject company. The usual saying goes that "It's not who votes that counts but it's who counts the votes"; we are witnessing new clauses being added to that formulation. Call the Ivorian innovation on this front the Gbagbo Imbroglio, if you will. Their singular contribution to the body of electoral fictions is nothing less than the fictitious election.

The usual practice when handing over to oneself is to hold back declaring results in your strongholds and wait until you know how many votes you need. In Chicago or Kansas City in the past, this was a matter of figuring out how many cemeteries to mine for the requisite ghost names. In Ghana in the 1990s, results from the Volta region always came in suspiciously late, later even than the Northern regions, and 98 percent votes in favour of the incumbent and 100 percent turnout (or more) would be the norm - shades of Mobutu or perhaps referendums in Stalin's time.

Gbagbo and company couldn't manage to do this, indeed the electoral commission that this sitting government had put in place took its job seriously and was remarkably independent - as well it should since a tremendous amount of effort had been put in place by Ivorians and the international community to stage these elections. The resort, then, was to say that the electoral commission did not have the right to declare the results. Which brings me again to that video clip I noted earlier that I've been stewing over ever since (and hopefully the BBC won't mind my using their image, I recommend to everyone their closing line: "the elections have been canceled six times in the past five years."). I haven't seen a more perfect piece of political theater in years. Every actor played their part brilliantly.

When the next day, the head of the electoral commission did manage to sneak out and declare the results, the Gbagbo camp would remark that the declaration was invalid since it hadn't been made within the requisite timeframe. In other words, the declaration that could have been made the prior night had turned into Cinderella's carriage once midnight had passed.

What then followed would clearly demonstrate that Ivory Coast has had a fictitious election.

It would only be after the election results were declared that a 'Constitutional Council' would throw out the votes of 12 percent of the country so that the "results" would be in Gbagbo's favour. Surely this must be the most innovative response to an electoral contest. I can't imagine a greater slap in the face short of actual physical slaps in the face - and these have since been forthcoming.

First for 15 years ago, you say that a large part of your countrymen are not Ivorians, then you say that they are but that they can't register, then you delay for 5 years, then you allow only some to register as you then delay registration and again delay the vote. Then the whole country votes and even your folks vote against you so that the opposition win. And now you go and nullify their votes even though most of the irregularities were in your strongholds. Words fail me.

When Laurent Gbagbo would wrap himself in the flag and declare himself president, it would only bring to mind coronations of yore.

The question at the outset was whether Gbagbo's generals would follow the Burma blueprint and make his opponent, Outtara, an Aung San Suu Kyi of sorts. Burma of course outdoored its own electoral fictions recently - said elections were timed to occur while the Nobel laureate was under house arrest serving her expediently conferred and lengthy sentence. Just to make sure of the outcome, her party was essentially banned in any case.

Earlier on, one wondered if it would it be the Algerian Algorithm that would be applied: simply don't hold the second round since you know how it would go.

There was also the option of the Abacha Abrogation - with Nigerian bluntness, simply call things off.

The Baker barrage - I'm referring to the slickness of the Bush-Gore 2000 business where James Baker was consigliere: run the clock down. Recall that group of Republican lawyer types that stormed counting offices in Florida. Then the Supreme twist - a legal opinion that should not be construed as a precedent, mutterings about irreparable harm notwithstanding.

A close counterpart is the Mugabe Mutation, a variant of the rope a dope: lose in the first round of elections and resort to the 'or else'.

Finally I suppose there is the Lukashenko option

Perhaps six out of nine Belarusian presidential candidates were in jail. One of them, Uladzimir Neklyayev, was beaten unconscious and then dragged away from the hospital wrapped in blankets.

Laurent Gbagbo has already served an extra term as President - five whole years beyond the end of his mandate. We have been on notice as to his willfulness and are watching in almost despair as he does his worst, hoping against hope. I have a pet theory that someone who has been a political prisoner will do exactly what he wants to do (pace Mugabe, and Mandela notwithstanding). It is vain to think he will do otherwise.

The irony is that Gbagbo was on the receiving end of a famously rigged election. When I wrote my 1993 piece, I was in awe of the slick manner in which Houphouët-Boigny had used his considerable powers of incumbency and dealt with his opposition in 1990.

Given all the precedents one had expected a certain finesse or perhaps panache in the electoral strategy. As a Wikileaked cable from the US embassy in Abidjan put it in July 2009, "There will not be an election unless President Gbagbo is confident that he will win it -- and he is not yet confident of the outcome."

As well he should have been. The cable also noted that it was unlikely the elections would be held in early 2010 as expected since Gbagbo would undoubtedly want to preside over the jubilee ceremonies of 50 years of independence. "The prestige and celebrity that goes with hosting such an historic event" was insufficient as we have seen.

All of that came to pass. This was a long game and Laurent Gbagbo has never missed an opportunity to disappoint. The exasperating and novelistic playbook has been followed to a fault. Delay, suborn, browbeat, bludgeon, deny, wrap yourself in the flag, bluster, and, if need, be suppress and kill - those death squads.

We tell ourselves stories about elections, but it isn't often that the reality surpasses the myth. It has been a colossal waste of everyone's time. We have gone from electoral fictions to fictitious elections.

File under: rogues, Ivory Coast, Côte D'Ivoire, strategy, politics, elections, fraud, culture, observation, Africa, toli

The Codes of Martial Music

2010-04-01T14:56:00.000-07:00

Earlier, the officers threatened to kill the PM if his supporters continued street protests in his defence...

National radio interrupted its programmes to play military music, which correspondent say is code for a coup.

— Guinea-Bissau army head 'seized', April 1 2010

After a day of gunfire, explosions and nonstop military music on the radio in Niger’s capital, Niamey, the whereabouts of the president, Mamadou Tandja, remained unknown...

As of Thursday evening, the government had made no announcement about its status, even as martial music continued on the radio. A wrestling program replaced the evening news broadcast on state television. The streets were deserted and shops shut early.

— Palace in Niger Is Attacked by Soldiers, February 18, 2010

Bands of soldiers ransacked the homes of several ministers and gunshots rang out, residents reported. The junior officers were apparently tightening their grip on strategic buildings, with their supporters ensconced in the national broadcasting headquarters across the street from the American Embassy. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

The national radio station blared martial music. Many shops across the city were closed, though street vendors continued to sell mangoes, bananas and pineapples.

— Confusion After Guinea Coup Attempt, December 24, 2008

I have many memories of the two coups I lived through in Ghana in 1979 and 1981-82. Like many of my compatriots, I have chosen not to dwell on them and instead have noted simply that we are very discriminating in what we choose to remember and forget. The safe detail that lingers, however, is of the martial music that consumed the radio, and then the TV, airwaves in the ensuing days. We were treated to waves after waves of martial music on Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) that were only occasionally interrupted by the rantings of someone who claimed he was coming to protect us. Suffice to say that I have a visceral reaction to military strongmen and their rhetoric - I am blinded by the accompanying blood.

More interesting perhaps is that I have a deep appreciation of the codes and nuances of martial music. My first response to the news of any coup is to wonder whether this time-tested ritual, the playing of military music, had been followed. And then my curiosity and propensity for musical obsession takes the best of me: I ask around about the exact pieces of music that were played. When I do manage to get the nitty-gritty details, it is almost always disappointing: in the main, a few olde English paeans to blood-lust. The Francophone coups tended to run with more folksy arrangements and the North African had a rather elusive quality - the Arab influence perhaps. The martial music of our coups all had this alien, otherworldly aura - as if to remind the listener that the military in Africa were one of the most ruinous of our colonial inheritances.

I am left to wondering why in this day of of digital music and ipods, the savvy aspiring military junta couldn't come up with a more inspiring playlist. And in the context of Africa, didn't our warriors of old have fearsome praise songs written for their exploits? Couldn't some talking drums have the same effect? why not a "Made in Africa" soundtrack? But perhaps this is missing the point; martial music in the context of a coup is simply a code, a social signifier, and the disrupted programming an intimation of an enduring, if disastrous, tradition. The journalistic descriptions are always about 'blaring military music'. In contrast, in my memory, the dissonance is not really about volume but rather about unfamiliarity and annoyance: the horns were especially grating coming through the modest speakers of the portable radios we gathered around. The irritation was that you couldn't avoid this music even as your favourite news broadcast was preempted. The screeching horns resonated with the tinny sounds of your Grundig Waveboy and made for a rather somber nuisance.

Coups in the past century mostly seemed to follow the same blueprint and martial music was no mere footnote, I'd even wager that they were a critical ingredient. But have there been innovations one wonders, global guerrilla adaptations of the noisome strategy? Reading closely the above news reports, what is one to make about the detail of the 'wrestling program' that preempted regular programming after Niger's coup month's ago? Was it a case of l'appel de l'arènes. And was the continued selling of "mangoes, bananas and pineapples" in the streets after the Guinea coup a flourish of journalistic colour or merely a blasé signifier about the prospects of that grim lot.

I have friends who study the history of coups and military-civilian relations and who will wax poetic on when exactly it was that the airport became a necessary target for a nascent military junta. In Francophone Africa you always had to worry about a flight of French paratroopers swooping in to restore the current client dictator. Not so with coups in Anglophone or Portuguese Africa. Technology also changes things, these days a successful putsch in a healthy media market requires that you deal with those pesky communication networks and pay a threatening visit to mobile phone operators so that your opposition can't organize countering maneuvers.

During the struggle over the abolition of the monarchy in Nepal a few years ago, the reactionary forces tried to shut down the cell phone networks. They managed — for a day, and the enduring damage was done to their cause. The monarchy is no more. Aspiring military juntas should take note that one messes with the mobile phone networks at one's peril. The communication imperative is keenly felt. Even in the bloody aftermath of Iran's last election, the authorities didn't dare take the drastic step of shutting down the mobile networks. The day I read that headline, I'll know that they are done for.

Africa will be in the news a lot this year, and not simply for uplifting reasons like the World Cup in South Africa. It doesn't matter that many African countries will be celebrating 50 years of independence, brace yourself for some dismaying headlines even if natural disasters don't dominate. A major part of the narrative is going to be about coups and military/civilian relations. Throughout, it will be about how civil society fights against encroachments on the democratic gains made since the 1990s. Watch for slippages and authoritarian thuggishness on freedom of speech, watch for arbitrariness and vendettas resurfacing, watch for soi-disant democrats averting their eyes to due process. Consider Gbagbo dissolving the government in Cote d'Ivoire - and crucially the electoral commission. Take a look at Sudan in coming weeks for example. Muse on what Mugabe will come up with in Zimbabwe this year. Worry about why North Korea arms shipments are headed to Congo-Brazzaville. Observing the twists and turns in the African story can be very trying.

What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a coup to succeed in 2010? What is needed in this modern age of citizen journalists, the internet, a web of global voices, cheap digital cameras, Twitter, Facebook, Ushahidi, ridiculously simple group forming and ubiquitous mobile phones and such? Is it enough to capture the radio and TV station as in the past? Should you even bother to threaten the newspapers? Surely the gadfly editors will be watching which way the wind is blowing with alternate headlines at the ready. Do you need to secure the army barracks or just the airport and the country's borders? What about a show of force? Send some tanks into the street? Should one surround the American, British, French and now Chinese embassy - the Chinese are big in Africa these days? In Guinea-Bissau today, soldiers were sent to surround the United Nations compound. Remember that some of the first targets of the Rwandan genocide were the Belgian UN blue helmeted peacekeepers. Or is the current fashion of targeting cabinet meetings the most expedient?

I suspect that the key feature in all this is playing martial music on the radio or TV. The dismal tones of the ironic playlists of authoritarians are symbolic laments of sorts. A dosage of aural intimations of the prospect of bloody streets, these military anthems are set to fierce drums and harsher horns. The lyrics, if any, are a celebration of fisticuffs, eviscerations and strategic disembowelments. Such are the codes of martial music.

A few more nuggets of note:

During the 2008 coup in Mauritania, "the first indications of a military coup came as state radio and television were taken off the air amid reports of unusual troop movements in Nouakchott". Note if you will that there was no mention of martial music and that the authors of this coup are still standing. Serious (if bloody) men that they are.
During the 2009 coup in Madagascar, there were no reports of martial music on the radio. Perhaps this is because the major beneficiary of the coup, Andry Rajoelina was then "a 34-year-old former disc-jockey". In constrast, there were suggestions about the army targeting the mobile phone networks. Everyone has gone on to condemn the Madagascar coup but Rajoelina is still sitting pretty a year on, his was a 21st century coup: he knew all about the playlist. Threaten the cell phones for sure, monitor Twitter, but don't mess with the radio programming.

I continue to ask, can't they get a better playlist? And dear readers, what constitutes a good martial music playlist? What tunes would you pick for your coup d'état? And what of this here musical theory of coups? Does it adequately model the gracenotes of African coups?

Soundtrack for this note

Fela - Army Arrangement
Need one say more?
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Bunker Soldiers
Alernatively try Pretending to See the Future from the same album.
José James - Code
Obsessions are many.

File under: coup, memory, music, military, culture, observation, humour, rogues, blood, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Africa, toli

The Polyrhythmic Temptations of Erykah Badu

2010-03-20T22:04:00.000-07:00

"What good do your words do when they can't understand you?"

The above chorus seemed to have rhetorical heft midway through Erykah Badu's recent concert at the Fox theater in Oakland. You see, she seemed about to escape the song form, en route to dissolving into a polyrhythmic ether of sorts. Just when lift-off appeared inevitable however, hip-hop brought her back to earth, then, after a short tribute to Michael Jackson, the soul returned. Standing in the audience nodding my head as I observed the proceedings, I started thinking about the relationship between artist and audience. What happens when your muse takes you off the beaten path? What concessions, if any, should one make on the one hand, and, on the other, how much should you, the audience, indulge the performer? Because it was a close run thing you know.

This polyrhythmic temptation, this polyphonic inclination, has taken up much of her last two albums. Indeed during the last two concerts I'd seen of her, there was no attempt made to coddle the audience. During the earlier one, in support of Worldwide Underground, she was in the throes of a liquid type of electronic soul music and had began drinking from the polyrhythmic fountain. During the last one - in 2008 in support of New Amerykah Part 1 - polyrhythms possessed her completely. To compound the musical dissonance further in this latter instance, she had made the mistake of following The Roots onstage - a frequently lethal decision on the best of days, and definitively so if the audience isn't ready to be a guinea pig for one's new directions. I enjoyed myself - to my ear it sounded much like a Funkadelic affair, a beautiful mess in short, but I'm not sure that everyone felt the same. For example, The Wife had some words later on - and she wasn't cooing. This past February's concert was fun and more audience friendly (the band was gearing up for the big push in support of her new album). She has pulled back, it would seem; one still wonders however.

Let it first be stated that I dig Erykah Badu, that on the strength of Baduizm and especially Mama's Gun, I will follow her to the musical ends of the earth and beyond. As we wait for the new album to be released in short order, the question most of her audience is asking is whether she will reign in the demons that she wears on her sleeves. Musically also, we're asking whether she'll submit to a sonic conception that is more recognizably song-like and whether melody and old fashioned soul singing will feature. The snarky will ask how long can a soul singer be post-song. The music these days is all riffs, beats, polyrhythms. Blame the sampler (that new accoutrement that has been accompanying her of late), blame Jay Electronica perhaps for a carnal and musical temptation. At times she seems consumed with sonic tics and mannerisms reminiscent of Michael Jackson after 1993. It's no doubt very exciting in the studio but rendered live, it can be challenging.

When someone like Giles Peterson hails her as the Nina Simone of our time, I think to myself, hey, I too am an aficionado of Sun-Ra and believe that the creator has a master plan, but which Nina Simone is he refering to? Does he mean the outsized musical talent or is he alluding to the late era eccentricity and mannered diva stylings? When Sly Stone is invoked, is it apropos her recent funk excursions or... well, let's leave the Sly comparison alone.

Erykah Badu is self referential in the extreme and takes these kinds of cultural perceptions in her stride; she's all about multiple identities and musical schizophrenia. From Lowdown Loretta Brown to her other personas, she's a Kool Keith of sorts, presenting a hyperlinked conundrum asking you to stare at the performance while grooving with her. She demands attention and makes clear she will only do what she wants. It's the kind of creative freedom that few other artists have. It's also part of her mystique. In concert, she sheds skins, and is continually reincarnated. Costumes morph repeatedly as if to underlie that you can't pin her down, you shouldn't even try. To harken to the cautionary lyric that opened this note, I'll only add that there's a fine line between being elusive and being unapproachable. I was minded to call in Stevie Wonder and ask him to sing Have A Talk With God to her.

Let's not go too far and damn her with faint praise, Erykah Badu after all is a student of the great performers, and will jab and feint with the best of them. She remains very successful commercially even though the singles that are released now bear little relation to what you get when you buy the album. In the last album, Honey and The Healer, her tribute to J Dilla, were just about the only songs that moved the crowd and that were heard on the radio. Fair enough you may say, 'radio suckers never play me' is a refrain from Public Enemy on. She always makes sure to throw in a club banger, a unique video and moves units as the say. Who's to argue, right?

The earlier overt homages were to songsmiths: Roy Ayers, Chaka Khan, Midnight Star. These days however it appears that songs don't interest her, rather it is grooves, riffs, beats in short. She takes scraps of rhythm, drum and bass and forms sonic collages. The last two albums have been full of dense polyrhythms, loop backs, staccato effects, overlays and, crucially, very little concessions to the song form or indeed her audience.

I'm no musicologist but as an African I know all too well about polyrhythmic conceptions. The Congolese with their sebene (and the Ivoriens of late) have long prospered on these changes in their music but their inclinations are rather ecstatic. It's about the dance, the audience is constantly in mind, not so with our analog girl in a digital world. The closest analog to Erykah Badu's current game is the vodoun effect of T.P Orchestre Poly-Rhythmo de Cotonou. Think Benin. Think musical voodoo. It's the same aesthetic: funk underneath, musical mysticism, dense polyrhythms, polyphony and frequent changes. It's meant to be hypnotic at its best, I can only hope she reaches these heights as she continues to experiment. And if not, someone should hip her to Poly-Rhythmo.

A typical concert moment will have her holding up her hand, stopping the band just as they've built up a groove. "Hold up. Wait a minute." It's a tic if overused and you sometimes wonder if she can give it to you straight.

When performing I Want You, it is almost a dissolve into liquid incorporality but then she pulls back and gets it together as if she has returned from a spell. There are commercial repercussions to how she handles these polyrhythmic temptations. Erykah Badu is by most measures the most popular soul singer of her generation (I'll skip her elder Sade in this comparison and ignore Amy Winehouse and Alicia Keys - call them pop). The soul crowd simply appreciates the voice and the songcraft. The hip hop crowd love her because she has genuine love for that aesthetic. She also happens to make rappers lose their minds such is her aural and sonic seduction. The bohemian are drawn to her mystical stick. All should be good if she holds it together.

I can recall fondly a joint tour with Jill Scott and Queen Latifah in 2005 when they appeared all-conquering in friendly competition. It is instructive to see how her contemporaries have dealt with fame. Jill crossed over into acting where her evident warmth is welcomed - her music hasn't been as strong since, but there are mutterings that she's hungry to get back on top - viz the forthcoming album and tour with Maxwell. Latifah? Well she's escaped music entirely - I was given the hard sell over Christmas about a Queen Latifah perfume.

I know I shouldn't, but I'm going to compare her to Amel Larrieux if only to contrast their live performances. Amel will joke that she is 'the queen of long endings' and I believe that this is an interesting way of dealing with having to sing the crowd favourites. She'll sing most of the song straight up and then go an excursion at the end and no one can tell where the song will wind up. This strategy allows the song to be different every time, depending on the mood of the band, the vibe of the crowd and so forth. Erykah's heart doesn't seem into her back catalog, she's experimental from the get go, the song doesn't interest her, it's more a mood that she's searching for and she'll add layers and rhythms. The result is that the audience doesn't get even the benefit of being moored to familiar ground.

The new album, Return of the Ankh, is about to be released in few days. I suspect that the first singles won't sound anything like the rest of the album much in keeping with her modus operandi. Erykah Badu continues to be tempted by polyrhythms, this is not a temporary flirtation. Let's hope that she manages to navigate the tension between her muse's direction and the commercial imperative.

Erykah Badu at the Fox Theater Oakland, Friday 19 February 2010

Opening Act: Goapele

Goapele opened the show with a short set mostly of old favourites. She also introduced a slow and moody new blues: Tears on my pillow, capped off with a lovely organ solo. Oakland gave her love.

Here's my illicit footage of Goapele performing Closer.

Dave Chappelle showed up, drawing a great cheer, to introduce the main event.

Setlist

20 feet tall (from the new album, psychadelia itself)
The Healer
Me
My People
On and On
& On
Appletree - done as an electronic boogie joint
Michael Jackson medley finishing with Off the Wall
I Want You
Didn't you know
Love of my life
Hip-hop interlude:
- Friends by Whodini
- Lodi dodi by Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh
Large Professor interlude showcase for the dj
Bump it
Back in the Day (Puff)
Muddy Waters sounding joint
Other Side Of The Game
Soldier
Next Lifetime
Orange moon (snippet)
Tyrone
Bag Lady

Obligatory blurry photos: Erykah Badu Live

File under: music, Erykah Badu, review, soul, funk, appreciation, polyrhythm, performance, creative process, culture, perception, diva, toli

Juicing the Books

2010-03-12T18:41:00.000-08:00

My greatest acknowledged vice, according to two of the women most dear to me, is that I drink too much fruit juice. Rather than dwell on this marital and maternal complaint over what is surely a most benign addiction (compare the problems of keeping a fridge full of orange, pineapple and mango juice to alcoholism, the perils of nicotine, drugs, sex, or say dodging bill collectors due to gambling debts with loan sharks and their ilk), I thought that acknowledging it upfront would help explain how I worked myself into a state of righteous indignation over the following article. Well partially at least.

Tropicana Orange Juice Raising Prices

PepsiCo said it was shrinking its most popular size by about 8 percent, while maintaining its price, and raising the price on another size starting in May.

The 64-ounce container of orange juice will drop to 59 ounces. The suggested retail price will remain at $3.59. [snip]

Food and beverage makers react to changing ingredient costs by raising prices, changing products sizes or both. It is a way to protect their profit margins, and in the case of shrinking packages, offer less to shoppers so they can still buy products without having to pay more money at once.

