africa – Page 6 – Kikuyumoja

an indecent proposal?

Contrary to what you might think, the following question isn’t a delayed april fools joke but instead my very own sunday morning i’ll-need-to-find-a-solution- to-that-car-problem- issue-in-Nairobi brainstorming attempt to figure out how I’ll get decent transport for myself in terms of having the convenience of driving my own car.

My own car? My car is a 1989 VW Golf II I’ve mentioned earlier here and here, and I tell you: BEFORE I sell this beloved gari to any strange Belarussian car dealer for something like EUR 100,- who then sells it to a fat man sitting on his car empire within a free port somewhere in Ghana, West Africa I am way much better off taking my car to Kenya and driving it there till it falls (even more) apart.

Having said that, what about the route?

Would it be possible to drive a car from here to Nairobi? I know it has been done before, so why shouldn’t I do the same? Not necessarily with my current car, maybe an older Mercedes with A/C etc that sells for something like EUR 500,- ….Mzeecedric, any idea? Ati, I know you’re laughing on this, but hey, it’s an adventurous idea, ama?
(Mbuzimoja, we’ll do this in August, yes? Just say yes, eh? :-)

Raphael

…the man was killed here before, by cutted with this pangas into pieces. I got the job because he was killed.

When I hear some robbery, I can just go sloooowly, now will be waiting becos what is needed: don’t shoot him if he is out of the fence. What is needed, you wait him enter in the fence, and then you can shoot him. Inside of the fence.

And if you are heeero, you can even leave him after getting in the fence, you can even leave him and then you wait till you know what he needs to do. Maybe to run with the car, or to take the tyre of the car, or to broke the door to find where’s the cash – then you caaan: shot him.

Therefore, you must be ready for fight.

There’s something to this man called Raphael, a man working as an askari (night guard) protecting the National Fishing Institute in Hubert Saupert’s award-winning documentary “Darwin’s nightmare” (as mentioned earlier), that still fascinates me. What exactly is it? His low and soft voice I’ve seen with so many other askaris before? I don’t know.
What I do know, though, is that this is the best documentary I’ve seen by far.

Simba mwenda kimya ndiye mla nyama.

more on AFT…

Various hits from blogafrica.com today (thx, afroM!), which included a very nice audio stream of an Ali Farka Touré & Toumani Diabaté performance via (the feed of) "Imagens de África", made me realize that I also still have some bootleg recordings of an Ali Farka Touré live performace I downloaded some years ago with the (now defunct?) ethnobeat yahoo group (thx, Araceli).

Now, since Poxi Presha would definitely hate me for publishing anything copyrighted (yes, Bwana PP, we appreciate your battle and you’re not yet forgotten!), and since the music is (fortunately) available for purchase as well as streamable via The Hype Machine (Toure, Touré), let me please link to these live recordings FIY only.

Ali Farka Touré – Live1
Ali Farka Touré – Live2
Ali Farka Touré – Live3

Yani, I don’t know what YOU do when there’s Blues music around, but let me tell you: the first thing I did this morning was to grab my guitar and (trying to :-) play along with AFT & BT.
Again, le monde est fait pour qu’on s’aime. How true…

n.b.: …listening to these live recordings and the almost hypnotising "reiteration" of tunes, I am reminded of a great concert two years ago with Abaji (Lebanon) and Boubacar Traoré (Mali) playing together. Unfortunately, we will never be able to hear Ali Farka Touré playing together with…well…the Dagar Brothers?

UPDATE: Alastair Johnston of muzikfan.com has just published his obituary of Ali Farka Touré. Please don’t miss this…

Au revoir, AFT

"For some people, when you say ‘Timbuktu,’ it is like the end of the world, but that is not true. I am from Timbuktu, and I can tell you we are right at the heart of the world." – Ali Farka Touré

Mama Mshairimoja informed me this morning that Ali Farka Touré, the finest and most spiritual (blues) guitarist & singer from West Africa, died on March 7th, 2006.

He may no longer be among the living, but his music keeps on staying alive and warms my heart with happiness and contentment.
Could there be any better legacy?

Thank you, and have a nice journey.

Why doo piipoll ssing?