Now far be it for me to complain about my suppliers raising prices. It's not a case of hell hath no fury like a juice lover squeezed. I do understand, after all, that the Florida winter damaged crops this year and that there's supply and demand and all that. Like Bubbles in The Wire, I accept what a working man has to do to make a living. It's all in the game right? No, what got to me was the disingenousness of the thing. That last line in the article is a prima facie lie, an attempt to disguise a price increase with weasel words. Well I started feeling like Bodie: the game is rigged.

You may recall me discoursing on The New Formula - the propensity of companies to tweak processes and often worsen their products in furtherance of the bottom line, a pathological hallmark of latter-day capitalism. I even had a case study showing how spikes in the prices of soybeans directly led to me losing out on my trusty Oil of Olay body wash as, first, the oil maleation process was removed and then, when there was nothing to be tweaked in the manufacturing process, soybeans were removed and the product was relaunched and relabeled "new and improved". Such is life right? Make lemonade when life gives you lemons.

But that was tinkering with process, now they're even messing with my lemonade. With commodities like juice, one would think that there is only so much you can do to process to wring out efficiencies. You can only pay the illegal immigrant labour force so little to harvest, even they need basic food and shelter after all. The gains from fertilizer are diminishing and runoff issues are quite literal. Even the politics of it are confusing; banana republics are expensive these days. Ecuador's going mildly 'socialist' to the dismay of old fashioned Texas businessmen. In all seriousness, the economics of modern day agriculture are fairly well studied and there's precious little slack.

No. It's the package shrinking that gets me. The Tropicana deception, as I called it, this juicing of the books is only the latest in an interesting trend of manufacturers increasing prices but retaining the same size packaging. Bottles or containers are made more convex, given revamped designs to fill the same physical dimensions, the spouts are shaped to pour out more than previously. Throughout the sticker price remains constant in order to fool the indiscriminate consumer into thinking that they are receiving the same product.

This orange deception is the result of literal bean counting in the spirit of airline companies in the 1990s that literally started saving peanuts (reducing the number of peanuts per package distributed in flight - and these days you're lucky to even get any complimentary snacks). We're being nickeled and dimed to death. The sole concession to honesty is in the small print of the labels on supermarket shelves - the per unit price that generations of consumers had to fight for. Regulations that are often meaningless in the marketplace.

Consider liquid detergent in this vein. There is a fine interplay of fluid dynamics between the design of the spouts of modern liquid detergent bottles and the viscosity of the liquid they contain. And this is an engineering and marketing decision, when you pour, sometimes things come out faster than you expect. At other times, it is rather that you have to be quite lithe of hand to steady the bottle as you try to stop pouring - call the result excess runoff if you will to keep with the fertilizer analogue. It's a minor irritation to be sure but the net effect is to make you use more of the product than you expected, a cynical nod towards planned obsolescence. And I've experimented you know, I follow these things closely - for a couple of years I even kept a collection of old bottles of Ivory, Palmolive, Tide and the like. Results? Well each brand tweaked their bottle design and consumer convenience was never in mind.

But let's broaden the perspective here on this mania for manipulation, this drive to extract surplus value. We see this in strategies adopted in modern agriculture - or should I rather say agribusiness: piling on the fertilizer, force feeding animals substances that should alarm even the most jaded, corn everywhere, herding in crowded cages, top-ups with antibiotics when expedient and so forth. No wonder modern farms or say your local meat rendering plant are desolate places. But this imperative has broad applicability. Airline travel is now seen in its true light - convenient perhaps, but an exercise in stress and physical discomfort. The space in economy class of ye regular airline is now so circumscribed as to be cattle tested. The logic indeed is that we're only cattle. "Buy something you stupid consumer" as that poster goes.

But I can understand the perverse incentives. I know that there is a push at the end of each quarter to close deals and I've felt it wherever I've worked no matter how low up the totem pole I might rest. You don't need studies of companies manipulating earnings to consistently beat expectations to know what all this means. When we read about Lehman Brothers doing the Repo 105 dance, it is much the same attitude towards truth in advertising at work. The current encomiums to "do more with less" have their counterpart as we have seen, "sell less for more" is Pepsi's slogan. As someone who owns stock I can understand the profit imperative, as a consumer however, I know it will come back to bite me and in this case, it will bite me in the form of a 59 ounce juice container lovingly designed to fill much the same shelf space as its 64 ounce predecessor.

It's all a shell game and there are now so few scales left to fall from my eyes. I am now eagerly awaiting the new juice containers in May to add to my collection of deceptive latter day capitalist artifacts - an archive of products engineered for the express purpose of juicing the books.

Soundtrack For This Note

Richard "Dimples" Fields - She's Got Papers On Me (featuring Betty Wright)
A cautionary tale this one, it's all downhill from here.
Oran "Juice" Jones - The Rain
A juice soundtrack should always feature the one and only Oran "Juice" Jones whose oeuvre I've discussed previously. The Rain is about betrayal:
That's right, now close your mouth 'cause you cold busted. Now sit down here, I'm so upset with you I don't know what to do.
Hear that Tropicana?
Eric B. & Rakim - Know The Ledge
It's all about the inflation calypso isn't it? Well, knowledge is king. Alternatively try Naughty By Nature's Uptown Anthem from the same Juice soundtrack.
Superchunk - Package Thief
Tropicana's theme, punks.
Masi Asare - Orange Soda
I'm going to have to go in for soda instead of juice what with all these pricing shenanigans.
The Juice Crew - The Symphony
Pound for pound the heavyweight champion of posse cuts.
Atmosphere - Shoulda Known
From their 2008 album rightly titled When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold

Anyone have any further examples of these newfangled "advances" in packaging?

Disclaimer: I should note that of late I've been mostly buying a brand of juice that is often sourced from South America (typically Brazil) rather than juice from Florida or California - I wonder if I'll return to Tropicana or Minute Maid after this fiasco - can't they have the nerve to simply increase the price? And while digressing, I should also again note that I've started to see pineapple juice from Ghana making it to the supermarket shelves in these California climes. I do applaud the wonders of distribution in this modern age. It's the packaging and advertising that gets me down. Deception innit?

File under: economics, deception, pricing, design, strategy, policy, juice, packaging, irritation, rant, USA, capitalism, marketing, observation, perception, commodities, backlash, snake oil, New Formula, toli

A Kenkey Bounty

2010-03-06T21:15:00.003-08:00

Happiness is finding kenkey in Oakland - and not just something purporting to be kenkey, but good kenkey. You hadn't realized how much you'd been missing kenkey in your life so you beamed when you saw those corn husks wrapped around those broken pieces of your heart. Call it a restorative. And then to cap it off you notice some good puna yam at the door of the store, "From Ghana", she assures you. Hey it's Ghana's independence day and what better way to celebrate. Your basket was quickly filled with the basics: kenkey, yam, sardines, tilapia, plantains, okro, palm oil, fufu powder, and the old faithful, gari. You had come perilously close to disaster but had remembered that piece of advice that they announce as the plane takes off from Kotoka International Airport: "A Ghanaian immigrant should never run out of gari"; it's like losing your soul.

One of the problems with being an immigrant is getting food from home, a problem exacerbated especially if, like me, your culinary tastes were locked in place by age 8 or thereabouts. Physical displacement can be tolerable - a cosmopolitan disposition helps, but culinary dislocation goes beyond the realm of physical to a certain level of metaphysical angst. Like nostalgia, it's almost a social disease. As that wise man said, "home is where the kelewele is".

I see it as a quality of life issue. Moreover I have a very specific notion of (my culinary) home. I could eat plantain every day (and often do) - and have been known to base my housing decisions on its availability. So the first thing to investigate when in a new town is where the "African" shop is and if my staples can be obtained. My kelewele has to be styled like Auntie Becky's in North Labone - and I've been known to come to virtual fisticuffs with other exiled souls who have the nerve to argue that it was rather 'the woman from Labone junction' who made the best kelewele in town. Good grief. Well, less said on that, I shouldn't blame you if you haven't been exposed to that slice of heavenly taste.

Fruits: mangoes, bananas and pineapples preferably from Aburi and its environs - I am a failed pineapple farmer - and more on that later. Fruits however can be substituted. Banku and kenkey are irreplaceable. When it comes to kenkey, it's Ga kenkey that is essential. I could of course learn how to make kenkey but I always demur, safe in the knowledge that I'll never reach the heights of some of the good kenkey houses in Osu or Jamestown. I believe in division of labour. Sidenote: to avert the inevitable Ga versus Fante kenkey critiques, I'll admit that Fante kenkey off the road from Cape Coast is quite the thing. Tell Mama Akos Esi (or rather, her grand-daughter who tends to skip school to mind the stand) that I sent you.

There's probably a longer feature to be written about the "African shop" abroad that caters groceries, phone cards and serves as community bulletin board to the diasporic cohort. My experience in France is perhaps coloured by the relative lack of authentic African food stuffs where we lived; the substitutes helped but weren't sufficient and French cuisine leaves me completely indifferent to this day. In London in the 80s it was first Charlie's in St John's Wood that catered to our tastes - although Charlie's English reserve and hefty prices were a bit hard to take. Then, as the immigration wave crested, we started to see competition as Africa immigrants opened their own shops - the couple of Afro-Carribbean shops in Cricklewood made my day. Later, Ghanaians and Nigerians took over many parts of South London so that Deptford on a Saturday could be well be Kaneshie market. In New York and New Jersey, there were of course the Korean shops that were early entrants but again Ghanaians and Nigerians have now caught up and compete in the culinary marketplace with groceries and now restaurants. Boston was touch and go - the Ghana shop that I frequented moved a number of times - and even burnt down at one point. Still, I was never too far from plantain, yam, gari and kenkey. And the world was good. Slowly and surely the African culinary colonization is taking place and these days many supermarkets cater to our diaspora. Would that this trend continue.

Downtown Oakland has the Lucky Oriental Mart which, despite its title, is comprehensive in its purveyance of all manner of African and Carribean food. God bless the Filipino owners whose knowledge of our plants and foods is a thing to behold. The only gap in their coverage had been a regular supply of decent kenkey - now resolved. I do hope these soul sisters make it to the continent one day; on this Independence day, they captured my heart with a few balls of kenkey. A small thing perhaps, but I am duly sated. From here on, I only have a few fantasies to fulfill: some chichinga or grilled Guinea fowl - well a man can dream can't he? Everyone needs a taste of Africa.

File under: Ghana, immigration, food, kenkey, wist, culture, taste, nostalgia, life, Africa, toli

Black Sheep

2010-02-02T00:33:00.009-08:00

Every feel unwanted? Ever feel like a pariah? What if your country starts disappearing from the global zeitgeist? When, I wonder, did Ghana start to fade from view? All right, let's get concrete here. Try this on your iPod Touch or iPhone (I was given a first generation iPod touch - now running iPhone OS 3.1.2 - a while back as a kind of consolation prize when my job seemed in doubt - but I shouldn't digress about the pathologies of corporate America). Anyway, where was I? Yes, take your i-something, open the Contacts App, create a new contact and add a new address. Alternatively just try to edit an existing address. Now try to change the country field to Ghana. Note, if you will, the result: Ghana is not in the list of countries. Search under "Africa (Western)" and you'll see nary a trace of Ghana. Heck, look through the entire list of countries and realize that we didn't make the cut. Ghana is not a country in the eyes of Apple.

I came across this issue over Christmas when I was home and trying to enter new addresses in this, my conflicted glorified organizer thingimijig. It's just a bug of course, and presumably if I complain loudly enough or write up a bug report against Apple, it will get fixed. Whoever wrote the Contacts app is certainly not trying to whitewash Ghana from history. They just don't have many Ghanaians using iPhones, nor indeed testing the feature hence the omission slipped through the cracks, embarrassing as it may be. Moreover I've been on the other side of the fence, producing software that at times has been seized upon for subtle local insensitivity. I've even written in the past about the cultural difficulties that any piece of technology can elicit so I won't be calling for boycotts or apologia.

But wait, there's more. It seems that Ghana has been disappearing left, right and center from dropdowns and country selection boxes all over the web. I keep coming across this kind of ethnic cleansing in my browsing. Who decided that Ghana must go? It is one thing to be a literal exiled soul, a man of many countries but no home, but it's adding insult to injury to be cast into virtual exile. What gives? Why are form widgets all of a sudden slimming down and discarding Ghana? Why are even these fleeting elements of identity, that pleasing sight of Ghana nestled in between Germany and Gibraltar, being denied me and my countrymen. For example, in the past week I've been trying to buy gift subscriptions to some magazines for my uncles (Economist, Newsweek, New Yorker) and noticed that the online payment processors that these websites use simply don't feature Ghana in the list... go take a look: Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Gibraltar. Where did Ghana go?

I opened an investigation into this onset of web deportations but, first, let me tell a story...

My routine, ever since 1998, has been to spend my Christmas vacation in Ghana. As a fairly dutiful engineer son this means that 24 hours or so of my vacation is spent on tech support. I either bring new computers or coax the parental unit's setup into shape. They've tended to use Windows as their operating system so, as a matter of course, I would install or renew the subscription to Norton anti-virus or some software firewall or other, paying penance to the insecurity of the Microsoft ecosystem. Since 2005 however, I have been unable to renew the subscription with Symantec from Ghana. It's the usual thing, any credit card transaction from a Ghanaian or Nigerian IP address would fail silently with only a cryptic error message. I had a US billing address and yet my transaction would keep getting denied.

After repeated instances of this, I eventually worked out that the payment processor that Symantec uses had declared Ghana a nation non grata. Thus for the past 5 years, I would renew the subscription when I returned to the United States, or by using the corporate VPN (back when I was actually foolish enough to take a work computer with me on vacation) in effect pretending to be in the USA. Sidenote: the other alternative that most Ghanaians take is to simply install bootleg software or some open source or more wallet-friendly package (virtually no one actually pays Microsoft or other vendors for their wares).

Ghanaians have great difficulty using credit cards, PayPal, Google Checkout and the like. If we take ecommerce as one component of modern global citizenship then we are illegal aliens of sorts, and our participation is marginal at best. While remittances are a major part of our economy, we continue to pay a heavy price in all our financial transactions. Banks, wire transfer and check cashing joints salivate at the profits they make on our backs and yet the kind of routine monetary transactions that any idiot with a credit card can do in the West is a pipe dream.

The major reason of course is that a large amount of 419 scams, advance-fee schemes and outright frauds seem to emanate from our virtual lands. Payment processors tend to filter with a broad brush and their geolocation heuristics often tar almost all IP ranges from Ghana. The same story goes with spam filtering and some ISPs are known to ban entire countries arbitrarily as mitigation measure (I've seen this applied to countries like Russia, China, Korea). I have lots of Nigerian friends and their emails are often consigned to the spam folder even in GMail whose spam filtering capabilities seem to be the most discriminating. I can recall a member of the security services in Ghana quipping that two thirds of the 419 scams in the world could be stopped if police could simply round up everybody at Busy Internet and other internet cafes in Accra at the right hour. Thankfully that broad brush hasn't been applied - think of the rule of law, false positives, and Minority Report a priori censorship. Still, the actions of an unruly minority are making life difficult for us all.

What is most galling now is that even our Nigerian brethren in e-criminality are on the list of countries in the above 4 cases. We have the workings of a different bug. With tongue firmly in cheek, I would say that Ghana is uniquely blacklisted. If you live in America, you expect that you won't see North Korea, Iran, Cuba or the like in your commercial browsing since sanctions and embargos pertain. Why would Ghana be in such august company?

One hypothesis, for the websites at least, is that the bug is at the level of the payment processor: Entrust, or Visa, MasterCard etc. Or perhaps our unreliable postal system is at fault. Another alternative is simply that there is a canned type of widget that is being used around the web. I know how these things work: most programmers cut and paste code when they are developing their sites, I know I do that often enough. A cursory inspection shows that the Condé Nast sites are using the jQuery toolkit, a potential source of the bug, but it could be any of the other popular toolkits, Dojo, YUI, Scriptaculous etc. These are pre-canned form widgets and one can envision that a popular tutorial site or user interface toolkit has the bug and has been widely copied.

But, what about the bug in Apple's iPhone Contacts app, one wonders? That seems like an outlier unless it too was written as a web app using much the same widgets. Does anyone have any theories on the matter?

I won't get into how Orbitz and Expedia have now followed the lead of Travelocity in removing Accra from the list of places you can book travel to - this, even though major airlines like Delta, KLM and British Airways fly there. I know that my small country doesn't warrant much attention, I know my place. But this is different, all I want to do is enter some addresses in my organizer or send my uncles some magazines. Magazines that are ostensibly a dying business won't even let me send my hard earned money to them. Someone help me, I feel like a black sheep.

File under: technology, software, web, glitches, Apple, iphone, internet, creditcard, payment, systems, Ghana, Africa, bug, identity, humour, toli

Best of 2009

2010-01-14T07:58:00.008-08:00

Everybody likes lists so here's a list of things that moved me in 2009. I didn't blog much (a mere 5 posts - I was quite shaken) but I did leave quite a wide digital trail by compulsively tracking my consumption of various cultural artifacts - especially as I tend to make time to write mini-reviews. A cursory summary of my year: 50 books, 120 movies (blame Netflix), 10 concerts and 1 play. I remain an omnivorous consumer of the web and additionally bookmarked or shared up to 680 articles and blogposts (blame the 1099 feeds I subscribe to Google Reader) - each of these was the occasion of some pithy commentary and tags, your basic frisson de folksonomie.

Books

I read mostly novels last year and eschewed non-fiction since I haven't yet become American in my reading preferences. There was some poetry especially near the end; mostly web-based after I got interested in how poets are using the web.

Entertainments

Entertainments tend to get short shrift, dismissed as they are as guilty pleasures, yet there is something to be said to bask in the glow of literary entertainments. With hindsight, I prefer Graham Greene's self-described 'entertainments' to his serious pieces. I've resolved to increase the quotient of entertainments in my reading.

Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (mini-review)
A delightful entertainment and sublime take on a bygone era at Oxford. Compare to the best campus novels like those of Kingsley Amis and David Lodge or even more scabrous affairs like Porterhouse Blue. Satire and vicious cultural observation. Some of the dialog from the upper class twits reminded me of his Edwardian contemporary, Saki. For example,
Are you fond of peasants? My tenantry are delightful creatures, and there is not one of them who remembers the bringing of the news of the battle of Waterloo.
How to describe an effete English Lord in 2 sentences.
Comment Cuisiner Son Mari À L'Africaine by Calixthe Beyala (review)
A novel in the form of a cookbook. A cookbook in the form of a novel. A fable in the form of a tasty barbecue. A romance spiced with flair. A delightful confection through and through, cooked with verve. A sensual read, it is also a thoroughly modern affair set in the milieu of low income housing in Paris. She was early in documenting immigrant life and prescient about the travails of exiled souls.
The Charlie Mortdecai trilogy by Kyril Bonfiglioli
The three Charlie Mordecai novels, Don't Point that Thing at Me, After You with the Pistol, and Something Nasty in the Woodshed have the highest concentration of effortless wit, zingers and cultural affectation I've encountered in a long while. Who knew that the intrigues of a disreputable coward, art snob and seasoned thief would be so entertaining? The increasingly intricate plots are almost incidental - verging at times on spoofs of James Coburn spy capers which were themselves spoofs, the towering pleasures are in the asides. I want to have cocktails with Mordecai.
My life-long study of the art of warfare has taught me that running away is certainly the most cost-effective type of fighting. It doesn't win many battles but it saves you a lot of troops. Ask any Italian general if you can catch him out of his hairnet. Or, indeed, if you can catch him at all.
— Kyril Bonfiglioli - After You with the Pistol, page 74
The Parker novels by Richard Stark
Donald Westlake sadly passed away late in 2008, his alter-ego's productions are the gold standard of hard-boiled noir, spare and stripped down tales of amorality and professional crime. Luckily many are being reissued these days. The Mourner (review), The Score (review) and The Seventh were last year's comfort suites for me, variations on a heist with a relentless force of nature at the helm. Also revelatory was Darwin Cooke's graphic novel resurrecting Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter. Revenge has never been better.

Masters of Storytelling

There's nothing like letting go and putting your faith in one of these craftsmen of the tale:

Verre Cassé by Alain Mabanckou
I read a lot of Mabanckou last year and an appreciation piece is sorely overdue. He is one of the best living African writers and yet few focus on him perhaps because he writes in French. Let's hope that the new translations that have began appearing remedy the situation - Broken Glass seems to be getting some buzz. Short of that, I'll become his shill. His latest, Mémoires De Porc-épic, (review) was also magisterial.
Moses Ascending by Samuel Selvon
After discovering the many pleasures of Zee Edgell last year I resolved to read more Caribbean literature and, after plowing through Selected Poems by Derek Walcott, I went back to that other master of Caribbean letters, Samuel Selvon, catching up on his great creation in 1970s England. A novel packed with hilarious observations about immigrants, poor whites, Pakistanis, black power, sexual mores, the relationship with authority figures, and throughout the resilient hustle of the Caribbean immigrant.
The Dragon Can't Dance by Earl Lovelace (review)
Call it a masquerade or rather a prose calypso. Wonderful social commentary on Trinidad, straight from the slum hills overlooking Port of Spain.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins (review)
Beautiful writing, haunting characters and an unerring ear for the nuances of language. The film adaptation is a classic of tragic noir, Robert Mitchum was never better.

To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia (review)
A sardonic lament on the corruption of the mafia. He cut out all the fat in the narrative and the result is so restrained as to be unbearable. It lingered in my mind the whole year and resonated as I watched Gomorrah. What is to be done when this malevolent thing can blight an entire society? The follow-up, The Day of the Owl (review), is if anything more menacing.

Urban Dread

Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas
This one hit too close to home mainly because I know one of the barely fictionalized protagonists. Observations on race, identity and cultural anomie from the viewpoint of Boston black Americans close enough to the ivory towers to make their continuing travails and periodic falls from grace more heartrending and frustrating. An elegy for the modern strays of the world.

Also in the same vein of urban dread, The Scholar: A West Side Story by Courttia Newland with its inner city London setting and The Turnaround by George Pelecanos who continues to mine the streets of the Washington DC area.

Heartwarming

I Do Not Come to You by Chance by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani
Young African writers are in ascendance these days. This wistful and funny study of world of the 419 scam was the best and most heartening of the lot. I never quite got to Sarah Ladipo Manyika's In Dependence or my friend Nii Ayikwei Parkes's Tail of the Blue Bird so those will have to be part of the 2010 contingent.

Theatre

The Cutting Ball's production of Ionesco's The Bald Soprano was a tonic, what with its great translation and interpretive gusto, but then you know that I love all things Ionesco.

Movies

In The Loop
The best film of the year. The best adaptation of the year. The most fun of the year. A satire of the build up to the Iraq war, it hit harder than all the war movies. The Alistair Campbell character is larger than life but the entire cast shines.
Goodbye Solo
Ramin Bahrani is fast becoming my favourite director; he manages to get so much out of his actors. I'm fairly sure I've been driven by a taxi driver with the same spirit as Solo (wonderfully played by Souleymane Sy Savane) in Boston. They caught the magic with this gripping meditation on life and family ties. The previous year's Chop Shop was gritty and heart-breaking.
Killer of Sheep
Talking about strays of the world, how about a portrait of working class life in 1970s Los Angeles. Charles Burnett's masterpiece only received a theatrical release after 30 years. I can still hear Dinah Washington's This Bitter Earth play in the background of a hot apartment in the summertime.
Sin Nombre
The most uncanny love story meets road movie meets Latin American gang life. Mesmerizing.
Gomorrah
No wonder the writer, Roberto Saviano, now needs police protection; Matteo Garrone's adaptation brings stark visuals to a relentless milieu of social corruption and violence.
District 9
I hope Neill Blomkamp never gets budgets ala James Cameron, his scrappy aesthetic and expedient innovations are fine by me.
Nuts in May, Abigail's Party
Happy-Go-Lucky also was my top film of 2008 hence I went on a Mike Leigh spree and revisited many of his early television pieces. Fun all around.
Life and Nothing But
The aftermath of the first world war is a great backdrop for a meditation on loss and love. Another Tavernier-Noiret collaboration.
Mapp & Lucia (series one)
I have long loved E.F. Benson's Mapp & Lucia series, its celebration of beastly manners are economical marvels of observation. The television series didn't disappoint.

Music

I have a series called The Lost Reviews in the works so I'll simply note the high points.

Dwele was naughty and nice, touring in support of 2008's Sketches of a Man. The addition of the horns in the live show made all the difference especially on Travelin' Girl. The swagger was well deserved, he's an artisan of soul.
Alice Russell caught the spirit during her Pot of Gold tour. She has impeccable taste and a golden voice. Let us be loving her.
Meshell NdegeOcello had the baddest band since The Revolution.
Amel Larrieux was in flight, my favourite musical brave bird continued to tour as she worked on her next album. Frankly I can't wait.
Charlie Hunter was a bad man, a genius of the soulful guitar. Run to see him live or at least catch his latest album, Gentlemen, I Neglected To Inform You You Will Not Be Getting Paid.

And then there were the passings. Michael Jackson's death left a hole in my heart. The concert film was no consolation and the tributes barely salved the soul; the thrill is gone. Add to that the recent passings of Willie Mitchell and Teddy Pendergrass and what is a soul lover to do. Rest in peace.

Late Pass:
Kutiman's Thru You was the most creative album of the year, all the more impressive since Youtube was his orchestra and jam band. Dig it.

On to 2010. My mantra: focus and produce.

File under: review, literature, appreciation, culture, observation, music, soul, movies, film, theatre, toli

Africa 1989

2009-12-14T02:04:00.010-08:00

It struck me that we haven't heard many African voices in all the recent reminiscing about the year 1989. Anniversaries abounded. From Tienanmen Square, through the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, to the fall of the Berlin Wall, we've had retrospectives on these momentous happenings. 1989 evokes loaded images, especially poignant amongst these being the transformations in Eastern Europe and beyond that affected the whole world. The year is a convenient stand-in for epochal change, Cold Wars fizzling and so forth. 1989 was similarly epochal in Africa even if our headlines were filed in the inside pages of our collective newsprint. Africans weren't mere onlookers and enjoined in the global conversation of those heady days.

I then came across some fragmentary notes I had on the year in Africa, notes I'd written when I was in a more jaundiced mood - they verged on the bleak. Writing today, however, I am more sanguine about that year, and hopeful, even as I look back. I can point to many items that genuinely warm the heart. You have to take the long view when it comes to Africa, and perhaps this accounts for the dissonance one feels about our past. Perhaps you'll be able to detect the keys in which different parts of the following were written.

I. The Reign of Locusts

Item:

Although political transformation in the 90s proved to be of variable intensity and longevity, often turned out to be new wine in old bottles, the change on the continent has been lasting. The incidence of military coups has dropped so far as to become negligible and there is an indisputable increase in functional democracies. In 1989 only three countries in Africa could claim to have democratic governments.

— Akwe Amosu musing on Democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa: Trends and Transitions (pdf) in 2007

Dig:

I've often wondered what it was like to attend, say, an OAU meeting circa 1989. That must surely have been a rogues gallery sans pareil. Could you shake hands with everyone in that room and look at yourself in the mirror the next day? For that matter, could you sleep that night? And what did the small talk of the nifty fifty sound like? Scratch that, what exactly was their big talk? Inquiring minds want to know.

— Excellent Discussions

Having looked at Africa in 1966 (when innocence was lost) and written about the promise of Ghana in 1969, the faint glimpses of hope in 1992, and the pre-millennial tension of Africa 1999, and with an evident itch to scratch, I thought I'd give the toli take on continent in 1989. The 1970s and 1980s have been termed The Lost Decades in much of Africa — almost as if a plague of locusts had the run of the continent. We should tentatively file these notes under the banner of fallen angels.

Let's start with this: Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe would likely have been the golden boy at the OAU meeting in 1989.

With 20 years hindsight, it is hard to believe that Zimbabwe was the example that the rest of Africa was being lectured about to emulate by the donors. Its vibrant economy, well managed agricultural sector, deep focus on educational achievement, and its democracy seemed without equal. Where its neighbours were basket cases, Zimbabwe appeared to be moving forward, it was the "success story". Mugabe's "egalitarian socialism" was being studied by Western cognoscenti. A stereotypical halo of smugness would surround my Zimbabwean friends of the time (side note: my Sierra Leonean comperes exuded similar confidence). Suffice to say that things can go wrong or right in a hurry.

He of The Little Green Book, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, would have been a few years removed from the US bombing attacks that aimed to kill him, and a year removed from the reaction over the skies of Lockerbie. A French jet would suffer a similar fate in September 1989 when a bomb would kill all 170 people on board as it flew over the Sahara. There were even more potent, and certainly uncontested, acts, however, in his interaction with the West: the Provisional IRA was in full murderous effect in 1989, equipped with significant supplies of his explosive Semtex and sundry weapons; it would rotate members for training in the Libyan desert. As I recall, public transportation in London was an exercise in bomb threat delays followed on occasion by actual locomotion. The implications for West Africa of He of The Little Green Book's unmoored rage would be far more bloody I am sad to say. He was just about to unleash Charles Taylor and Foday Sankoh from nearby camps in his grand project of revolutionary agitation, and more on Liberia and Sierra Leone anon.

I won't bore you with by enumerating the long list of dictators that ruled and the havoc they caused, it makes for dismal reading (3 democracies out of near 50 countries remember). From "Comrade" Siad Barre in Somalia to Master Sergent Doe in Liberia and Sergent Eyadema in Togo, it was repression as usual. Most significant, perhaps, in this dreary military vein was that Omar al-Bashir came to power in Sudan in a coup on 30 June 1989. His regime brooked no opposition and promptly took Sudan's civil war into high gear. The legacy of Lost Boys and such ensued. Civil wars are never pretty and Sudan's was long and ugly.

Structural Adjustments

For what it's worth, in my native Ghana, Flight Lieutenant Rawlings's PNDC was typically authoritarian throughout 1989 as our Truth and Reconciliation commission has outlined. Apparently it was no contradiction for a supposed Marxist to be implementing the unpopular IMF Structural Adjustment Program, he was an early adopter on this front. General Ibrahim Babangida of Nigeria was of the same mind, and followed suit with the IMF and the World Bank. Expediency trumps everything if the preservation of power at all costs is the overt motive. Popularity or economic sense in policy doesn't matter much when you have a military regime, your populace will have to cope with whatever you dictate. It is the very definition of dictatorship. Structural Adjustment, then, was the great agenda in Africa, and many countries were being put through ~~the wringer~~ its paces. I'll note in passing that the term "Washington Consensus" was coined in 1989 at the very height of authoritarian rule in Africa. The Cold War bred strange bedfellows but none so ironic as the combination of mild-mannered Western financial technocrats and African dictators.

The inevitable backlash was felt from civil society, large enough to have necessitated a bit of rebranding and message massaging. In 1989, we started to hear about "structural adjustment with a human face" and its counterpart "sustainable growth with equity". This revelatory exercise in linguistics only betrayed the apparent irony that inhumanity had been the prevailing concern, with equity as an afterthought. In fairness, the legacy of these programs is mixed: the economies of most African countries did need reform after all. What is beyond question, however, is that the success stories that were being touted in 1989 were nothing of the sort, most of the gains were chimeric. Ask any Ghanaian if the 80s were good years if you want to hear a hearty guffaw. Would that the development aid cohort had their current restraint in those years, their swagger was hard to take. Some of us have long memories...

Francophone Africa presented a perfect picture of client states. Smooth operators like Omar Bongo (President of Gabon) and Houphouët-Boigny (President of Côte d'Ivoire) mixed the requisite post colonial trappings at home with the luxurious core of sleazy quasi-corporate patronage of the French political class. Call it equal opportunity looting or mere cronyism, enabled by Mitterrand and the revolving board of Elf-Aquitaine and others. France regrets those good old days. Who wouldn't, I wonder?

Mobutu of Zaire was in full flight, an unchallenged dictator systematically breaking down the social fabric of his country while breaking world records in kleptocracy. Interestingly enough, by 1989 he was a little fed up with some of the shenanigans that some of the other African ~~rogues~~ leaders were getting up to. These parvenus were beginning to spoil the game for everyone. In mitigation, and in a rare act of regional statesmanship, he even helped broker a peace deal (promptly broken) in Angola. Now Mobutu was not one to do anything without a pecuniary motive hence inquiring minds are wondering what he was promised for his efforts. We'll no doubt have to wait until the State Department declassifies records in 2014 for the answer. Accordingly, I've already scheduled my FOIA request in Google Calendar.

It is worth dwelling on the Angolan case. Jonas Savimbi broke the barely 2 month old ceasefire, the fruit of years of negotiations, and resumed the civil war in Angola. Master of the huhudious, Savimbi declared:

"The Angolan people, to their infinite sorrow, accept that the war has restarted."

That, without any doubt, has to be the quote of the year 1989. He was the one who decided to break the peace, he didn't ask anyone, he presented the Angolan people with war as a fait accompli. He was to deepen their infinite sorrow for another 13 years.

Human Right's Watch began their Africa Watch in 1989 in their world report with a look at the Angolan case. Again it is instructive:

This refusal to criticize rebel abuses stems from the Bush administration's unwavering support of UNITA and its leader, Jonas Savimbi. For 14 years UNITA has been seeking to topple Angola's post-independence government in a war that to date has resulted in the deaths of over 100,000 people, most of them civilians. The U.S. policy of funding UNITA, first initiated by President Reagan in late 1985, has if anything been solidified under President Bush. Even before President Bush took office, he wrote to Savimbi assuring him that "all appropriate and effective assistance" would continue. Then, in 1989, to compensate for the loss of South African military and economic assistance to UNITA, the Bush administration increased the level of U.S. covert aid for Savimbi to close to $50 million. Although termed "covert," U.S. assistance is widely characterized as an "open secret." Savimbi himself made a public statement in June that Congress had renewed his aid, and was also quoted in Jeune Afrique magazine as saying that he had received $35 million in funding from the Central Intelligence Agency. Characterizing the aid as "covert," however, helps minimize Congressional and public scrutiny.

The lesson of Angola is that Africa was never innocent.

The corollary perhaps is that marauding phenomena like Jonas Savimbi did not operate in a vacuum. Proxy wars were a legacy of the Cold War, and Africa was a bloody battleground. Africans paid a heavy price. Enough.

II. The Great Awakening

The global conversation in 1989 was all about democracy. Mali led the way in Africa. Their president, Moussa Traoré, was your garden variety military ruler: no ideology to speak of save for the unvarnished exercise of power. With Mali being a poor landlocked country, he must have figured that he would have free reign. There would be no strategic interest for the Americans or the Soviet Union, the colonial power, France, had bigger and more lucrative fish to fry, and neighbouring countries only cared if refugees started streaming over the border. Everything seemed perfect and the years passed. 1989 must have been a rude awakening (1990 would be a nightmare, and 1991 would be the end). The Malian body politic and social compact reacted to his rule as if to an emetic. Malians were simply fed up with military rule and the attendant violence and arbitrariness. Slowly and systematically from 1988 on, they organized themselves to take back their country. It was a truly impressive sight throughout 1989. No external motivation was needed, a society simply decided to change its direction and moved.

Historians ask the same question about Leipzig in 1989. Why did people lose their fear? From the trade unions, to the students, the teachers, the lawyers and other professionals, all the way to the farmers, the consensus was that multi-party democracy was the way forward. Newspapers appeared without approval and served as forums for discussion over the shape of democracy to come. It wasn't unanimous, and the process had its twists and turns but the atmosphere changed. Those sensible Malians lost their fear and brought about lasting change. The proviso, with this being Africa, was that there would be needless deaths along the way (a massacre of 300 protesters in 1991 being the final straw). The miracle in Mali is how we now call it. Mali was the first to turn the tide to genuine democracy in the 90s, an impressive beacon for the rest of the continent.

Ghana's version of 1989 was in a minor key and actually started over the course of a few weeks in 1987. It was a series of public lectures by a history professor, Alfred Adu-Boahen, on a sober topic: The Ghanaian Sphinx. Reflections on the Contemporary History of Ghana, 1972-1987. It is hard to believe that there was a time when such comparatively mild criticism would have condemned you to harassment, jail or worse, but that was the case at the height of the reign of Flight Lieutenant Rawlings' junta. Arbitrariness, and a malign and heavy hand were the weapons of choice. The only forms of resistance in the eighties were exile on the one hand, or the culture of silence on the other. Said culture of silence was attacked head on during these lectures and the spell was decisively broken.

The metaphor of the Ghanaian Sphinx - that puzzling acquiescence to authority and silence in the face of privation and worse, was outlined and a solution was proposed. It was a simple formula: plain speaking about the history of Ghana since independence and calling things by their name with lucidity. His argument made a difference and the atmosphere in the country changed. The fight for democracy was enjoined and much of Adu Boahen's blueprint has been followed over the years. If only there had been more such profiles in courage. Would that more had stood up and been counted.

The immediate and major difficulty in this effort was that political parties were not allowed in Ghana. 8 years of military rule had cowed the opposition. To the extent that there was any politics in the country it was to be found in social groups without any agenda. Ghanaians vied to compete to be secretary of football supporters' associations, book appreciation clubs or bible study groups. Even the Danquah lectures were framed as simply educational lectures. It would require considerable reorientation to force the issue. Still a conversation was started and Ghanaians began to organize themselves. Indeed in 1990, a Movement for Freedom and Justice was formed to pressure for change and a return to civilian rule. The first fruits of this pressure was with the news media. The Catholic Standard resumed publication (religion being the major (only) growth industry in the country). More crucially, a few independent newspapers were allowed to come into existence, the Ghanaian Chronicle the most significant among them. Over a next decade, these newspapers and then the new FM radio stations that started broadcasting would prove crucial in securing democratic gains - monitoring elections being one of their essential contributions.

Another history professor, Laurent Gbagbo, was speaking up in Côte d'Ivoire against President Houphouët-Boigny whose recently completed basilica, Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro, was the largest church in the world. By then he had been in power almost as long as Castro and Kim Il Sung of North Korea. The sly fox was nothing if not resilient and hanged on to power until his death a few years later. With hindsight, it would have been better if Gbagbo had been successful in his efforts in 1989 (or for that matter in the 70s when Houphouët first put him in jail). He was a very different (read compromised) man when he would come into power in 2000. The damage was done to the social fabric of Côte d'Ivoire during the lackluster years of the 1990s when each leader in the political class outdid themselves in demagoguery and never failed to disappoint their compatriots.

Algerians turned out in masses and overwhelmingly approved a new constitution at the start of 1989 to pave the way to multi-party politics. The generals seemed to go along with the decision but would have second thoughts about democracy at the culmination of the process in 1992 when it appeared that Islamist parties were poised for victory. A murderous civil war then ensued. In 1989 however things were looking up. In most of Africa, there seemed to be a great awakening and signs of life

The strongmen in Africa fought these encroachments on their freedoms like all powerful men are wont to do: tooth and nail. It was the eternal dynamic of the confronted authoritarian: delay, ignore, suborn, bribe when expedient, divide and conquer and that old standby, the demonstration of violence. After 1989 there would be less room for maneuver and many had to tone down their outrages against human rights and democracy. The result was that the 1990s would see a spate of elections. True, in many countries, it was only lip service that was being paid in these elections, hence the frequent resort to of vote rigging; in other countries, however, there would be genuine transitions. 1989 gave impetus to these nascent movements.

III. A South African Detour

A conventional reading of South Africa in 1989 would run with the Great Man theory, namely that the secret negotiations that had began with an imprisoned Nelson Mandela in 1988 continued throughout the year and would culminate in his release in 1990. All this would understate the complications on the ground and the considerable effort expended to rid the country of apartheid.

There was continued internal pressure by the banned ANC, persistent strikes by the trade unions and general defiance in the townships. There were significant external pressures, whether through economic sanctions or consumer boycotts, that forced the divesting of holdings of South African enterprises and a shunning of exports. Military, diplomatic and cultural pressures weighed on the regime.

There was a lot of geopolitics involved and some point to the crucial impact of the battle of Cuito Carnival the previous year in Angola where South Africans and their proxy army, Jonas Savimbi's UNITA movement, were forced to a stalemate by the MPLA and their Cuban reinforcements. After much diplomatic untangling of the situation, the Cubans went home, South Africa agreed to Namibian independence, and Angola's MPLA agreed to a truce with UNITA. You can read Chester Crocker's self serving memoir, High Noon in Southern Africa, for the naive account of what transpired... The irony of the book's title and indeed the outlook it betrays will be tackled later. Sam Nujoma would lead Namibia to independence in 1990 after what had been long hard-fought war. South Africa would begin to stop meddling in its neighbour's affairs.

In 1989, the world learned that hit teams of South African police were assassinating people "in Swaziland, Lesotho, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Britain, as well as inside South Africa". All opponents of the apartheid regime were fair game. The moral opprobrium against P.W. Botha's would weigh on his successor De Klerk. The optics were not in their favour. The rest of Africa made their thoughts clear. The ANC proposed, and the OAU adopted its Harare Declaration on August 21 1989

We recognise the reality that permanent peace and stability in Southern Africa can only be achieved when the system of apartheid in South Africa has been liquidated and South Africa transformed into a united, democratic and non-racial country. We therefore reiterate that all the necessary measures should be adopted now, to bring a speedy end to the apartheid system, in the interest of all the people of Southern Africa, our continent and the world at large.

Note, if you will, how the same story was reported in the New York Times:
"South Africa Rebel Blueprint Backed by Regional Leaders".

The spin in the paper of record reflected the prevailing conventional wisdom in the USA. We must never forget that Ronald Reagan, George Bush the first, Margaret Thatcher and their bagmen, still saw themselves as allies of the apartheid regime. To their dying day, they should be tarred with their association, nay commission, with some of the most awful lot in history. There were many misadventures and much blood spilled in the Great Games of the Cold War; the support by these governments for apartheid is unambiguously egregious.

And it bears reminding that the struggle for liberation of South Africa was still a close run thing - note the headlines from that same day: "New Wave Of Arrests In S. Africa; Apartheid Resisters Go Into Hiding"

Leaders of a three-week-old campaign to defy apartheid restrictions began going into hiding today to elude a new wave of arrests by South African police as the government of acting President Frederik de Klerk intensified its crackdown on activities aimed at disrupting next month's segregated elections for Parliament.

The Cape Province turmoil has been viewed as a campaign against elections for the tricameral Parliament, in which Coloreds and Indians have separate-and mostly powerless-chambers. South Africa's 23 million blacks have no representation in Parliament.

The police crackdown on dissent appears to be the government's response to criticism by the far-right Conservative Party that de Klerk has gone "soft" on security, especially after the announcement that the acting president will travel to Zambia next Monday to meet with President Kenneth Kaunda, Africa's leading patron of the exiled African National Congress, which is South Africa's most powerful anti-apartheid resistance group.

Still the sensible folks prevailed:

We believe that a conjuncture of circumstances exists which, if there is a demonstrable readiness on the part of the Pretoria regime to engage in negotiations genuinely and seriously, could create the possibility to end apartheid through negotiations. Such an eventuality would be an expression of the long-standing preference of the people of South Africa to arrive at a political settlement.

That thankfully came to pass. The ANC won the 1994 elections.

At the end of the year, the General Assembly of the UN adopted its Declaration on Apartheid and Its Destructive Consequences in Southern Africa (pdf). Again this was over the strenuous objections of Bush and Thatcher. Lest we forget.

IV. Decentralization

In many arenas in 1989, Africans were beginning to route around central governments. The Big Men still mattered but civil society looked to assert itself. Change was in the air and decentralization was the result. The caveat as ever would be that the institutions took some time to follow the lead of the people; it is the African way it appears. A few years later, Yassin El-Ayouty would write "the world has completely changed since 1989; the OAU has not, since 1963" (The Organization of African Unity After Thirty Years). As someone who rails against stodgy institutions, I am heartened by the decentralization that continues to take place throughout Africa, it keeps leaders on notice.

Where the Organization of African Unity was barely more than a club for the "big men" first of African independence and then of cold war politics, with a gentleman’s agreement not to interfere in each others affairs, the African Union is a institution whose statutes affirm the importance of substance, of accountability, of human rights, and the obligation to uphold those rights not only at home but in your neighbor’s back yard too. Undoubtedly in practice, these aspirational standards are often not met and the development of these institutions is a work in progress; but the challenge is no longer the lack of standards but enforcement.

— Akwe Amosu - Democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa: Trends and Transitions (pdf)

In the field of health care and public policy, The Bamako Initiative was beginning to bear fruits. Again, starting from Mali, we got concerted efforts in health care and population issues. The emphasis was on decentralization and getting local communities involved in decision making that affected them. The strategy would inform later efforts at poverty reduction.