They ssing to enta-tain assas…. :-)

(mp3, 587kB)

Congotronics

Mingiedi, leader and likembe virtuoso

More than a year after its initial release on Crammed Discs (label) in January 2005 (true? or was it 2003?), the Congotronics series with Konono N°1 has eventually received my attention.
This beautiful and ingenious arrangement of traditional mbira/likembé/sanza/thumb piano sounds, amplified with hand-made microphones built from magnets salvaged from old car parts, is just the perfect background tune for my research on water & sustainable development in Kenya – a paper that has kept me busy for the last couple of days and thus kept me away from blogging.

The musicians come from an area which sits right across the border between Congo and Angola. Their repertoire draws largely on Bazombo trance music, but they’ve had to incorporate the originally-unwanted distorsions of their sound system. This has made them develop a unique style which, from a sonic viewpoint, has accidentally connected them with the aesthetics of the most experimental forms of rock and electronic music, as much through their sounds than through their sheer volume (they play in front of a wall of speakers) and their merciless grooves. (source)

Just in case you can’t get into this special music, the pictures showing the artists and their methods alone are proof enough that there’s something very special about these guys and the efforts they have spent on getting their music heard.

Yes, that’s a wodden microphone!

AMG’s allmusic review says: Part traditional, part African rhumba, part smart avant-garde electronica, Congotronics is the sound of an urban junkyard band simultaneously weaving the past and the future into one amazingly coherent structure, and not only that, you can dance to it.

Ploum Ploum

Speaking of 1960s & Co, Monsieur Glückauf! today indirectly pointed me to Jean-Marie Boursicot’s Film Library [which] provides a huge database of more than 700 000 commercials. They also have this Gauloises commercial I’ve mentioned the other day.

A country/continent search on "Africa" reveals the following commercials among others:

FIAT 13, une voiture pour homme, une voiture pour toi ! (1970)
(nb: a french commercial with a KENYAN numbaaa plate? :-)

PLOUM PLOUM parfum de Paris (1966)

OMO washes brightest (1965)

SOL, la première lessive bleue (1976) (=OMO?)

BLUE BAND, la margarine bonne mine (1985)

SIMBA, pour une cuisine Zaïroise plus raffinée .(1993)

And a classic 3:15min piece from 1952 for ASPRO (Aspirin®):

(watch his clothing!)

and within another ASPRO commercial from Algeria:

shuukran, Aspro…

Sorry, direct/hot linking of these mpeg files didn’t work – see it as an incentive to take a stroll through this interesting historical library of commercials and make your own picture of how the world has changed during the last 50 years. Well, has it really changed?

The criticism I have is that (I think) people watch these phoney worlds on tv and try to adopt their lifestyle according to what they see. So what about those that orientate themselves and their standard of living on these commercials and yet don’t have the resources to actually compare these tv worlds with reality (in the West)?
Remember those Royco Mchuzi Mix commercials from early 1990s Kenya where all the kids of this posh mid-class family gather round the table, asking mum for another round of spiced chicken ("more please!")? How many families back in those days were actually living that way? And today? Today, it seems, even the hawkers on the streets have a GSM mobile phone. Yes – that’s our Africa. Not (only!) this half-naked guy as seen in the Aspro commercial. Yani, is this still the african Africa or the westernized Africa? Wrong question?

How did this world of Cussons Soap, Smirnoff Vodka, BlueBand Margarine & Royco Mchuzi Mix – as seen on tv – actually affect the lifes of ordinary people?

In the same way (attention, interest, desire, action) it affects people around the globe? Maybe. However, I am sure, recent advertisment campaigns like the following picture of a billboard in Nairobi, Kenya contribute a lot to the economical boom – especially in places where people desperately try to improve their living standard and virtually stick to anything exotic to emphasise their progress on this.

golden afrique

Despite all those indy/alternative/emo/electro/whatever-tunes I normally go for, I am an avid collector of (good!) music from the continent. Not necessarily new stlyes from the West or East – but the Golden Age of 1960s when music was still kick-ass and many African countries busy with celebrating independence (Uhuru!!). Why? I don’t know. It’s just a passion.

Next movie I am almost dying to see, though, will be HIP HOP COLONY!

(pls feel free to check out Kenyan Hip Hop over @ Msanii_XL‘s blog :-)