The most useful document I've found to evaluate Africa in 1989 is a long-term perspective study by the World Bank: From crisis to sustainable growth - sub Saharan Africa (pdf). It is comprehensive and fodder for historians, social scientists and mere bloggers.

Decentralization has been essential in bringing about change in Africa and often times it hasn't been a matter of conscious policy. It turns out that things like cell phones and FM radios are the great equalizers for democracy and help move beyond social communication to the political and economic realm. We should all search for more in that vein.

V. Enter The Gremlin

He could have been a mere footnote, but it wasn't to be. He was a mere anecdote for me on Boxing Day of 1989. Annoyed as I was that my mother had worked on the holiday, she deflected my irritation by mentioning this man who had called up the BBC and told her that he had invaded Liberia. That was most people's introduction to Charles Taylor and his unique brand of malevolence. It was bemused entertainment for a journalist but he gave such good copy, a fluent mixture of hubris and cold calculation. He was going to "bring the bitterness of war to Liberia", launch a revolution throughout Africa, and overthrow Master Sergent Doe.

From the first 10 men who joined him from Libyan camps to all the subsequent marauding armies that came into play, Charles Taylor has destabilized no less than eight countries. The casualties and the brutality was impressive. The callousness was biblical, the innovations of small boys units in warfare absolutely diabolical, and the savagery simply unmatched. Much as I wish to dwell on democratic change that 1989 presaged, I have to admit that Charles Taylor and the civil wars that he fomented since 1989 loom large throughout Africa. He may sit these days on trial in The Hague but he casts a dismal and influential shadow. Liberia and Sierra Leone suffered the most in the bloody free-for-alls; Cote d'Ivoire vacillates and many others are picking up the pieces twenty years later. The events of the past year in Guinea can even be read as further aftershocks of the Charles Taylor earthquake.

Blood and sin was Charles Taylor's unique contribution to Africa.

The pervasiveness and intensity of looting, pillage, and plunder by the leaders and the rank and file, the lack of a stable and systematically organized structure of command and control among the armed bands, the criminal misuse of children, the employment of strategies of confidence artistry, the opportunistic use of a variety of cultural symbols, the orchestration of a state of anarchy as the normal environment of operation are all constitutive of the behavior of gangsters who use terror as their ultimate instruments of control. This mode of control draws from the worse aspects of an array of cultures ranging from the culture of urban gangsters and small town confidence artists of western society, and the area boys and swindlers of West African cities to marauding murderers.

— Amos Sawyer - Violent Conflicts And Governance Challenges In West Africa: The Case Of The Mano River Basin Area (pdf)

It is a dubious legacy, and it all started in 1989.

VI. A Year in Music

There was lots of politics on the agenda in 1989, and lots of dancing too.

Fela Anikulapo Kuti & Egypt 80 - Beasts of No Nation
Call it politics with an insistent groove, 28 minutes of delicious afro-beat. Fela wrote his sign of the times, broadening his usual critique of the Nigerian government with a fierce attack on apartheid and its enablers (see Reagan, Thatcher and P.W. Botha on the album cover) in particular, and more generally on many leaders: "animals in human skin" was his characterization. The lyrics include a detour on the United Nations and its relevance for Africa

Dem call the place, the "United Nations"
Hear-oh another animal talk
Wetin united inside "United Nations"?
Who & who unite, for "United Nations"?
No be there Thatcher and Argentina dey?
No be there Reagan and Libya dey?
Is-i-rael versus Lebanon
Iran-i-oh versus Iraq-i
East West Block versus West Block East
No be there dem dey oh- United Nations?
Dis "united" United Nations
One veto vote is equal to 92 (Or more, or more)
What kind sense be dat, na animal sense? (2x)
Maze - Mandela
The prime purveyors of silky soul music asked "When will they set you free?
Why it has taken so long is a mystery". The chorus, "Freedom's on the way", said it all and they backed it up with another short intrumental titled, appropriately enough, Africa
Stevie Wonder - Skeletons
After a long hiatus, Stevie took on apartheid at album length, it was a return to form. I've discussed his deft timing before.
Hugh Masekela - Uptownship
South Africa's finest was still in exile then, the music was strong as ever.
Lisa Stansfield - All Around The World
Beautiful soul music.
Janet Jackson - State of the World
Earnest inquiries with a Minneapolis sound backing.
Public Enemy - Fight The Power
Incendiary Bomb Squad production meets brash lyricism.
Redhead Kingpin & The FBI - Do The Right Thing
Would that more people did the right thing.
Entouch - II Hype
Laidback grooves
De La Soul - Say No Go
The Native Tongues went afrocentric and were the torchbearers after hip-hop's annus mirabilis (1988).
Digital Underground - Doowutchyalike
Freedom was in the air
Big Daddy Kane - Another Victory
He was Young, Gifted and Black
Farley Jackmaster Funk - Love Can't Turn Around
House music came of age
Ten City - That's The Way Love Is
Chicago, Detroit and London were pushing the envelope.
Ziggy Marley And The Melody Makers - Look Who's Dancing
Coming into his own.
Neneh Cherry - Buffalo Stance
Between soul and hip-hop
Heavy D. & The Boyz - We Got Our Own Thang / Somebody For Me
Teddy Riley and Al B. Sure were very busy in 1989; Heavy D was "strictly Big Tyme".
Wrecks-N-Effect - New Jack Swing
Stephanie Mills - Something In The Way You Make Me Feel
No one does a ballad like Stephanie.
Quincy Jones - The Secret Garden (featuring Barry White, Al B Sure!, El Debarge, James Ingram)
Chocolate heaven.
Super Diamono - Diaraf (Jaraaf)
Essential Mbalax from Super Diamono de Dakar. The Cheikh Anta Diop album features Omar Pene singing like an angel.
Soul II Soul - Keep on Movin'
Club Classics Volume One was a miraculous album. Keep on moving was the right message for 1989.

What were your memories of Africa in 1989?

File under: history, review, 1989, politics, culture, Africa, democracy, change, Mali, Ghana, South Africa, Angola, Liberia, Charles Taylor, war, rogues, music, toli

66 Ways to Franco

2009-12-04T01:19:00.007-08:00

It was the kind of thing that you found yourself doing in the middle of the night, musing on an idle question born of two of your concerns: musical obsession and software anthropology. Counting the ways to Franco was an excursion into the realm of metadata, matters of syntax, and a contemplation of the hive mind of the web. The initial insomniac impulse was to create a playlist; your search, however, found a surprising 38 variants of the name in your library and you couldn't locate the song that had triggered your nocturnal foraging.

You remembered that at the beginning of the year you only had a couple of his albums in your collection but the music blogs of this world wide web had sprang to life and you'd steadily filled the gaps while reading them. In this golden age of music distribution, all one needs is a vague memory and an internet connection to fulfill one's aural titillation. Let's see, a cursory glance shows that the mp3 collection now stands at 25,494 songs, 186 GB, or 99 days of non-stop music - probably a third of which was acquired over the past year. Now you do still spend a lot on your musical vices, but you can imagine that it is highly unlikely that $8,500 (at iTunes or Amazon pricing) would have left your insubstantial wallet during this Great Recession. No, your collection grew by osmosis. Moving on...

Your count was akin to last year's discussion about the bewildering number of ways people mangle song and artist names. That led to the sight of those Top 100 ways to write Guns N' Roses – Knockin' on Heaven's Door. What a strange glimpse of the musical Tower of Babel we now have. Take a lexical curio like Guns N' Roses (call it typographical eccentricity), add a few apostrophes and you'll realize that the children of Mr Special Character and Mrs Structured Data are blessed ones. This is the minutiae that software people - and that unwashed sub-clan, the database denizens, have to deal with on a regular basis. Whole businesses have been founded on making sense of such messy data. Information retrieval is the general term of art, and metadata, well, metadata is the data about data. It's one of the hard problems in your line of work.

So what do we have then? Through a set of historical accidents over the past decade - notably the piecemeal standardization of ID tags in the mp3 file format, the mp3 file format itself, the rapid adoption of internet led by the web, improvements in storage technologies, the development of new portable music players and the decentralized mass digitization and distribution of music, we can behold the glorious results of a democratic exercise of mass data entry. During this time, millions of ordinary people took to their computers and ripped their cd collections. Millions more downloaded and shared this great social bounty. True, the more prudent laggards waited until there was commercial affirmation and legally sanctioned avenues for their digital music. Throughout, however, this mountain of music had to be labeled.

The inevitable curators came along fairly early on in this process - the online databases, GraceNote and then Freedb, to help automate things and identify the cd once you loaded it on the computer. Their altruism however didn't stem the tide of data entry (someone after all had to have entered it once and we all know how that goes). Offerings like MusicBrainz have emerged in recent years as repositories of high quality music metadata, ostensibly on a mission to bring accuracy and fingerprinting to digital music. The commercial services too now loom large as major distribution points, but they too license their listings from some of these databases, and it shows: errors everywhere. More puzzling is that the record companies haven't been of much help, they too don't pay attention to the details of the names of the artists they supposedly promote, nor indeed the titles of the songs. They, like iTunes and Amazon stores, aren't perfect at information hygiene. You see typos and plain wrong labeling of music. You don't have to take the word of an opinioniated metadata curmudgeon, the proof is in the existence of a vibrant ecosystem of tag editing software, free and even commercial. Imagine that, people pay for a product to help them label their music.

Given that even the big boys don't label their music accurately, it has been a true free-for-all and that's not even taking into account the trend of the past couple of years of digitizing (and sharing) all the lost vinyl. I'll only note that the amount of African music that is being rediscovered is frankly startling. The labour of love of those who find and clean dusty grooves, scan album covers, digitize and share their musical memories is a true surplus for society.

It turns out that all these musical curators and aggregators have only been partially successful. It really is a problem with the human factor. When you have humans doing data entry you'll have errors. When you have on order of millions doing data entry, you'll have large numbers of errors. These glitches appeal to me, truth be told. People label things to remember them and the patterns they use are worthy artifacts. The variants, I'll suggest, are emblematic of both folk memory and the mass creation of semi-structured data. If I could, I'd write an ode to the mp3 tag. In the meantime, I set about to count the ways to Franco.

Last.fm was my weapon of choice - a music recommendation system with attitude. For one, they have been gathering data from all and sundry for years now - they call it audio scrobbling. They gather data about what people listen to, crunch away, and make contextual recommendations. They deal with huge amounts of data and the attendant complexity. One early strategy to work around the inadequacies of ID tags in mp3s was to simply escape from their confines and allow users to tag artists, songs and albums on the website and watch the free-form folksonomie emerge. Web-savvy as they are they organized these musical objects each with its url and wiki page. People like to discuss songs, albums and artists. Few algorithms can handle the notion that Orchestra Baobab recorded two albums in 1975 under the Orchestre Bawobab moniker. You need a human intervention to account for this kind of peculiarity. And so they did. It's a simple application of collective wisdom: watch what users do and organize around it. They can even offer radio stations based on tags. At a certain point also, they tried a fingerprinting technique that would process their users' libraries to allow them to normalize the metadata associated with a piece of music. Taking this further, they can simply ask and allow people to correct spellings or suggest alternatives for artists that performed under different incarnations. Once a critical mass is reached you can automatically apply this feedback to tend to this garden of metadata. This is the business of web scale identifiers.

And so we come to Franco. Not the fascist Spanish dictator, whose despicable legacy is still paradoxically a touchstone for some American neocons. No. For most Africans, Franco is all you need to say to signify great, pulsing guitar-driven music, rumba, soukous, social commentary and old time good fun. All these are the elements of Franco. It's all the same good, liquid music and great memories of excursions on the dancefloor, a long career spanning four decades. It's been twenty years since François Luambo Makiadi passed away, time enough to count.

And so I counted:

There are at least 66 ways to get to Franco.

I must admit looking at the list gave me pause. How do people remember a musician? How do we remember a piece of music? Only about 9,000 users of last fm seem to listen to Franco and yet here we find world class variety. He appears in 66 different guises to the world if you exclude the 3 obvious mistaggings and misspellings. The labelers in a pool of 1.5 million Guns N' Roses listeners could only mangle that band's spelling 56 ways. What was so special about Franco, I wondered, as I looked at the list? The obvious answer is that much of his music is not available commercially in digital form. Instead, a lot of his listeners are typing up the records and cassettes.

Capitalization concerns surface immediately. Some people like ALL CAPS, others are lower case freaks. That is par for the course in a world where search engines basically ignore case. (Sidenote: looking at the top search trends of the year, it appears that users use lower case in search engines, few bother these days with "Britney Spears" when "britney spears" will do. In this age of mobile phones, it seems that the shift key is being used less). Sidenote: we won't digress onto Camel Case discussions at this stage.

Most people think of Franco as synonymous with the band he founded: OK Jazz. But how do people deal with the abbreviation? How does one spell OK? Is it rather "Ok" or "O.K."? Opinions are varied. The OK Jazz band was so named because they began as the house band in the OK Bar in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa). It should be simple then: Franco & OK Jazz say - assuming you go with no dots.

Matter of punctuation however open up a can of worms; we stray onto typographical concerns, with pronounced eccentricity in the choice of separators. For delimiters, we see dots, semi-colons, slashes, commas and hyphens.

People have different conventions for conjunctions: it's a case of ampersands (&) for the many and fully spelled out for the few.

We have the language issue, the band was named in French so we'd expect "et", but some labelers are English-speakers hence we get a few instances of "and", "with" and "featuring" showing up. Incidentally the folks in the forums at MusicBrainz will regale you with tales about the epic wars over the conventions for dealing with the word "featuring". Briefly, some people spell it out, others contract to "feat" or "feat." - with the punctuation, or even further to "ft.". Suffice to say that it was much like the egg-cracking debate in Gulliver's Travels.

Lest you think that punctuation doesn't matter, let me interject the following anecdote. Tony! Toni! Toné! were named as such in their debut album, "Who?". In later albums, they were called Tony Toni Toné - with the exclamation points removed. Which is the more accurate name for the band I ask? Could you spin a story from the missing exclamation points? Well I'll engage in mindless speculation on this typographical mystery - stay with me. It's obvious: they changed record label and lost the rights to their name (much like The Jackson 5 had to become The Jacksons when they left Motown). They were shrewd in their negotiations and the price they paid was the removal of the exclamation points. The transformation was from 3 ejaculations (those 3 exclamation marks) to a sedate sentence, perhaps indicating a newfound maturity. Truth be told, the music was better without the exclamation histrionics yet it clearly is the same band. For what it's worth, Last fm and Amazon all normalize the name without the exclamation point. Anyway, I won't pursue this tall tale further. Back to Franco and OK Jazz...

The OK Jazz band was an orchestra with a shifting cast - in Congo and much of Africa after the second world war, there was a great flowering of such orchestras as proving grounds and incubators - so you have some renderings going with Orchestre OK Jazz. Again native language comes into play, for the English it's orchestra instead of the French orchestre.

Then there are the nicknames and honorifics. Simply put, Africans love titles. OK Jazz acquired the "Tout Puissant" prefix (almighty, literally all powerful). Franco acquired the appellation, "Grand Maître" (Grandmaster). Add in the grammatical concerns and you expand the choices; is it "le tout puissant" or "son tout puissant", ergo is it "the almighty" or "his almighty"? Le Grand Maître Franco & le T.P.O.K. Jazz perhaps? Franco Luambo Makiadi & OK Jazz? Sometimes also, Franco's full name is spelled out as if to underlie the vastness of his catalog. And when doing this, the name order varies.

At its most extravagant you'd get something like Le Grand Maitre Franco Luambo Makiadi & Le Tout Puissant Orchestre OK Jazz.

Even then, would you contract to TPOK Jazz? Or T.P. OK Jazz? Or T.P. O.K. Jazz? The plot thickens.

With such a long career, there was inevitably a shifting of focus; on some albums it was the band that was the lead, on others it was Franco who took the spotlight, and at other times other members took center stage (Sam Mangwana, Vicky, Taby Ley Rochereau and so forth). The names varied accordingly. It was all Franco, and it was all good, if you don't mind my saying. Trust me, pick almost anything he recorded and you'll be a happy camper.

But to get to my point. The music I'd been looking for at the midnight hour was the following album:

Over his career, there were a number of occasions where Franco had to pay obeisance to his patron, that murderous dictatorial rogue, Mobutu, kleptocrat without equal. The music on those few albums were not the best that he produced in his illustrious career. True, the tracks were danceable but they weren't ecstatic as usual. Some have even detected elements of irony in some of the songs - subversive dog-whistles that undercut the dictator's purpose and propaganda. I imagine some Africanist historian writing the definitive study of this phenomenon, perhaps something titled Musical Resistance in Dictatorial Times in 20th Century Congo: Rumba as Social Subversion. Interestingly enough, as you can see, the word Franco doesn't appear on the billing of the album, it is just plain old Luambo Makiadi. Twenty five years after its release, I couldn't find Candidat Na Biso Mobutu when I searched my iTunes and Winamp libraries for Franco's music, and it figures: he didn't need the dictator's bloodstains attached to his musical name. Franco was a smart man, he knew all about branding. He is sorely missed.

File under: whimsy, metadata, data, music, Franco, naming, syntax, structure, standards, software, technology, observation, Africa, toli

Meshell's Moods

2009-11-07T00:09:00.003-08:00

Anger can be a great musical catalyst. The story is told about Miles Davis's historic 1964 concert at Lincoln Center, that the band was angry that Miles had preemptively waived their fees for charity. The performance, duly celebrated in two albums, My Funny Valentine and Four and more, can be said to have that urgent yet sinuous edge that make it one of the essential live musical performances. The young rhythm section is especially on fire; you can almost hear the added accents in Tony Williams's percussion, Ron Carter does all the right things as a low end theoretician on the bass, and Herbie Hancock solves differential equations on his piano. And then there's the horns of course, Miles is lyricism itself - the ballads are simply wonderful, and George Coleman blows throughout as if it's a cutting contest. The son of man claimed that man cannot live on bread alone, these hungry musicians tried to come up with a corollary to that notion over the course of the concert. Suffice to say that it was an important occasion for all concerned and the potency of the music endures.

It was in this vein that I listened to Meshell NdegeOcello's band last Friday at The New Parish in Oakland. It wasn't quite anger that was at work, it was more like irritation that was the catalyst but who am I to quibble about the end result. I'll get to the whys, wherefores and textures of their sound but should get the hyperbole off my chest upfront.

Simply put, Meshell NdegeOcello's band is the coldest band since The Revolution circa 1985.

If you want a slightly more precise description, I'm referring to the sound and attitude that pertained as the Purple Rain continued to fall, you know, before the addition of horns and the looser feel of the Parade and Sign of the Times bands. I'm talking about a well-oiled band that is out to make a point, a band that wants to share an important moment. Meshell and company are forced to be reckoned with in their live performances, moreover they are touring to support a strong new album, Devil's Halo and are fully committed to its rocky soul aesthetic.

The Wife called them sick - her slang is of a different vintage, for me they were stone cold. Their creative energy harnessed as it was, was something to behold. The sonic architecture brought in elements of Sly Stone, Bootsy Collins, Stanley Clarke and Eddie Hazel. And they were versatile in their approach. Meshell can go from Nathalie Merchant primness to Betty Davis fierceness without skipping a beat and she'll throw in some Sly and Robbie dub for good measure. By the time, they got around to freaking Prince's Dirty Mind, rendering it like no one has heard it before, my jaw had already dropped, I was in awe. When someone is in this kind of mood you can only sing along - and admire.

But on to the bit about anger... As we stood in line outside the club, we overheard mutterings about problems. There were scattered phrases that might cause your average concertgoer to raise their eyebrows, things like "No soundcheck", "Equipment came late", "Damn rental company", "Will they even play?" and so forth. The crowd was suitably wary. They were playing at a new venue, a small club and a suitably intimate joint but one where the kinks were still being worked out. And it showed at the outset even as they came out with such energy. For the first three songs, the sound was slightly off. There were sufficient glitches to cause Meshell to basically throw away the small sound machine (synthesizer/sampler thingimijig) that she's started performing with. Her sound technicians were feeling the pressure as they scrambled to fix things. The underlying tension only heightened the performance. Thus she stuck mostly to singing for the rest of the show and would sing mostly from the more recent parts of her songbook. Call the concert an exercise in aural seduction. Raging songs like Lola, Mass Transit, The Sloganeer - Paradise, and Article 3 were full of urgency. Only occasionally would she pick up the bass when her mood would veer into the ecstatic. Mostly she was orchestrating the shifting soundscapes that now characterize her music; the short outbursts that are the bread and butter of her songcraft only slightly lengthened for the live performance.

There was an element of pride as they paced on stage, as if they all had a point to prove. Oakland may only be a pit stop between the bigger commercial venues - Los Angeles (with the beautiful people) and San Francisco (with the sexy people) where they would play the next night. Oakland however is important for soul singers, functioning as a sort of comfort interlude that restores one's swagger. It's a town that appreciates the ironic mood of a song like White Girl, the audience will laugh in the right places.

Songs like Dead Nigga Blvd - from 2003's Cookie, have extra resonance when sung one block away from Martin Luther King Jnr. Avenue, five minutes away from Mandela Parkway, and 10 minutes away from Malcolm X Elementary School. And she is right to be angry, as expressed in the lyrics and performance of that song, at the disrespect and dysfunctionality of part of the black community in Oakland and elsewhere. People campaigned, marched and sacrificed much labour and even blood to secure the gains of the civil rights struggle, commemorated in those boulevards and yet some would say much is being dissipated. The salty language of the song decries a drive-by mentality accented by the staccato keyboard riffs of the song. The mournful Die Young also struck a chord in that vein. It would figure that only a couple of days later I would read the headline she'd anticipated: Man shot and killed in downtown Oakland. Such is life, or rather such is death in these parts. To die over nothing, a block from the martyr's boulevard...

But back to the considerable songcraft on display. Bitter was her pre-millenium, album length meditation on a mood and we were treated to Fool of Me and Faithful in that key. Fellowship and Forgiveness and Love upped the dub quotient, the reggae tinge of a comfort woman. She took up an acoustic guitar for Crying In Your Beer - lovely balladeering with Chris Bruce her fearless guitarist. Deantoni Parks was ferocious throughout on the drums, sounding like an army platoon. Keefus Ciancia had four or more keyboards and would add ethereal sound effects. She's comfortable having Mark Kelley on bass which is a compliment to his capabilities. All in all this a group with a creative edge. We were treated to a lush musical moment capturing shifting moods.

For the encore, she comes out, picks up her bass and gets into her great remake of Ready for the World's Love you Down. It is spacey, laced with dub stylings, and soulful to the core. It is also flawlessly executed.

Meshell is not one to coddle her audience but she is definitely thankful that we stayed with her on this night. We weren't too demanding for the old favourites and went along with the musical trip of the new songs. Devil's Halo is strong set verging on the rock end of a soul spectrum. You could see the sense of confidence and perhaps a little swagger in the step of all the musicians as they left. In her current thankful mood she is perhaps reaching a sentiment expressed in the title of her second album: Peace beyond Passion.

...

The opening act, Beatropolis, were were a musical puzzle of sorts if only because their feel-good sensibility was hard to pin down. Perhaps we should let them descibe themselves in their own words: "live organic drum and bass... many styles". Indeed there were many styles on display, from an acid jazz start, mix in The Roots circa Organix, a touch of Joycelyn Brown, a smidgen of Roni Size or perhaps Dizzee Rascal and let everything simmer. They would throw in a jungle version of You're All I Need To Get By just because they could, and why ever not, I expect Marvin and Tammi would concur. Perhaps most impressive was Fall Apart. Yeats never would have imagined that a century after writing The Second Coming that we'd have rappers declaiming that "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity" to a fierce drum-n-bass beat, a jungle lament about things falling apart, a topic close to my heart. Needless to say, I approve.

...

The full-length video of Meshell's Seattle concert from the following week finds her and band in a more laidback and relaxed mood. Compare to her previous escapades in jazz from a few years ago.

File under: music, soul, rock, funk, review, concert, live, appreciation, mood, virtuosity, MeShell NdegeOcello, toli

Poetry as Cultural Memory

2009-03-18T01:50:00.014-07:00

Kwesi Brew's poem, Ghana's Philosophy of Survival, is a curious beast, one that continues to confound even as it strikes a chord of admiration and indeed recognition. Judging by the title alone, there's no quibbling here about a pursuit of happiness, that laudable aspiration and seminal con. In this reading, the message of Brand Ghana (or maybe even the more general Brand Africa) boils down to survival, and a philosophy at that. You might be a little perplexed and expectant when you turn the page and first encounter the poem. Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves, that's only the title and you can read the rest for yourself. I thought I'd discuss a few poems and consider his notions of cultural memory: the things we choose to remember and to forget. Herewith some therapeutic toli...

Ghana's Philosophy of Survival

We are the punch bag of fate
on whom the hands of destiny wearies
and the show of blows gradually lose
their viciousness on our patience
until they become caresses of admiration
and time that heals all wounds
comes with a balm and without tears,
soothes the bruises on our spirits.

This is the mettle of invisibility.
This is how we outlast and outlive
the powerful and the unwise.
Whether it is best to wait
or engage the scarlet fury of battle
to stay the hand is for the wise to say,
and not the rashness of the moment.

But we have always been here on this land of ours.
Our country is our home and will always be here at home
To watch, listen and take our suffering
'til true happiness comes naturally and without bitterness.
Love of family kith and kin and brother-keeping
has cast us in this mould:
that while we take the blow and seem unhurt,
speechless, we also watch and wait.

Kwesi Brew, from Return of No Return (1995).

He doesn't pull any punches does he? Indeed he comes right out and gets your attention with the assertion that "We are the punch bag of fate". I admire the nerve as well as the craft. You can't help but be implicated in the "we" even if you're not Ghanaian because what follows are stark words. Phrases full of ironic caresses follow from a connoisseur of the school of hard knocks. He has thought long about the topic and is deploying his talents in plain language.

He isn't berating a culture of excess, or greed, laziness or similar human failing. He's not complaining, nor is he making any value judgments like the prophets of yore. No. Not quite. There's no moral indictment to be found here. Further, should we go looking in the opposite direction, we also won't find any praise-singing. There is merely clear-eyed reflection on a the workings of a community. We are treated to observations born of the discriminatory sensibility of a curator, observations wrapped with the detail of a wordsmith's weaponry. So, reflection it is. The mood is akin to wist, the atmosphere filled with the cosmopolitan perceptions of the weary.

It's a heavy burden however that he has set for himself. Discoursing on the lack of wisdom of the ruler or the excesses of the powerful is the first order of business. One almost expects this kind of pose of our poets. Still, turning the mirror at a society, as the cultural interpreter is wont to do, risks the weight of unpopularity. You get branded as a shrill gadfly demeaning the national character.

As an aside and recent example, it shouldn't have required much courage to criticize the opportunistic imps that landed us with wars and a depression early on in their misdeeds, but few displayed it. Now that the incompetence of that cabal is the conventional wisdom we all prefer to forget the social hysteria that prevailed and that they were able to exploit, the self-righteousness of the wounded and so forth. Cobwebs, I know, dusty cobwebs...

Returning to the poem, what are the contours of the stated philosophy of survival, I wonder? Let's start with the question of form. This isn't an essay, manifesto or political tract, it is very specifically a poem. The meter is off kilter - read it aloud and you'll see what I mean, I would hazard that this is deliberately so. He is usually very precise in his works. The chosen form is meant to disorient with its mixture of concision and paradox. The skill of the poet lies as much in the choice of words as in what is left unsaid. The tone also is very different from the exuberance of his earlier poems, the ones that excited a generation of Ghanaian writers.

There are certain phrases that are meant to heighten the tension. Consider the journey that starts with "the mettle of invisibility" and ends "the powerful and the unwise". It is worth dwelling on what we pass through: a coping strategy that helps us "outlast and outlive". If there are gems in this philosophy of survival, perhaps it is in a certain sense of community, the social interplay that Kwesi Brew describes as "love of family kith and kin and brother-keeping". Teasing out this clue, we learn that social living is the strategy. It's a protective mesh to be sure, but one that one that liberates from the peril of alienation that invisibility otherwise implies.

I keep returning to the last lines contrasting them with the first. It's an improvement, if not a reversal, with a sense of purpose. Cultural memory is the thesis. We may decide what we chose to remember and forget as individuals, what a society remembers, however, is often in the realm of the historian, who takes her cues from the raw material of the journalist, or the humble bureaucrat whose notes serve to underlie - or give the lie to, the politician or flight lieutenant's self-serving talking point memo. The hope is that a community will harken to the larger and deeper truths of a poet's lyricism, the storytelling of the griots of yore.

If it is sometimes good for a person to forget, it can be fatal for a community to forget. By the same token, it also matters what a community chooses to remember and to forget - the trappings of nostalgia, myth-making and selective amnesia mark out many blind spots in this landscape. The task then for the poet is to speak to cultural memory, to weave the dreams at once and to reflect on the messy muddle from whence we forge our society.

Kwesi Brew was perhaps the most famous of Ghana's poets (he passed away last year) although, and perhaps this is in keeping with his notion of survival, the poet in him was only one of the many lives he lead: diplomat, businessman, politician and so forth. He didn't simply witness the story of Ghana in the twentieth century, he midwifed the country and helped write its story with all its ups and downs, an active voice even when politicians and journalists would decry a "culture of silence". His declared task, and indeed his legacy, was to make sure that we never forget "the voiceless days of the past" as he wrote in another poem - contrast here with "speechless, we also watch and wait". Consider also the threat to "engage the scarlet fury of battle", and the almost Ali-Foreman rope-a-dope strategy he alludes to. Of course there is also is an element of myth making in the stories that we tell ourselves and he made sure to tell his own stories and to influence the things we remember about our small country. The lesson that Kwesi Brew's Ghana has to teach the rest of the world goes well beyond mere survival.

The book of poems in which Ghana's Philosophy of Survival appears, Return of No Return is centered on a trio of long poems imagining the encounter of Africa with the West. The titular poem is written for his good friend and fellow poet, Maya Angelou, "No Return" was his nickname for her and a reference to the Door of No Return that is the feature of Elmina castle and the various other coastal castles on that saw slaves shipped off to the Middle Passage. Sidenote: these days the castles are tourist attractions of a mournful sort, legacy tourism they call it.

There's a story lurking here in the relationship between the two fellow wordsmiths. Maya Angelou, like quite a number of African Americans in the 1960s left the USA for safer and more hospitable climes. Some were in exile escaping J. Edgar Hoover, others the more benign recriminations of the civil rights era, and still others aiming to satisfy that longing for the motherland. In any case Ghanaian literature and arts in general benefited from the encounter - Efua Sutherland, Kofi Awoonor, Ayi Kwei Armah, Kofi Anyidoho and others would be part of Kwesi Brew's milieu.

Sidenote: by the early 1990s African Americans were beginning a second round of engagement with Ghana. The Leon Sullivans and Jesse Jacksons of the black establishment part of the seduction. No return was indeed returning.

Thus the terms of reference are ostensibly about the Return of the Native, and his note to Maya Angelou would deal with that and all the complexities of American and African interactions. He prefaces it however by considering the beginnings of that trans-Atlantic story and the centuries-long engagement with those who would become the colonizer. The two earlier poems in the series bear the title Don Diego at Edina (Elmina) and imagine a couple of meetings between local chiefs and the Portuguese. I think we'll call this poetic license but also much in keeping with Brew's own history. The Fantes were the first to encounter the Portuguese once these latter got their headstart on the high seas. Fantes are stereotypically reputed to be the most assimilated with the West. What stories indeed would they tell themselves about the relationship? His character of Don Diego Azambuja is perhaps based on his poet's notion of the first adventurers. Where does power lie? And how much foresight can we grant? This excerpt is a poet's history:

And the brown in the King's eyes thickened darkly over
The presage of gold on hands of iron, gold, gold, gold.
Will there be enough gold to dampen these fierce appetites,
Will there be enough gold, Kyeame?

- from Don Diego at Edina (Elmina)

The old chiefs were no fools but were confronted with guns, steel and the concomitant "fierce appetites". The second poem in the series, adds The Great Rebuff as its subtitle perhaps indicating the bad turn in this centuries-long conversation. In it the chief's Okyeame (his spokesman) whispers

Remember, Nana, temptation's honour is disgrace.
The stranger seeks the nether edge of your bed
To snatch your pillow for his head
when sleep overtakes your wakeful care.

Azambuja looked on.

Tell them, Kyeame tell them,
Friends who met but seldom,
Til death parts them.
Savoured the sweetness of untroubled friendship.
The nature of human heart wreaks its mischief
Upon close neighbours each smoldering with his own craving
From unfulfilled desires burst forth consuming anger

- from Don Diego at Edina (Elmina) The Great Rebuff

Again, the chief and his advisers have agency and foresight and negotiate as best they can. Perhaps this is an important point in light of the later catastrophe of the slave trade and colonization. He ends the second poem with an observation about nostalgia, moving forward a few centuries and laying the ground for his consideration of the African American yearning for return. He couldn't talk to his soul sister, Maya Angelou, without invoking the African memory of that dislocation and forging a common language. Again the entire suite is all about cultural memory, what we choose to remember and to forget.

The collection, Return of No Return, was a departure for Kwesi Brew, less exuberant than The Shadows of Laughter and less expansive than the vision outlined in African Panorama (previously discussed here). A mature meditation and a means to recapture his muse. Always clear-eyed, at times it is a simple critique. Consider:

The Force Of Evil

When bad men
Pass through a place
The way is closed
Behind them by the injured,
Even to innocent men.

When in this mood, titles such as Democracy with a Dark Face, Power Perverted should give insight into the focus of his observations. Miracles and the Message is his reflection on the the 1983 drought in Ghana another sore episode and one that is rarely addressed, even as its effects linger.

In writing about these topics, he was perhaps responding to a frequent complaint about the short memories of Ghanaians. So when thugs confront us, we should meet them with our active gaze. And just to prove this point here is Kwesi Brew as Jeremiah, inveighing against the military thugs who were then in the midst of their misrule. No one can say that they weren't confronted. Consider this excerpt from A Goodbye to Arms

Where the green khaki struts and grinds
its marijuana terror into unarmed hearts,
They come as men-at-arms
badged as justice, grim of face.
And then at last, dissembling cloak removed.
A pack of common traders stained in violence
Wresting bread out the mouths of babies
only to give it back to them at a price
so kind are they who betray us.
Mothers, fathers, children, brothers and sisters
Their own shame stained blood

...

Where is our liberty, you thieves of time?
Where is your vision of prosperity, disciples of greed?
Where is your safety of life, agents of death?
Trusting in these tempers of discontent,
We shall be free again
Free from fear, the fear of fear, the worst
And forever!
A nation's life is a span of just one single bold day!

- from A Goodbye to Arms

The play on the phrase "free from fear", favoured of election observers everywhere ("free and fair, free from fear") is perhaps the sole levity in that poem, a J'accuse directed at Rawlings and his chameleon crew who were ostensibly shedding their military proclivities (hope springs eternal). The rest of the collection, however, serves to round out the picture with laughter and acute observation. We can all use some laughter to leaven life, some riddles to puzzle over and some landscapes for quiet contemplation and revival. The oral tradition that was our past might have encouraged laughter and forgetting but it was also the font of proverbial wisdom and coping strategies for dealing with tricksters. The poets and writers of our present have their work cut out for them.

There is only one aspect of Ghanaian society that Kwesi Brew's words don't fully address in his works, and that is the growing influence of the new religions. Perhaps the urbane cosmopolitan in him didn't feel the need to consider these articles of faith as he spoke to memory. His message of social living was a worldly one even as it invoked the spirit of brother-keeping. It was simply his duty as observer to hew to that message, to bear witness to an unvarnished Ghana.

He lived then "in a land flooded with ubiquitous miracles" and fought the good fight, fashioning his way in the path of a long line of cultural interpreters. I love the texture of Kwesi Brew's poems, the exuberant efficiency of his wordplay and the complications he teases out as he captures both personal and social moods. His words are a soothing balm when the temptation of wrath beckons, they have the consistency of shea butter, guaranteed to heal open wounds and I feel very close to their vitality.

I often feel impatient about Brand Ghana, the twists in the writing and the frequent setbacks. My elders counsel me that it is best to dwell on the small things, to look at the big picture. Talking the long view is a hard thing for the impatient; watching opportunities pass by as small mindedness prevails seemingly at every turn. After reading Kwesi Brew however, I come back refreshed. I no longer begrudge the sanitized fairy tales that many like to tell about Ghana - they have their uses, and, if anything, sharpen my resolve: resist nostalgia and the larger temptation of myth making. Lyricism and clear-eyed reflection were Kwesi Brew's weapons of choice. We are writing the story, we have been writing it forever.

Poetry A Playlist

Phoebe Snow - Poetry Man
Deliciously seductive soul music. The Zap Mama remake with Michael Franti is also essential.
Roy Hargrove - Poetry (featuring Q-Tip and Erykah Badu)
Perhaps this belongs more properly on a playlist entitled elation, but I couldn't resist. Like butter... shea butter.

This is the second of some reflections on Ghana, prompted by the recent election. Let's place this note under the banner of social living.

File under: poetry, literature, criticism, review, appreciation, culture, observation, memory, griots, Ghana, Africa, Kwesi Brew, Social Living, toli

The Wound Part I (Ghana Elections 2008)

2009-01-01T17:22:00.006-08:00

Let's start with this: they almost killed my uncle.

I really can't write much more than that. When I look at what was done to him, when I look at the pictures, there really isn't much more that can be said: they tried to kill my uncle, they almost killed my uncle.

For an election.

My mother was the one who received the phone call from her brother telling her to come quickly, that they were killing him, that she should bring help.

I was back in Accra at a remove of 200 kilometers. I only saw the text message that read

"Dr Ohene beaten to pulp at Dededo polling station, Ho West. He has been sent to Trafalgar hospital. It's time to stop these gung ho moves"

True I heard the almost primal sound that my cousin had raised when she received that message, a terrifying sound that had made me stop whatever I was doing on this, my dad's birthday, and rush her way. I felt the same wound. I still feel it.

My mother had been talking to my grandmother and grand-aunts when she received that frantic phone call. I can't imagine what those women must have felt in that instant and in the subsequent fraught hours. Is it possible to wound anyone more?

I don't know what my 10 year old cousin, my uncle's son, who was in that house with those women, must have felt. He had been arguing throughout the previous day that he should accompany his father to watch him be a polling agent. Would they have killed his father in front of him? Is it possible to wound anyone more?

The threat had been raised in 2000 and 2004 that "There will be blood on the ground". There was certainly violence and intimidation back then but we have seen things this time in 2008 and now 2009 that are chillingly close to what transpired in places that no one should ever emulate, in countries that people use as cautionary tales.

The cynical people who incited, who fomented, who organized the political violence are as much to blame as those who attacked, who beat, who kicked, who threw stones, who threw planks, who sprayed acid and sundry powders, who held people hostage until they signed, who chased people off, who surrounded cars that arrived in their villages and towns, who shook cars, who spat, who came with cudgels and cutlasses, who threatened to burn down our family home and many others, who stole watches from bleeding men, who searched for cement blocks to take lives, who heeded the call to slaughter the strangers in their midst.

I had promised myself that I wouldn't write during my holiday in Ghana. I knew that I would have prime material with these runoff elections and indeed my home has been plum center of the election strategizing and campaign. Sociologists, historians and political scientists would die for what I've witnessed.

Since 10am on election day when I heard that awful news, things have been clarified for me. The deeply political animal that many of you who read me know is simply in pain.

I have written about my uncle before in these pages, noting that he was one of three psychiatrists tending to the mental health of 20 million Ghanaians. These days he might well be the only psychiatrist in Ghana since almost everyone who trains in his discipline seems to leave the country. My favourite uncle, I don't know a gentler man.

I will write more later on this and other topics and more in my customary style. I will share two things now, I hesitate with the first but I recall having written on the necessity of permanent outrage and certainly there has been outrageous behaviour here.

Photos of my uncle after the attack on him that my mother somehow thought to take (warning these are graphic).
My mother is more sober perhaps, and certainly calmer when emergencies arise. I don't know where she has found the time given the tremendous pressures of the past few days but she has written an account of things.

Look On At Your Handiwork

I hope these wounds will heal and that I'll forget these things. But for now I'll end with this: they tried to kill my uncle; they almost killed my uncle.

File under: life, violence, emotion, Ghana, election, politics, strategy, Africa, blood, memory, family, toli

A Debt Foretold

2008-12-07T21:08:00.007-08:00

Asked if she would use a credit card if one were given to her, Ms. Zhang looked confounded. "What's a credit card?" she asked, adding, "We have everything we need."

— China's Economy, in Need of Jump Start, Waits for Citizens' Fists to Loosen

Indeed, I ask. Indeed. Ms. Zhang has vocalized the existential question of our age. What's a credit card?

Everyone is asking similar questions these days. "What's a bank?", for example, is something that markets the world over are pondering. We're finding out that there are many things that are bank-like entities — from insurance companies through mortgage companies to even car companies, and others, nominally called banks, that had very odd ideas about what a bank was actually supposed to be or do. But I digress, let's stick to the matter at hand: what's a credit card?

Well the credit crunch hit home in a minor way last week. The message, delivered in a plain white envelope, was resonant in its simplicity:

Dear Mr O. Amaah

We are writing to you because we noticed that this credit card account hasn't been used for at least [redacted] months. We believe this may indicate that the account no longer meets your financial needs. With this in mind, the account has been closed.

[redacted closing pleasanteries]

So there you have it, ever so pithy. It kicked the bucket; there's one less credit card in the world today. A little piece of plastic was duly snipped, shredded, and recycled. And that was that, you might say. Still, there's a tale lurking behind that note, a petit divertissement perhaps, an object lesson about the current global reassessment of risk, or if you are so inclined, a parable about the meaning of credit. Consider the following credit card toli a chronicle of a debt foretold...

My introduction to Generation Debt (USA edition) was with a First USA credit card that I signed up for sometime in 1994 in order to finance a conference that a bunch of African students decided to put on that year. Not being favoured sons and daughters of Harvard, donors were not being forthcoming with spare change to help our efforts. But we were bloody minded enough to want to put Africa on the university's agenda, for a weekend at least — we knew our limits. So I picked up the three credit card applications that had been crowding my university mailbox, filled and returned them in their glorious postage-paid envelopes.

I have to admit, I was shocked when a sleek credit card duly arrived in the mail a week later. I was doubly shocked when I saw the number of digits in the credit line assigned to me. I still can't believe that a bank would extend almost $12,000 of credit to a mere African student who was earning $8.50 an hour working weekends as a dishwasher in the Harvard dining halls. Well, this meant that the show would go on, my $300 bank balance be damned. I dug this plastic exemplar of American bravado. Sidenote: one of the other applications had been promptly rejected, and after a longer period, the third was approved (with a credit line of $500).

Incidentally the first purchase made on this card — and the card's claim to fame, was a plane ticket for Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf to bring her to the conference. At that time she was a humble bureaucrat at the United Nations Development Program who, if I remember correctly, had initially suggested that she would even contemplate driving up from DC if we could find someone to car-pool with her... You'll recall that Liberia and Sierra Leone circa 1994 was prime warlord running riot material. She, in contrast, simply wanted to talk to the students. How refreshing.

Anyway, the eventual budget for the conference was around $22,000 of which approximately $15,000 was put on credit cards that were bestowed on yours truly over the next two months.

Now I see you shaking your head. I understand. It's OK, go ahead, shake your head, titter away. I can handle a lot of head shaking, rolling of eyes and the like. I certainly am shaking my head as I remember the things I charged on that card. You see, thrift runs deep in my family. Further, there's a certain conservative streak and reputation that is very much belied by this, my first encounter with a credit card. In mitigation perhaps, I'd note that I was just a year past the sophomore stage so you could place this anecdote under the banner of youthful indiscretion.

Returning to our original question — remember we're trying to clarify things for Ms. Zhang — what can we say so far?

Well a credit card is claimed to have something to do with meeting financial needs — that is what my credit card company suggested even as they terminated our dalliance.

The anecdotal evidence also shows that a credit card is something that changes one's relationship to risk, and indeed risk assessment.

A further reality illustrated here is that a credit card is something that allows sophomoric impulses to move beyond mere bravado to full-blown fiscal train wreck, all within a 25 day (or 20 day) billing cycle - for these things can change at little notice per the small print.

It turns out that there's nothing like having $15,000 bills to concentrate the mind - well at least to concentrate my Ghanaian student mind. It also turns out that, statistically speaking, credit card debt doesn't concentrate the minds of most Americans - students or otherwise. It must be a cultural thing. It is confounding, isn't it? A credit card is a puzzle.

Suffice to say that I sweated a lot for the next few months as I applied to various funding sources to try to get reimbursement so that I could pay off my credit card bills. That $15 minimum payment that was cheerily suggested to me seemed a little out of proportion to the actual bills in question, on the order of a thousand times the amount of said bills. A credit card is a hassle.

If you were in Cambridge in those heady months and had even a faint whiff of money about you, you would have made my acquaintance. The idea was that I'd beg, steal or borrow to repay this debt. I visited more foundations, Harvard-affiliated or not, wrote more letters, made more phone calls, appeared in more student council meetings or board meetings, than I care to remember. I discovered reserves of argumentation and negotiation skills that I never knew I possessed. Some looked for polish in the presentation and others wanted you to dance for the money. I had no shame, and was chameleon-like in my affectations. For a surprisingly large number of organizations, it appeared that it paid to look very skinny, malnourished, child-like and/or poor - there's a certain image of Africa that loosens wallets. Normalcy wasn't a feature that they cared for. Well, I obliged. I remember someone wondering aloud why we needed to bring all these mid-level African professionals (Johnson-Sirleaf, Djibril Diallo etc.) to the conference when an expert like Samuel Huntington was available (and local). I kept my mouth shut. A credit card is a hustle.

I learned a lot in those days about money, power, time, and especially about debt. On the question of time, I learned one of Einstein's dreams about the perception of time: there's that notion of time dilation as evidenced by the interval between when someone says they will give you money and the actual moment when you receive said money. A credit card is an alarm clock of sorts.

There were many lessons learned, perhaps too numerous to enumerate here. The American facility and close companionship with debt will forever remain a source of fascination to me.

My sweat paid off, money trickled in, the conference went on and I managed to pay off those initial credit card bills on time. A couple of months later, I got another letter from First USA: the credit card company duly increased my credit limit to $15,000. A credit card is a dream.

When you read about the psychology of conmen, you'll find a lot about misdirection in language and verbal framing. The fact that they call it "credit card" is quite a tell when it is actually a "debt card". The verb credit has positive associations of honour and achievement that enable the crucial leap of faith. Truth in advertising, if you will. A credit card is a confidence game.

The Story of O

Having a long and hyphenated name, I was always wary about using my now dearly departed credit card - even as First USA's issues in the realm of e-commerce were being worked out. For one, my full name didn't fit in the required space on the card's front so the first part of my last name became the initial O, and a new identity was minted, Phoenix like. For fifteen years, an entire area of forest and countless trees have been sacrificed to the cause of junk mail offers to that guy with the O initial. I tell you, Mr O. Amaah has been positively deluged by marketing offers after First USA promptly sold my details to its marketing partners. A credit card is an alter ego.

Returning to our story. In time, First USA was bought up by Bank One which was bought up by Chase Manhattan bank (later renamed Chase), which was bought up by JP Morgan to become JP Morgan Chase. The card name changed accordingly. A credit card is a chameleon.

When I lost my wallet and bag a few years ago, and tried to cancel the card, I had to go through a whole rigmarole with customer service trying to determine what the name of the card was. I always remembered it as my First USA card but there were at least four different entries in their records. Who knew? A credit card is a complication.

I am not one for debt. I had this card for almost 15 years but I found myself preferring the second card which, you'll recall, came with a lower credit line and on which my full name could be printed on its front. I only use credit cards as a convenience and am one of those termed deadbeats by the credit card industry, ergo one who pays his bills in full.

Truth be told, I stopped using it because of fickle and aesthetic reasons. I didn't want to pretend to be Mr O. Amaah any longer. I was skeptical of that entire identity conjured up out of missing pixels and thin air. A credit card is a sleight of hand.

Still, I kept the card around for sentimental reasons – you always remember your first credit card, your lost virginity in commercial debt. It was the prodigal card, or perhaps the card that the builder refused in biblical terms. Well no longer. My credit card is dead.

JP Morgan Chase received a bailout in the form of a $25 billion equity injection from the United States Treasury under the authority of the TARP legislation. Presumably as the company absorbs its Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual acquisitions, the bean counters have decided that hoarding cash is the name of the game. Risk managers the world over are doing much the same thing – that's why they call it a credit crunch, innit? They no longer relish the prospect of yours truly being seized once again by a seminal lunacy and taking advantage of the now $23,000 credit line that they had since extended to him. Oh well, their loss.

I suspect it will take a few years for Mr O. Amaah to stop receiving junk mail. While I might (briefly) mourn my First USA card, I can't wait for my alter ego's disappearance. In the grand scheme of things, I'm doing fairly well in life. I have health and loving family and friends. I applaud those faceless credit assessors for cutting me off — even if abruptly and without notice. I'll echo the words of a confounded Chinese woman:

"What's a credit card?" Adding later, "We have everything we need".

A credit card is a debt foretold.

Light Reading

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Chronicle of a Death Foretold
The end was always certain but the story was worth telling. And re-reading, over and over again.

Credit in Film

One of my favourite films of the 1990s is the Dutch film Karakter (Character). It's a tale of Oedipus meets Inspector Javert with the prospect of bankruptcy looming and debtors' prison. A wonderful period thriller founded on the themes of identity and duty — the duty of repaying one's debt; that Dutch sense of rectitude.

Soundtrack for this note

The Streets - A Grand Don't Come For Free
An album length meditation on the small things and the daily hustle. Standouts include It Was Supposed To Be So Easy, Not Addicted and What Is He Thinking. Indeed.
Lizz Wright - Dreaming Wide Awake
The sophomore album in the form of the young lioness growling. Aural candy for the jazz vocal fiend.
Tom Scott - Today and Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth - They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y)
The sinuous horns are duly credited to Tom Scott's brand of seventies' rare groove. They were sampled to great effect by the one and only Pete Rock who added glorious snare drums. Everything that is good about hip-hop can be found in that song.

Next: What is a bank?

File under: credit, debt, bubble, USA, economics, risk, banking, finance, observation, culture, life, Shell Game, toli

Drum Magazine Ghana 1969

2008-11-09T21:04:00.006-08:00

Belatedly, some notes on the year 1969 in Ghana, as viewed through the lens of Drum magazine... (see slideshow)

I spent some time scanning images from a year's worth of issues of the Ghana edition of Drum magazine. Truth be told, losing myself in the pages was a bit of escapism. I wanted a glimpse of my parents' world, of their aspirations and of the culture from which I emerged. Those pages were a good source of any manner of cultural artefacts and goings-on in the country. Call it nostalgia, call it social anthropology, call it a poor man's history, or perhaps I was simply fascinated by the advertisements. So. Drum Magazine. Ghana. 1969. Here goes.

1969 was an election year in Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah's one-party regime had been overthrown and civilian rule loomed. But that was by the by - the magazine was typically focused on lighter issues. By way of background, Drum magazine is most known from its South African roots but it also had Ghanaian and Nigerian editions from the late sixties until the eighties. The equivalents would be Ebony, Jet or say Essence (alternatively think of Hello and Paris Match) ergo, none too weighty society papers. A good place to start then would be "Drum's fabulous contest to find the prettiest mini-skirt (and its wearer) in Ghana."

The singer Rose Small's pink mini-dress "proved irresistible". Her testimony was eloquent:

"Minis are gorgeous and I adore them. With the right figure, pretty legs and a lot of taste a girl simply looks wonderful in a well-made mini. I believe that for a long time to come minis will continue to be ravers.

I wear minis because I feel free in them. In any case what's wrong with showing just a wee bit of thigh? For parties, for casual wear, for public outings when I appear on television or nightclubs my dress is either four inches or six inches above the knee. I have no fixed notions about the length anyway. On a day I feel gay I just slip on a six-inch-above-the-knee dress.

Of course I do not fancy very complicated fashion make-up. For the mini which won the competition I just asked a dressmaker... a fan of mine... to make me a six-inch mini with a matching long-sleeve blouse. That's all. The important thing is the poise and grace which I think I have. The mini cost only eight new cedis to make. No fuss, no mess!"

Dig the insouciant language of the liberated. Others however took offense, Ghana was (and perhaps still is) a fairly conservative society:

"The mini-skirt which you have so irresponsibly patronized is becoming a nuisance in the country"... "most of the girls who put it on do not have the good legs, the shape and poise to do justice to that weird dress of yours".

The fashion spreads contrasted the mini-skirts and bell-bottoms of the time with the more traditional cloths (Dutch wax, batiks and other fabrics).

We see the marketing of the Kenyan fabric named Maridadi (from the Swahili word meaning bright and colourful) and its Ethiopian analogue.

Teijin Tetoron, the Japanese polyester brand was trying to make a splash - without much success, as it turns out, cotton works best in our tropical lands.

There was plenty of eye candy throughout the magazines.

On the perennial question of hair, the influence of Motown was felt with Supremes-styling presumably taking over from the corn roll of yore.

This same dynamic is at work 30 years on, as the following posters from 1999 show.

Imagine an academic paper: Tradition and modernity, the sociology of hair in post-colonial Africa.

The alternatives were afros and going au naturel of course. Wigs were for the more adventurous - brand 99's wig spray advertisement proclaimed that it was "Ghana's favourite lacquer".

Head scarves abounded, the older, traditional duukuu that had given way to European headgear before independence was now reinvented as the lappa cover cloth.

Timothy Burke made his name as a social historian studying advertisements in Zimbabwe in Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe. There is much of the same material here. There was soap, lots of soap, Lux Soap would weigh in against Rexona and its ubiquitous cover girl. Omo competed with Surf.

Skin lightening products were popular (well at least they were heavily advertised). Fela would sing Yellow Fever a few years hence and bemoan the extremes of the practice. It's not just Africa however and not simply old history, the same thing happens in India and China today. "You deh bleach, oh you deh bleach".

A yearlong series on sex education draws a big response from readers, dealing as it does in straightforward terms with everything from birth control and family planning, the pill and other contraceptives, midwives, child birth, relationships (pre-marital and otherwise), passion and even prostitution.

Healthcare advertising is also much in evidence. Presumably the infant formula and powdered milk of the time wasn't contaminated with melamine but the hard sell about infant nutrition was well on the way as breast feeding was deemed passé.

Cod liver oil remedies compete with Milk of Magnesia treatments. Vicks rubs elbows with the various potions and herbal bitters that form the bulk of traditional medicine. The same competition between modern pharmaceuticals and traditional practitioners continues to this day and all now have large advertising budgets. As one would expect, we find adverts for various malaria treatments - Nivaquine gave "sure protection", Resochin claimed to cure malaria. Bayer, Merck and others were targeting Africa.

Ghana Airways was continuing its expansion - by the mid 70s it would begin its inexorable decline (it died a few years ago) - well, we could all dream in 1969.

Next to ads about Westinghouse air conditioners or Fan ice cream (which had been launched on the advice of Dr Fred Sai and was instantly favoured in generations to come), you'd find much about beers of course. Star beer and Club lager had large budgets and blanketed much of the magazines. It was all about the good life. The culture and politics of alcohol have been much studied in Ghana. Schnapps was less in evidence but featured - it is used in libations and many of our ceremonies.

My clear favourite is Pepsodent toothpaste with Irium. Be progressive and dig the production values and the light skin.

There was a vigourous music scene and perhaps a golden age of music in the country. On the highlife side of things, E.T. Mensah and his Tempos competed with Jerry Hansen and The Ramblers band who were more in the vein of King Bruce's Black Beats. These newfangled Ramblers stepped things up and "brought back the boogaloo" from London and the States.

The Professional Uhuru Dance Band featured the guitar dexterity of Stan Plange. The GBC Band roughed it up with The Revellers, Railway Dance Band and the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation Band. The Aliens Band, The Planets, the Black Santiagos rounded out the cast. The Sierra Leone Heartbeats, fronted by Geraldo Pino had set up shop in Ghana after the coup and found a receptive audience for their brand of soul music - echoes of Motown were in the air. Paradoxically The Soul Messengers' tour was judged a failure - the competition was too fierce.

Every issue featured the obligatory society puff pieces (sundry ceremonies, weddings, durbars and funerals). Memo to self: finish the long overdue toli on African ceremonies.

The Ga chief, Nii Bonne, the so called "Boycotthene", who made a stand against inflation and organized a national boycott in 1948 against colonial rule, died during the year and his funeral was a major marker. It was unusual for traditional rulers to feature in the independence or nationalist movements but Nii Bonne didn't recoil. You may recall, my previous commentary about E.T. Mensah's song, Inflation Calypso, which marked that episode in lilting music.

On funerals, the thinking was that "it costs too much to die". A certain Moses Ababio in Somanya bemoaned 'senseless, prestigious funeral ceremonies'. Millicent Adamafio in Sekondi chipped in:

'grandiose and extravagant preparations must be condemned in the strongest terms. Some people have become full-time mourners, showing their faces at almost all wake-keeping services. Their explanation is that the more one attends such functions and registers his condolences, the more sympathisers one gets when he is bereaved. In fact there are voluntary organizations whose sole purpose is to give moral and financial support to members who are bereaved'

Others countered:

"what is wrong with a nice colourful and impressive funeral for a loving relative whose face we will not see again. The dead are an important subject in our tradition and should be accorded the due ceremony and honour they deserve".

You'll see much the same debate if you read today's Ghanaian newspapers.

There's a cultural point to be made here. Those "voluntary organizations", those funeral societies are very much tied to the informal sector in the economy. This has always been true and was even moreso during military rule. It was said that during the worst of the Rawlings years the funeral industry was the only growth industry. They provided not only social comfort but financial support. Beyond that, the susu collectors that deal with money management in our markets are intimately coupled with these informal societies and their financial arrangements are our equivalent of the shadow banking system, the essential glue that underpins the Ghanaian economy. Many analysts of the Ghanaian scene seem to dismiss these cultural organizations too readily. The financing of funerals and weddings would make a great dissertation topic for a budding economist or social historian of Ghana. Those considering technological solutions such as mobile payments and the like would do well to start by examining what makes these organizations so effective.

The formal banking and financial sectors were big advertisers, trying to convince the unbanked to start accounts after the hard times under Nkrumah in which banks had fallen out of favour. There was a concerted campaign targeting market women, young professionals, textile workers and entrepreneurs.

On ceremonies, there were scenes from the Oguaa Fetu Afahye celebrating the peoples of Cape Coast - the Oguaa traditional area. The headlines: custom and taboo take their turn.

The original founders of Cape Coast were said to be the Bentsils and Inkooms who migrated from Sekyere and Techiman and settled in Effutu, nine miles north of Cape Coast. The wandering Effutus soon began to explore their new environment and through the trapping and marketing of crabs, pitched themselves a settlement in this part of Effutu Kingdom called Cabo Corso (Cape Coast) by the trading English and Swede settlers and Oguaa or Gwaa (market) by the "natives"... There were images of "top-level fetish priests" performing the annual purification ceremony (Wohyefa) at Prapratem. These were "top-level", not your garden variety fetish priests.

Closer to my family home, there are the celebrations at Aburi and the Akuapem "mountains" with welcome images of Nana Kwame Fori II, Omanhene of Akuapem, and Nana Dokua II, Queen Mother of Akropong. Family...

Jimmy Moxon was also in attendance, by then he had already spent 25 years with the Akuapems. The so-called "Gentleman Chief" had moved from England and was known by his official name, Nana Kofi Obonya. At other events, you could catch glimpses of members of the Oddfellows Lodge and of various Freemason societies dressed in their distinctive attire.

There was much about student life (the writers were not far removed, if at all from university). Siren, the journal of Mensah Sarbah Hall, University of Ghana, Legon did a satirical end of year issue featuring a cartoon strip that gave rise to the "Wankye Wankye Scandal" - and consequent student riots...

The strip was denounced as 'pornography', students were duly suspended, campaigns were mounted to have them reinstated, demonstrations were started. Things got out of hand.

Reading closely you realize how benign the commentary was, young male students frustrated at the lack of internalists - 'internalists' being those female students who dated fellow students. There were complaints about "the young lecturers who openly fish in the limited pool of Volta Hall - and in the female wing of the controversial Sarbah hall". Student militancy prevailed however. The riot police had to be called in to calm things down. Dig the uniforms.

When the mood swings there are even looks outward to the deadly costs of the Biafra war in nearby Nigeria. Nelson Ottah termed it a "descent to the abyss" and was shocked by what he saw in Ojukwu's Biafra.

A great magician was abroad, and many things that had no relation with reason were happening. So it happened that the whole people got up like a herd of sheep and followed to their own destruction.

It was all grotesque. it was all an extravagant imbecility. It was all a gigantic political swindle. It was all first-class mass-hypnosis. But it needs an explanation.

On Ojukwu, he didn't mince words:

"the man is a nihilist - a nihilist uninhibited". A magician who "found it so easy to take fourteen million intelligent people down the path of folly, vanity and destruction."

A young Cameron Duodu takes a trip to America at the height of Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers' confrontation with The Man. One gets the sense that he was really there to check out jazz groups like the Sonny Cox Trio or watch Le Roi Jones catching the spirit in live performances but he found that there was no escape from race in his travels in the United States. As he put it: "I see the beauty evaporate". It is interesting to read about America's civil rights trauma through the eyes of a Ghanaian journalist. He titled his pieces America the beautiful with no little irony.

Ghana was looking towards space - playing off the Soviet achievements against the USA's Apollo prowess (the moon landing was duly celebrated) - well anyone could dream and there were even nuclear ambitions (since revived in 2008).

On Politics

General Ankrah resigned and handed over to General Afrifa early on in the year. The die had been cast however, and the transition to civilian rule would account for much of the year's manoeuvering.

The Akuffo-Addo commision enjoined that "never again should there be any tyranny in Ghana... little purpose can be served if, having set up a democratic Constitution, we allow anti-democratic forces to overthrow or even attempt to overthrow the democracy that the Constitution ensures." A Constituent Assembly was sworn in to draw up a constitution taking into account its recommendations and those of the general public.

Lt. Gen. Ankrah would state 3 principles to inform the new Constitution:

The freedom and liberty of the people and their enjoyment of fundamental human rights
To eliminate the possibility of the return of tyranny and dictatorship to the country
To prevent the abuse of the Constitution through frivolous and ill-conceived amendments to it.

That last was a reaction to the deposed President Nkrumah and "his disrespect of the Constitution and the frequency of amendments which rendered it a simple tool in his hands for the perpetuation of his rule". With hindsight, the worries about tyranny would prove prescient - Acheampong and his band of rogues would mount a coup in 1972.

There was lots of campaigning and electioneering and much of it would feature in Drum's pages.

K.A. Gbedemah, finance minister under Nkrumah's CPP was exempted from the vetting conducted by the NLC and threw himself into the campaign with the National Alliance of Liberals (NAL). The association with Nkrumah would harm his performance. The "bearded, bespectacled, mystic-looking Dr. Willie Kofi Lutterrodt" didn't make an impression with his People's Popular Party. Joe Appiah broke with erstwhile colleague, Dr. K.A. Busia and the Progress Party, and founded the Nationalist Party on a platform to economic revitalization and promises to cocoa farmers. It would unite with the Ghana Democratic Party and the All People's Congress. Ex-minister P.K.K Quaidoo led the Republican Party the Dr. de Graft-Johnson led the All People's Party, these last two merging and forming the All People's Republican Party. Their manifestos make for interesting reading.

The elections would be won handily by Busia's Progress Party - the heavyweight brain-trust and shrewd electoral tactics proved overwhelming. Having B.J. Da Rocha on your side counted for a lot on the campaign trail.

Ajax Bukana, the irascible trickster, rabble-rouser and all around general entertainer launched the Mosquitoes Protection Party during the 1969 election. His platform was thoroughly ludicrous but brought some very welcome levity. The minstrel tradition had reached Africa and found fertile ground.

On Economics

There were complaints about smuggling - Ghana's economy was still dislocated. There were many scapegoats:

"we are asking them not to have a special liking for the Syrians, Lebanese, Indians and Nigerians who are mainly behind the illegal importation of cases of liquors, tobacco, used clothing and cotton prints".

These days, the additions to the list of convenient scapegoats in the Ghanaian discourse are the Liberians who arrived as refugees over the past 15 years. If you press a little harder, some might mention the Chinese but so far their impact on the economy hasn't drawn populist rebukes.

Early on in the year there was the so-called Railway Rumpus - labour disputes with the Ghana Railway and Ports Workers trade unions going on strike. They would face harsh treatment from the NLC - a military government, even a benign one, by definition is not very sympathetic. G.K. de Graft Johnson was then General Manager of those government-run enterprises and had a hard time balancing negotiations with the unions and keeping things running.

Mark Cofie, who started an empire of car garages, becoming an agent of Japanese car companies and dealing with repairing most of the American cars in the country, was given a glowing profile. A consummate entrepreneur, he had grand visions of a Ghanaian auto industry. In retrospect, it wasn't to materialize but he at least made a go at it.

On cars... the Hillman Hunter, the Honda S 800, Peugeot 204 Brake, the Mercedes 230 S, the Ford Cortina 1300, the Rover 2000, the Volvo 144 S and of course the Fiat 125 were all available in local showrooms. I still have fond memories of my Uncle Mike's yellow Fiat 125 which somehow survived well into the 1980s. Those Fiats were as indestructible as the Peugeots.

It wasn't clear how popular, or indeed how reliable, Soviet cars like the Moskvitch 408 were - the adverts made sure to note that there were plenty of "spare parts and excellent service available". Sidenote: Ghana had turned towards the Soviet Union in the previous years under Nkrumah - socialism with an African face was the slogan.

The slogan for Chrysler trucks and vans was "Engineering in Action". These days it's more like engineering inaction - and the prospect of bankruptcy.

There were many articles stressing the importance of vehicle assembly in developing countries, for example the Bedford VAM 23 motorway bus assembled locally by Africa Motors. These were the successors to the venerable, bone-shattering Mammy Trucks.

The recently opened Akosombo dam was meant to enable a new era of power and support the development of fledgling industries. "Abundant power for Ghana's new industries" read the headline. Manufacturing didn't take off however, and these nascent efforts would falter in the decades to come. It is only forty years on that these same aspirations seem to be taking off in any sustainable fashion. Still there is much on the various factories that were sprouting up.

Reports on the poor and often non-existent infrastructure in the Volta region make for depressing reading: no drainage systems, no street lighting, no water supply (only 8 percent with access to good drinking water), poor feeder roads, few doctors and so forth. The proximity of the Akosombo dam seemed to be of no consequence. A few gestures were being made to promote places like the Wii waterfalls and the mystery rock of Akosombo as tourist venues but the capacity wasn't there yet - indeed it has taken decades for some of those ideas to come to fruition. Certain parts of the country were being left behind and some would exploit the resulting grievances for political gain.

The environmental degradation of Keta and the anxiety of its harried inhabitants were a concern. Those who live between the sea and the lagoon will always find grievances. In any case, some of our best poetry has come out of their predicament, witness Kofi Awonoor's wonderful poem, The Sea Eats The Land At Home.

The obligatory photo of African school-children in morning prayer raises the issue of church or state. The big question was "whether the churches should continue to manage schools with local, urban and city councils or should the management of all educational institutions come under a unified system to be directed by the Ministry of Education". It was noted that

"the churches spearheaded the drive for education in Ghana... in 1737 the Danish chaplain attached to the Danish Castle at Christianborg in Accra sent two boys from the Castle school to be educated in Copenhagen. Again in 1828 the Danish governor at Osu, Accra invited the Basel Missionary Society in Switzerland to take up missionary and education work in Osu and its neighbouring districts."

During Kwame Nkrumah's reign, his government introduced party politics and the notorious Young Pioneers Movement. A relevant tidbit: when "Rt. Rev Richard Reginald Roseveare, former Anglican Bishop of Accra criticised the Movement's ungodly behaviour at a church synod, he was instantly deported from the country".

The public/private conundrum is very much in the news in today's Ghana, private schools are all the rage, often funded by churches. The jury is still out as to their effectiveness and the question of standards; the Ministry of Education still has to reconcile unyielding demand for public education with limited resources; worse, everyone has an opinion. The easiest way to get any Ghanaian talking for a good hour is to broach the topic of education, we all wax eloquent about what is to be done.

In 1969, the Sukura neighbourhood of Accra was gaining a reputation for crime and squalor even more lugubrious than Nima. Forty years on it is the aptly named Sodom and Gomorrah that takes the prize as Ghana's school of hard knocks, the place you terrify your little kids about the prospect of leaving them there. Of course this is all a matter of perception, the settlement of shantytowns always gives rise to dark hints of nefariousness by the establishment. Drum was firmly of the establishment and would editorialize about the problems of slums, runaway children and other social ills.

Looking towards East Africa, there is a feature about Pope Paul VI's visit to Uganda - and the story of the Ugandan martyrs. This would be juxtaposed with commentary on Mumiani, the legend of death - the blood sucking myths in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. This is about the "ghoulish people who murder for medicinal purposes". The feature recounts the superstition and bloodshed that swept Tanzania in the 1959. The derivation is from "the dark-coloured gum-like substance used by Indians, Arabs and Swahilis as medicine and said to be brought from Persia". Mumiani were viewed as colonial agents so the myth and that kind of mob justice began to fade in the post-colonial era. Our souls were perhaps contemplating other articles of faith.

Society Profiles

Dr Stephen Addae receives a great profile showing off his laboratory work. He was gathering materials and experience for his later opuses The History of Western Medicine in Ghana and The Evolution of Modern Medicine in a Developing Country. These tomes are bibles for historians of science and medicine, I should know, I'm married to one.

Pete Myers, the presenter of the BBC's Good Morning Africa whose "swinging career began in an Accra nightclub", was worth a lengthy treatment as an exemplar of the Ghanaian affinity with cosmopolitanism. Born in India, brought up in Caracas, Venezuela, he moved to Ghana as a teenager. He identified strongly with his Ghanaian associates and loathed the way that other expatriates conducted themselves in the newly independent country.

An interesting tidbit: he became a broadcaster after his friend Smokey Hesse who hosted the 50-minute Jazz Club on Ghana Radio got run over by a bus. He filled in for his friend after that tragedy and came to make a living as a radio presenter. He began to organize Friday discotheque sessions at the Metropole nightclub in the center of Accra, the club rapidly became the center for rock-and-roll and teenage fashion and even inspired mothers to write to the papers that their daughters were being misguided by the "decadence". It bears reminding oneself that Accra used to have a vibrant nightlife.

He went on to direct the Africa's first ever musical, Obradzeng, with sculptor musician Saka Acquaye and Beryl Kari-Kari, dancer and choreographer. After its initial dismissal by Nkrumah, the whole orchestra and 85 dancers were subsequently taken to Russia on one of the Premier's trips. Back in London he started working at the BBC, hoping to change its "colonial mentality" and "the way it talked down to the audience". His efforts were rewarded and the audiences responded to him.

In contrast to Myers' positivity, consider Geoffrey Bing, the former British Labour MP, who became one of Nkrumah's confidants, first as a constitutional adviser and subsequently as his Attorney General. He of course helped pass "the obnoxious Preventive Detention Act which came to rob Ghana of some of her best brains - it killed the celebrated Dr. J.B. Danquah". Unable to bring authoritarian socialism to Britain, he was glad to have an African playground to test out his ideas. A man who always operated in the shadows, we should compare him perhaps to those faceless European advisers to Idi Amin in the 1970s. After being thrown out of the country as a result of Nkrumah's overthrow, he would head home. Despite his fawning 1968 memoirs, his attempts to return to the political scene in Britain came to naught in 1969.

Baba Yara, Ghana's greatest footballer, the "King of Wingers of West Africa" would die on May 5, 1969 after sustaining a spinal injury in a lorry accident at Kpeve in 1963, three months of treatment at Stoke Mandeville hospital had done nothing to improve his health - nor had the local prophet healer, who had offered his services once he returned to Ghana, been successful. Thus his last six years of life were spent bedridden. Asante Kotoko, the Real Republikans and, of course, the national team, the Black Stars had suffered a grievous loss. The scenes commemorating his life leap off the page.

Born in Kumasi on October 12, 1936, it was in 1955, his debut year for the national team that he wore the number 7 jersey of the Gold Coast team which massacred Nigeria by 7-0 at the Accra Sports Stadium. Yara scored two goals and was the architect of four of the seven. Decades later his legend as a fearsome attacker is as glowing as say that of the magic hands of goalkeeper Robert Mensah. Those who saw him play wax rhapsodic to this day, my uncle Emma has been known to go on for a good hour about that golden era and those stars. The Baba Yara sports stadium in Kumasi is a testament to his memory.

There's an interesting profile of the great Ghanaian nationalist John Mensah Sarbah, born on June 3 1864, who died on November 6 1910. A lawyer he was the first native of the Gold Coast to qualify as a fully fledged barrister-at-Law. He argued against the obnoxious Lands Bill of 1897 which would have placed all public Lands in the Colony under the Colonial Government. It was never passed after legal argument and petitions to Queen Victoria. He waived his retainer for that case saying "I seek no reward in serving the land of my birth" He wrote a treatise on The Fanti Customary Laws in 1897 and the Fanti National Constitution in 1906. The great hall at University of Ghana Legon is named after him in his memory for his educational works. This included his founding of the Fanti Public Schools Limited which eventually became the present Mfantsipim School in Cape Coast. He designing the school's crest and its motto "Dwen hwe kwan - think ahead of time".

There's all that and more - like any society magazine Drum was sometimes shallow, other times profound and even on occasion sublime. Consider this a profile of a country in transition, between military rule and democracy, full of hope and navigating between tradition and modernity.

Ghana is headed to elections in the coming weeks and, from the outside, much of the discourse is akin to that seen here in 1969: great promise amidst reminders of just how far we have to go. I can only hope that my fellow countrymen take heed of those who paved the way for them and remember the words of John Mensah Sarbah: think ahead of time.

File under: Ghana, Africa, Drum, magazine, media, culture, politics, history, observation, photography, fashion, 1969, memory, toli

Maxwell's Suite

2008-10-29T02:40:00.006-07:00

For the record, the best $3.13 I've ever spent was for a copy of Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite in May 1996 dug out of a remainder bin in a dusty record store (now defunct) in Davis Square in Somerville, Massachusetts. I remember very clearly looking at the cover and deciding to buy the record on the sole basis of the title, thinking to myself: this is surely some soul music. I was 9 months into my first job and this was the first bit of whimsy I had indulged in all that time, the first thing I had bought for myself beyond bare necessities in all those months. For some silly reason I had worked myself into a state of thrift, subsisting at times on those "bags of burgers" that were the rage at McDonalds - 10 cheeseburgers for something like $4. Well I digress, we'll tackle that toli later... I remember also the look of interest as the guy at the counter rang up my purchase: "Looks like some soul, let me know what you think of it".

When I got to my room, I found the turntable, played the record and discovered that I was in possession of some exceptional soul music, a suite, a trip. This was a new voice that demanded attention, someone I would be proselytizing for even if he wouldn't need it. Looking at the credits I read names that gave me further comfort: Stuart Matthewman of Sade looked to be a key collaborator. Amp Fiddler and Wah Wah Watson were among the musical cast. I dug the voice, I dug the production values, I dug the sound, I dug the message, I dug the execution.

A mood lifted by the time I wore out the needle on the turntable that day. My immediate favourites were Til The Cops Come Knockin' and Lonely's The Only Company; I could identify with the vague longing and perhaps sense of obsession — young adults. Lots of things were resolved to the sounds of the album in the next few months. For one I decided to buy a cd player, that I deserved to have more than that gray room, that — well, lots of things you know.

I returned to the store a few days later to buy a cd copy and gave my report to the guy. We listened and talked our way through the album, talked music like those who share our affliction do - for example comparing Maxwell to that other guy, D'Angelo, who seemed hungrier. If they would be MJ and Prince in coming years, we wondered who would be their Madonna. The guy was an R&B traditionalist and kept trying to get me to buy that Brian McKnight album - I kept demurring, that thrift thing. Then he played New Moon Daughter for me and I kicked myself for having been so out of touch that I'd missed out on the release of a new Cassandra Wilson album. I decided to try to do a guest show at WHRB, to get back into things.

So.

There I was about to simply review the concert I attended last night and all of these things came out.

Music is like that. It's a social thing, conveying a sense of time, of place and of comfort. It triggers memories. It's that thing we call soul. I could go on about the vicissitudes of that year, about Boston, about friends and family, about jobs, the travails of finding an apartment and more. All those things came flashing back. I won't though. I'll simply note an album that was part of that year's soundtrack, a mood marker. And I'll hold on to that detail: the album cost $3.13 after tax.

So yes, The Cousin and I were warmed by Maxwell and his 10 piece band last night at the Paramount in Oakland. Escapism from the work week for 3,000 or so souls. It was well worth it. It was, to recycle that phrase I've become fond of, a comfort suite.

I'll leave the detailed reviews to others. It was a great show like all others in this tour. The horn section gave an organic feel, the guitars and bass were just right, the percussion was on point, the background vocalist gave nice accents. Briefly stated, the band is tight. When you think about Maxwell, don't just think of the man, the band is as important as the front man. All of them are enjoying the comeback and the overwhelming love from the audiences.

They played most of the favourites from his songbook and previewed a few new songs. His falsetto is still as pure as ever, he can do the Sam Cooke thing when he wants, or the Prince thing, or the Al Green thing, or the Marvin Gaye circa 1974 thing. There's the dancing and showmanship ala James Brown, he's no longer as skinny obviously, but he still gets down. If he was Mr Mellow Smooth in the past, there's now an additional edge to the performance and to the sound. There's now some experiential blues in his brand of soul. He still thinks in terms of suites, of capturing a mood, and will run with that feeling through its course.

Most of all there's the warm feeling in the music - it's like that groundswell that builds when Maze featuring Frankie Beverly come onstage in D.C.. It's in the crowd too - everyone knows the lyrics and wants to be seduced anew. By the time he got to covering Al Green's Simply Beautiful, he was simply making his intentions explicit. Call it melodious melodies or sensual soul - to pick titles of mix tapes I've made featuring Maxwell.

The ladies in the audience were all captivated. The panties were thrown on stage. The atmosphere was headier than a Robin Thicke concert. As expected, The Cousin paid me no mind throughout the concert, absorbed as she was in the aura like many others in the audience. I laughed at some of the scandalous things that those two women in front were screaming. It wasn't just nostalgia however, the music was truly that good. This Woman's Work made me tear up, Ascension (Don't Ever Wonder) hit the soul spot. Sumthin' Sumthin' got us dancing. Lifetime made us sigh. What more could you want on a Tuesday night?

Seven years is a long time out of the limelight but brother man delivered the goods. He's back. The demons are conquered. It was worth it. There'll be more suites in the near future and everyone is on notice that he'll be setting the bar high for all to follow. I'm expecting the same elation when that other guy finally resurfaces but for now, pound for pound, Maxwell's a heavyweight soul champion.

File under: music, soul, concert, review, Maxwell, memory, life, observation, toli

Mindless Speculation

2008-10-26T22:54:00.008-07:00

I. Geopolitics

The fellow with the fufu usually moves over to the man with the soup, never the other way around.

— Elechi Amadi, The Great Ponds

This delightful Nigerian saying distills a lot of economic insight - and it translates quite well even if you've never had the pleasure of eating fufu and light soup. It's a folk lesson that is learned very early in human life and certainly ingrained by the time you master the hard knocks of school playgrounds - or streets as the case may be. Gil Scot-Heron once phrased the sentiment as "all consumers know that when the producer names the tune the consumer has got to dance".

In times of crisis, economists talk about the "flight to quality" or deleveraging; political scientists, in turn, form models about the calculus of power relations. It's not quite a matter of rats and sinking ships but it surely comes down to the perception that the pepper soup would greatly enhance a depleted stock of pounded yams, cassava or plantain fufu.

Anecdotally, we then start reading articles about Americans (belatedly) trying to find jobs in the Middle East

Europeans in investment banking and other financial fields already have been flocking to the oil-flush Persian Gulf for months, propelled by the hope that emerging economies of the East will ride out any global recession better than New York or London. In a phrase often cited by British brokers and bankers, "it's Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai, or goodbye."

This is at the level of the individual response but presumably this phenomenon extends to the societal scale. Tribes, companies, and countries the world over are now searching for soup.

These days, the men with the soup - or capital, or cash, or credit, or liquidity, or savings, or solvency if you prefer, ostensibly live in places where phrases like "sovereign wealth", "nation of savers", "oligarchy" or "oil producers" are bandied around. If they are called to finance bailouts, they might well extract their pounds of flesh - to continue on the metaphorical route. And yet that is the crux of the matter: who is going to finance bailouts and on what terms?

Warren Buffet is a happy shopper and is very exacting with the terms he demands before deploying his checkbook. Japan's Mitsubishi banking group almost caused Henry Paulson to go into cardiac arrest when it started renegotiating the terms of its proposed bailout of Morgan Stanley. Iceland, to take the other obvious example, was even negotiating with Russia for its bailout before others finally stepped in - the price of Russian army bases on the soil of a NATO member is too high apparently.

Negotiations are always tricky things of course, but when you have the soup you have the benefit of knowing that others will come to you. In this respect the most poignant geopolitical maneuvering has been pointed out by Bernhard of Moon of Alabama and it concerns China and Taiwan.

Item: Selling Out Taiwan To Finance The Bailout

"The Chinese president also praised the good momentum of the development of the Sino-U.S. ties in recent years in various areas.

He said China is ready to work with the U.S. side to intensify dialogue, exchanges and cooperation, and properly handle issues concerning mutual interests and of major concern, particularly the Taiwan question, in a bid to push forward the sustained and steady development of the Sino-U.S. constructive and cooperative ties."

Translated from diplo-speech: "Give us Taiwan and you'll get the loan."

Dig: the reaction was swift

Regulators in Taiwan ordered insurers to limit their holdings of Freddie, Fannie, and Ginnie Mae paper...

The Taiwanese also have some soup they can withhold it appears. These are fascinating times for geopolitics, everything is being laid bare.

When confronted with empty bowls and covered pots, you really start to wonder if indeed there is any soup available. More to the point: who's got the soup?

II. Estate Planning

Apropos the notion of death and taxes I was thinking recently about the sad and tragic death of Kenneth Lay, former CEO and erstwhile looter of Enron. I was reminded of the mindless speculation about its timing, for indeed, from some points of view, it was a very convenient death for his estate, coming as it did after his fraud conviction but, and this is crucial, before his sentencing, which meant that said conviction was abated - and the prospect of punitive damages and restitution to those who suffered at his hands disappeared in a coronary heartbeat - or lack thereof. Of course one shouldn't begrudge his family in their time of loss for the consequent beneficial preservation of capital. Still it would have been good to be able to hear his expert opinion on the current "global financial crisis" (as the BBC have branded the current mood - sidenote: the Motley Fool term it Panic 2008) and speculate as to its causes...

The mind is a funny thing and I then remembered the part of The Godfather II where Robert Duvall's Tom Hagen pays a visit to Michael Gazzo's weary Frank Pentangel on a military base and reminisces about the old school Roman solution for unsuccessful conspirators. The good soldier subsequently took those musings to heart. That scenario is the kind of thing that only happens in fictional movies - even if these days people worryingly encourage it in their anger. Moving right along...

Along the same lines, the always astute Floyd Norris was indulging in some mindless speculation himself recently

If Congress takes no action in 2009, the estate tax will fall to zero in 2010, and then bounce back to 2001 levels in 2011. That would create what the Tax Policy Center report, written by Leonard E. Burman, Katherine Lim and Jeffrey Rohaly, delicately calls "grotesque tax planning initiatives." What they mean is that there would be a great temptation to do in dear old (very rich) dad before midnight on Dec. 31, 2010.

There hasn't been much remorse among those who have made out like bandits in the bubble years, it seems however that the gig is up - or at least, pace the observation about who now has the soup, that the shell game will have different winners in the near term.

One starts to wonder what will get in the head of the dissolute offspring of modern day aristocrats when they contemplate the prospect of ill-gotten gains disappearing by fiat as the mandated clawback (albeit a quite lenient clawback) begins. It is quite fitting that those who thrived on moral hazard might find themselves targets of the ineluctable financial logic of perverse incentives. Time will tell, I suppose, if this idle speculation has any grounding.

On a slightly related note I was reminded of the following poem

Lord Finchley

Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric light
Himself.
It struck him dead: and serve him
right!
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.

— Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Verses

Periodically the social compact that Belloc identified a century ago is forgotten - that is the realm of trickle down economics. When The Masters receive their comeuppance, the reaction is not necessarily one of class warfare - everybody knows their place in society, but rather it is a distinct lack of sympathy for those who fall from grace. A debacle prompted by overblown real estate leads, as it were, to some furious estate planning.

III. A Pepper Soup Soundtrack

DJ Palm Butta - Fufu N Soup
The message delivered in this cheeky Liberian hiplife reworking of the Chicken Noodle Soup fad is clear: "with some okro on the side... that fufu and soup is sweet". True enough, we live in an era of microwave fufu, but even with such modern conveniences, we also need some soup. It goes without saying that Palm Butta also has the follow up track Cook My Pepper Soup which dives into the heart of the matter.
Eastern Ministers Guitar Band - Uwa Tuto Uwa Fufu
As discussed at the indispensible Likembe, the literal translation of the title is "The World is Sweet and Painful", the fufu of the the title is perhaps the pain, the soup is the sweet.
Digable Planets - The Art of Easing
You had to be there perhaps, but if you flowed with the vibe that was the Blowout Comb album, you'd know all about the art of easing, of laying back in the cut.
James Brown - Escape-ism
Some hot sauce to go with some hot pants, JB delivered wisdom in spades
You know when you forget that grits is... when you forget that grits is groceries and that eggs is poultry, you lose your thing. Now, you can lose your thing out there wandering around.
Fred Wesley's horns and the various incarnations of the JBs band were the soup to James Brown's fufu.
Donald Byrd - Fufu
Donald Byrd's 1973 album Kofi is one of my favourite in the jazz funk canon. Perhaps the excursions trips to Elmina and the consequent African-inflected rhythms place this music on the funky jazz side of the spectrum. Whether it is the driving soul jazz of The Loud Minority or the intricate interplay of title track or the blowing session that is Fufu, this is simply inspired.

I could listen to this for hours on end and indeed, to harken to another song on the album, I do have Perpetual Love for Byrd's music.

The received wisdom is that it was mindless speculation that got much of the world into our present belt-tightening. As things take on serious notes, one hopes that we can at least comfort ourselves with some mindless speculation. I've made my opening contribution, I await yours.

Let's place this note as part of an occasional series, observers are worried.

File under: observation, economics, culture, decline, fall, USA, bubble, power, politics, toli

Mood Markers

2008-10-11T19:31:00.002-07:00

These three songs and a stanza captured much of my mood over the past week. I wonder, what was your soul therapy?

Winter in America by Gil Scot-Heron and Brian Jackson
The full lyrics paint a picture of decline and fall. A harsh season has arrived early and, from all appearances, doesn't want to leave anytime soon.
People know there's something wrong
Feels just like winter
It's winter in America
Truth is there ain't nobody fighting
Cause nobody knows what to save
I used to mishear that last line as "cause nobody knows what to say" and was glad for the ambiguity: say versus save. Are these pieces of the same thing? Which is preferable: being tongue-tied or overwhelmed? Is it the sound of sirens or the sound of silence that is more disquieting in these time?
Anger in the Nation by Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth
Well the title says it all doesn't it? I'm not normally a believer in ritual humiliation nor indeed the incantation of politics as theater, but I did find solace watching a few investment bank executives squirm under the questionning of US congressmen (notwithstanding the fact that said congressmen have been poor regulators). Thinking about the collateral damage that friends and family have already experienced made me appreciate the spectacle of these small discomforts and the promise of more to come. Of these small things are made comfort suites.
All Your Goodies Are Gone by Parliament
The languid rhythm of the track belies the message namely "Let hurt put you in the loser's seat". A essential soundtrack for anyone who deals with the stock market in the year 2008.
Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberly is often cited as the great anti-war lament, I rather harken to his characterization of moneyed charlatans and the damage they do
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;

usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
Perhaps the silver lining of the current moment will be some good art. I certainly look forward to it.

Next: Heart of Darkness, a playlist

File under: music, quotes, culture, observation, decline, fall, anger, economics, USA, toli

Sunday Night with Amel Larrieux

2008-09-24T21:56:00.004-07:00

Soul singers seem to dig Oakland. Something about the city's vibe resonates with them. Their appreciation is always reciprocated and audiences move rapidly from laidback contemplation to active engagement. Somehow I managed to catch Amel Larrieux and her five piece band last Sunday night in performance at Yoshi's in Oakland. Thus I can share a few notes on a comfort suite...

An electric bass guitar begins warbling, sounding something like an ethereal sitar by the time Amel walks on stage. She hums and launches into a warm acoustic rendition of Morning, the title track of her most focused album. Right out of the gate her voice grabs you as if to say "Pay attention. Get ready for some soul music". She doesn't intend to leave anything on the stage.

Trouble, is done Latin style with, as is typical in her live performances, an impromptu ending in which she starts scatting with abandon. "Louis Armstrong", she later explains, "All those years trying to be like you". She adds, "Lena Horne too". Well she's a singer's singer, it stands to reason that she has impeccable taste.

Giving Something Up is a bassy funk groove overlaid with increasingly abstract vocal stylings as it progresses, the arrangement is a mixture of jazz, soul and hip hop. Then almost improbably she breaks into Amazing Grace - a song that has never been done in this mode, urgent futuristic blues. How, the listener wonders, can a song contains such multitudes, rendered so seamlessly?

All I Got is an effortless follow up, a march reflecting on our condition. The refrain is all about the set upon (when she sings the passing lyric "slapped down a racist fool", those darker than blue in the Oakland audience respond knowingly). It's about standing strong and living without expecting any big bailout or "helping hand" as she sings: "this is all I got" indeed. As she riffs on the economic climate, "we're thoroughly spent... our credit's jacked up", there is complete empathy with the five piece band. They follow her on that the long walk with those worn shoes.

She gives a stately take on Magic and the zingers are fired rapidly: "still paying for your education when you're sixty six". Again the chorus is revelatory: "stress level's high and the morale's low". It's a blues for our time done with minimalist instrumentation. She ends with a turn as a choir director enlisting the audience in three part harmony. This kind of crowd participation is fun: we all need to "tap into that magic" to overcome our subprime present. Indeed that has been the theme of the whole concert, acknowledging what is going on in the world and finding humour to deal with it. Amel is an unpretentious artist, she makes everyone feel at home. It doesn't hurt that she's very easy to look at, the word chic describes her clothes and the long hair is doing all the right things.

A cheer of recognition greets the start of For Real, the ballad being one of the perennial fan favourites. With deft piano playing in the background, she floats into the upper registers displaying her Minnie Riperton credentials. After welcoming a a few bars from a guest soprano in the audience, she takes over. Her vocal control is breathtaking. Game, set and match, I'd say. To top it off she provides three or four different takes of the song - live remixes on stage. I'm always interested in the way singers manage to keep their trademark songs alive; somehow Amel always comes up with new arrangements subscribing to the jazz improvisation aesthetic. The jazz inclination will keep her in good stead with her audience.

We Can Be New is a warm poem, a melodious ballad very beautifully sung and ends with a reggae tinge. It must be the band's trademark to provide full glimpses of her range and musical comfort zone.

She debuts a new song, Have You?, a lover's lament peppered with humourous lyrics "I've mixed denim with whites, have you?". By this stage we are all spellbound. The elements of her appeal are simple: sympathetic piano, the light accents of her backup singer (Amira) and a singer at her peak. Amel is in full effect.

Then I almost died of joy: she sang Gills and Tails - my favourite song, the very definition of virtuosity. The vocal performance is wonderful; what the professionals would call her cry is a thing to behold. It's emotional, it's cerebral, it's quietly devastating. It's everything I like in soul music.

Wild is the Wind from her album of standards, shrewdly titled Lovely Standards, is done as a homage to Nina Simone. It's just her and the piano player; she has got the audience clinging to her every note. As the song starts to wind down she brings in the rest of the band and they add a dance groove - whoa, she can do house music, what can't she do? - the groove then morphs into Dear to me. House music man, just for the heck of it. She took a jazz standard, did it with flair and, just to show how fearless she is, she gives you some house. I give up, I'm joining the street team, Amel.

As if she read my mind, she then covers Prince's Pop Life, it's a party pure and simple - she reminisces about the Purple Rain to Parade Revolution era of His Royal Badness (she notes that she even digs Tambourine! claiming by this revelation membership in that purple secret society) and talks about the rush she got performing Take Me With You with Kamal the Abstract a couple of weeks ago.

She closes with two crowd favourites: Get up, the monster club hit from Bravebird and Tell Me (from her Groove Theory beginnings). We're all dancing and singing along. It's a celebration. There's a community feeling. We'll be holding our head high in the weeks to come, smiling on Manic Mondays and Black Tuesdays, lifted above the fray, fortified by some soul music, a soundtrack to our struggles, "this great Mountain of When". This is her thing, this is what she does best: two ninety minute sets, three nights in a row in an intimate jazz venue. Every show sold out, the audience in the palm of her hand, the soul singer performs. Amel Larrieux has done it again.

File under: music, soul, review, concert, live, jazz, virtuosity, Amel Larrieux, toli

A Seminal Lunacy

2008-09-16T21:50:00.004-07:00

No one was responsible for the great Wall Street crash. No one engineered the speculation that preceded it. Both were the product of the free choice and decision of hundreds of thousands of individuals. The latter were not led to the slaughter. They were impelled to it by the seminal lunacy which has always seized people who are seized in turn with the notion that they can become very rich.

— The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith

I was reading Galbraith's tome last summer in an attempt to clear my thinking about bubbles and their typical aftermath. Later in his life Galbraith would cover financial euphoria more closely, but here it was all about its counterpart: the crash. He surely had a twinkle in his eye as he made his felicitous coinage of "seminal lunacy", lowering the reader's guard before proceeding to skewer at will. The book was a tonic for him to write and it is accordingly a tonic to read.

News headlines are replete with mantras about sound fundamentals, healthy economies that are resilient, innovations that are safe, disruptions that are contained and so forth. On this trend he had some cutting observations:

By affirming solemnly that prosperity will continue, it is believed that one can help insure that prosperity will in fact continue. Especially among businessmen the faith in the efficiency of such incantation is very great.

Stated another way, this is merely a tactic for dealing with ignorance.

That much of what was repeated about the market - then as now - bore no relation to reality is important, but not remarkable. Between human beings there is a type of intercourse which proceeds not from knowledge, or even from lack of knowledge, but from failure to know what isn't known. This was true of much of the discourse on the market.

It is often effective.

We are a polite and cautious people, and we avoid unpleasantness.

Social beasts that we are, we follow the herd.

Others pointed out that the prospects for business were good and that the stock market debacle would not make them any less favorable. No one knew, but it cannot be stressed too frequently, that for effective incantation knowledge is neither necessary nor assumed.

There is perhaps an echo of Walter Bagehot's observation in Lombard Street

Every great crisis reveals the excessive speculations of many houses which no one before suspected.

We have the spectre of bemused and gray suited serious technocrats making pronoucements with great alacrity. And a wary public begins to ask whither regulation. But that is by the by

One of the oldest puzzles in politics is who is to regulate the regulators. But an equally baffling problem, which has never received the attention it deserves, is who is to make wise those who are required to have wisdom.

The great crash, like other seminal lunacies, caused much revision of the conventional wisdom.

What six months before had been a brilliant financial maneuver was now a form of fiscal self-immolation. In the last analysis, the purchase by a firm of its own stock is the exact opposite of the sale of stocks. It is by the sale of stock that firms ordinarily grow.

There are likely many contemporary equivalents to the deficiencies pointed out about buying your own stock. Modern finance has been shown to favour opacity over transparency and the consequent costs are mounting.

Looking forward we can expect lots of hearings, meetings and busy work. Politicians shown to have been asleep at the wheel will now demand answers.

The rite of the meeting which is called not to do business but to do no business... one of the oldest, most important - and unhappily, one of the least understood - rites in American life.

Action is the theme of the day

Men meet together for many reasons in the course of business. They need to instruct or persuade each other. They must agree on a course of action. They find thinking in public more productive or less painful than thinking in private. But there are at least as many reasons for meetings to transact no business. Meetings are held because men seek companionship or, at a minimum, wish to escape the tedium of solitary duties. They yearn for prestige which accrues to the man who presides over meetings, and this leads them to convoke assemblages over which they can preside. Finally there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action.

When histories are written about our present disillusionment they will surely read like Galbraith's summary of the reasons behind the crash:

In 1929 the economy was fundamentally unsound...
the bad distribution of income... highly unequal income distribution meant that the economy was dependent on a high level of investment or a high level of luxury consumer spending or both...
the bad corporate structure... the vast new structure of holding companies and investment trusts...
the bad banking structure...
the dubious state of the foreign balance...
the poor state of economic intelligence

By harkening to "fundamentally unsound" and ending with a note about "economic intelligence", Galbraith puts the knife in Herbert Hoover and others of his ilk.

It requires neither courage nor prescience to predict disaster. Courage is required of the man who, when things are good, says so. Historians rejoice in crucifying the false prophet of the millenium. The never dwell on the mistake of the man who wrongly predicted Armageddon.

There are lots of emotions when it comes to finance, concern chief among them. During a crash or panic, emotions turn darker and this can be a perilous time.

Despite a flattering supposition to the contrary, people come readily to terms with power. There is little reason to think that the power of the great bankers, while they were assumed to have it, was much resented. But as the ghosts of numerous tyrants, from Julius Caesar to Benito Mussolini will testify, people are very hard on those who, having had power, lose it or are destroyed. Then anger at past arrogance is joined with contempt for present weakness. The victim or his corpse is made to suffer all available indignities.

And a parting warning for those erstwhile masters:

One trouble with being wrong is that it robs the prophet of his audience when he most needs it to explain why.

Shell games do have costs.

A brief soundtrack

Ralph Tresvant - It's Goin' Down
Public Enemy - Shut 'Em Down (Pete Rock Mix)
The best remix ever. Period.
Abbey Lincoln - Down Here Below
Abbey sings it best: "the winds of change are blowing through the weary night".

File under: economics, zingers, quotes, observation, culture, bubble, panic, depression, crash, credit, finance, Galbraith, USA, literature, toli

Bite-sized

2008-08-26T23:25:00.003-07:00

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.

— Saki, The Comments of Moung Ka

It's so convenient when one can tell the truth.

— Graham Greene, Travels with my aunt

Honesty hath no fence against superior cunning.

— Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

It is always a relief to believe what is pleasant, but it is more important to believe what is true.

— Hilaire Belloc, The Silence of the Sea

These clippings from some recent reading were meant to anchor a number of pieces I've been working on. It struck me however that the verbiage that I might have attached didn't add much, and the plain juxtaposition of these bite-sized pearls sufficed. The first two statements, weighing the expedience of honesty, are paradoxically uttered by notorious dissemblers in the context of the stories in which they appear. Saki and Greene's mouthpieces share their author's sense of irony. In contrast Swift and Belloc are more satirical. [Insert disclaimer: we've all learned that honesty is the best policy.]

He was as American as folding money and waging war.

— George Pelecanos, The Night Gardener

He liked his epiphanies American: brief and illusory.

— Colson Whitehead, Apex hides the hurt

These last musings on America, by two of the sharpest and hungriest current wordsmiths, seem a little bleak and capture a certain malaise about the country. In the same book (it's nothing too weighty incidentally, and hopefully his next novel will have a greater impact), Colson Whitehead adds this choice piece of cynicism:

It was a good place to make a bad decision, and in particular, a bad decision that would affect a great many people.

I think I'd call this Blues 2.0 - we might as well add a version number to the sentiment.

Soundtrack: Me'Shell NdegéOcello - Elliptical

Taken from an album with the paradoxical title The world has made me the man of my dreams, this is one of the most fluid musical movements I've heard in the past couple of years.

File under: zingers, quotes, observation, culture, perception, literature, honesty, strategy, toli

Lunchtime Heist

2008-03-07T01:32:00.006-08:00

Something didn't look right. There he was on his hands and knees in the corner next to the ATM ten feet inside the burger joint. It gave you a little pause but you thought you'd proceed regardless. Someone at the front table was muttering something to him, the sounds lost amidst his chewing. Your bag got stuck in the doorway and, by the time you got unstuck, he had gotten up, turned around and was now facing you as you entered. 2:15 was later than normal for you, the upside was that you had missed the lunchtime rush: the place was a little empty.

For whatever reason you looked him up and down and took in the rest slowly. It didn't feel right. A gray hat haphazardly lay atop his head. A jacket: not quite a technician's jacket, nor even a UPS jacket, more like a fashion piece. You looked downwards as he stepped towards you. His hand brought up a bag from behind, he was gripping it tightly. You'd seen the money bags that the couriers use - this was the financial district after all, you see the couriers all over downtown San Francisco. This wasn't a regular bag. Puzzling.

And of course there was the sheepish grin that he was sporting. That definitely looked out of place. No gun that you could see... Still you dismissed your impulse to tackle him. "Whatever, you're imagining things." You walked past him towards the counter. He nodded imperceptibly as you crossed - still smiling you noted, and began to walk out.

As you made your way to the front counter, you continued to put it all together. "Must be missing something. Didn't look like a technician, nor a armored car courier... Surely he won't walk out of here just like that. Wasn't holding a gun, but could he? Why the smile? Anyway let me order."

Just in case, you tried to fix his features in your memory, late forties, brown hair beginning to gray, white guy, looked a little like Chevy Chase. You wondered if you'd make a good witness.

"May I take your order please."
"The special. No drinks... Hmm..."

You figured you should vocalize something about your disquiet. "Umm ... The guy..", you gesture. "Umm, the ATM.. the machine. Umm"

You turned and looked back to the front of the restaurant and noticed that the guy had indeed walked out. Oh well. Then the clincher: the ATM didn't quite look right. You turn towards the server and begin again: "Umm... The guy..."

Someone appeared by your side, impatient and loudly put the words out there:

"You know that someone just robbed your ATM machine."

That's it, that's what didn't look right. The bottom half of the ATM had swung out into the lane. The cheek of it, he even left the door open. You gesture. The newcomer repeated his words:

"You know that someone just robbed your ATM machine."

The woman taking your order was a little perplexed at first - perhaps it was the language barrier. She was also a little annoyed. The two men in front of her were departing from her script. You remained tongue-tied but Citizen Alert proceeded to spew out the details. Eventually, as he got no response, he asked, "Call the manager." She gestured to the manager and the other servers and grunted a name. Then:

"May I help who's next?"

You never quite liked that awkward formulation, surely she could have said "whoever's next" but the grammar pedant in you, let alone the intrigued potential crime witness, decided to step aside. Your order would be ready in a few minutes.

"Next."

You shuffled to the side and turned to look again at the front of the restaurant. Those now entering the restaurant all raised their eyebrows as they passed the evidently-open ATM. An alarming sight you assumed. You'd never seen the inside of an ATM before - well perhaps on the way out. A few diners started pointing towards the ATM but on the whole, there there was a lot of apathy in this joint. Perhaps it was the time of day, perhaps everyone needed a siesta. Or maybe it was just the nature of the place. Lee's is a tad above a McDonalds but it isn't quite a gourmet Barneys. Well you get what you pay for. You decided to take things in.

The manager eventually sauntered out from behind the counter and walked towards the front, chatting all the time on his cell phone. The newcomer accosted him, as did a few others: amplifying and explaining their consternation. The manager didn't seem impressed and continued his phone conversation. Minutes passed and a little group formed around the ATM bending down and examining it. One guy kept saying "ATM machine" and this again bothered you: you thought "machine" was redundant given the acronym. Eventually someone decided to call the police.

Your order arrived, you picked it up, thanked the server and walked over to the gathering at the front. You wanted to get a look at the ATM. Well, who knew?

You wondered how the robber managed to open the ATM and how long he'd been fiddling with it. Did he have a key or tools?

You heard someone say "He must have been a technician."

At that you smiled and shook your head. You said to no one in particular, "He just walked out with a bag of money and left the ATM open! Come on now."

You wondered how many other joints the robber would be targeting. It was a pretty brazen heist but it worked. The managers would be like the present one - unconcerned since the ATM had nothing to do with them. The clientèle would likely be as lethargic as today's version and, well, no one would be a hero. Indeed you were one of the few people who noticed anything anomalous or could have even attempted to stop it. Of course you didn't, proving the point.

You wrote your name and number on a sheet of paper and gave it to the manager in case the police cared - you didn't have time to hang around for them. Four or five others claimed to have gotten a good look at the guy and they all looked excited about their brush with notoriety. As you reached the office a few blocks away you started to hear the sirens.

You've been hibernating for the past few months; perhaps you too have been behaving like everyone in the restaurant: quiet and simply minding your own business. You need to get back into things, find your voice again. Don't let others just walk all over you and snatch your soul. Come on now.

You passed by the joint the next day and noticed that the ATM was no longer there. You kicked yourself for not having photographed the open ATM. You went to another lunch place. The sign was still outside however: ATM inside.

Soundtrack for this note

Nas - Thief's Theme

File under: life, crime, heist, theft, brazen, apathy, San Francisco, toli

Timepieces

2007-12-08T14:38:00.001-08:00

I present the following item from the Remembrance of Rogues Past collection: a campaign watch for the YEAA '98 campaign, namely the Youth Energetically Advocating Abacha shell organization that supposedly was spontaneously formed to campaign for that suffocating, murderous and dictatorial rogue, General Sani Abacha — late, unlamented and so forth.

I'm a avid collector of this kind of historical artifact and you'll sometimes find me bidding for a mint copy of the Franco sings for Mobutu album, to take a recent example and different rogue (quite a good album actually). The Abacha watch, while in the mode of praise singers and sycophants, is not your standard piece of dictator chic, it's much more functional and thus perhaps more insidious. In any case, it's worth some brief notes.

Back in the twilight zone of military rule in Nigeria circa 1998, it appeared that the dictator was feeling some pressure to make gestures towards democracy. The response was of course to think about how to hand over to himself, accordingly he devised lots of gestures. Having outlawed all organized opposition, the general decided to organize two approved political parties, "one a little to the left and the other a little to the right". Manifestos and constitutions were written, ostensible political philosophies were crafted and so forth, all by the military. The remaining question was who would lead these newfangled parties and there were any number of sycophants auditioning for the right to head these organic parties sometime in the future, if indeed elections would ever be held.

This is where the Youth Energetically Advocating Abacha came in.

The first order of business, as if this stage managing wasn't enough, was to start a whisper campaign urging both parties to nominate said dictator as their flagbearer. When more than whispers were needed, YEAA was to be the public face of the campaign, ready to whip naysayers into place. The idea was to coronate Abacha and win by acclamation the nomination from both of the parties a little to the left and right. A man of the people, he simply wanted to underlie that the youth wanted him to serve them and, moreover, that they were energetic — an obvious warning to anyone who might oppose the general. The thought was that he would face off with himself in new elections and succeed himself, or something of the sort - the main point was to hold elections.

On the one hand these actions were crude and ridiculous, on the other, they are simply sad. Whenever I look at the watch I think to the whole contingent of lobbyist firms, replete with consultants, who came up with the strategy and the inspirational name (Yeah!), the graphic designers called in to design the logo with the arrow and the wheel mechanism (perhaps fitting, for Nigeria under Abacha was on a road to nowhere), the coinage of the snappy slogan, the time spent uploading artwork and discussing typography with the design firm in California, the negotiations with Singapore factories for the production of watches and other insignia (for there were many containers worth of this stuff produced, T-shirts, key tags etc.), the shipments to Nigeria, the distribution of this largess around the country... The watch is like an open wound in the Nigerian body politic, testimony to the workings of a global criminal enterprise.

No one advocated for Abacha unless they were paid. Youth Energetically Advocating Abacha is a simple byword for coercion, cynicism and an illustration of the lengths to which people can go when in the grip of greed. The depressing thing is the sheer energy of this huhudious regime and the scale of the graft (billions of dollars were stolen for sure) — one wonders how many millions were spent on similar minor accoutrements. What a waste but perhaps such is the world of riches.

From all accounts Nigeria is much changed these days and a few of the victims of the regime are even (belatedly) getting their day in court. Perhaps it's best to move on and call this ancient history, perhaps one's outrage should be curtailed; let's leave it for the historians.

For the record, the battery never worked.

II. Measuring Time

Helon Habila in his second novel Measuring Time continues to make a claim for prominence in the roster of young lions in African literature. Instead of the claustrophobia of Waiting for an Angel (which I recently discussed) he stretches his shoulders and decides to take on entire decades of African history.

His writes in a deceptively simple style and focuses on storytelling. There's no overt lyricism; he'd claim that he is simply channeling the many stories that come to him. Still his is an ambitious agenda and he covers a lot of territory, after all his subject is modernity in Africa and all that means.

The options available to the two twins who tell the story of Measuring Time is a simple statement about Nigerian society. On the one hand, there is life as a mercenary soldier following warlords like Charles Taylor from Chad and Libya to the messy Liberian civil war. For a political junkie like me, this would be enough to focus on for an entire novel, for Habila this is merely interstitial.

On the other hand, the bulk of the book and the other twin's story is about stagnation and making do at home. There is lots of striving but precious little light. Yet the stories of the past need to be told, the politics need be engaged in - however programmatic they may be, the youth need to be taught, we all need to fall in love. There's no time to dance or to succumb to navel gazing. Life has to be lived in full.

In his populist writing mode Helon Habila is perhaps heir to Cyprian Ekwensi whose favourite subject was city life. Like Ekwensi he has a talent for empathy with his characters and draws you in with detailed portraits. He really knows how to capture moments in time. I am also reminded in this novel of another ambitious second novel that packed a lot of ideas albeit in a different genre, Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days. But perhaps we shouldn't tie a talent like Habila to others. He's writing delicate novels of ideas disguised as unvarnished, personal stories of Nigeria; the whole world is his.

III. Wasted Time (a soundtrack)

Me'Shell NdegeOcello - Wasted Time

Wasted Time, my favourite song from her appropriately-titled album, Bitter, finds Me'Shell in a suitably bitter mood. She has an unerring way of capturing an atmosphere in song. Bitterness is a transient emotion but one that is intense when one is in its grip. It's the only vaguely uptempo song of the album, building up the groove slowly as she reflects on a break-up. It's not quite a lament and she hasn't yet resolved the episode. It is a raw meditation on wasted effort. Fittingly the song cuts off abruptly, unsettling the listener. Wasted time never to be recovered.

Update: A good friend sends along a Cambodian twist for the collection: a Dictator Hun Sen "fashion" watch. He notes, "Never tried wearing it. Battery assumed dead".

File under: Nigeria, rogues, Africa, corruption, politics, history, memory, culture, cynicism, literature, toli