An African City -- Anyone Who Hasn't Watched

Anyone who hasn't yet watched An African City, should do so immediately.

It is a series of 10 episodes, generally around 14 minutes long, made for the web, featuring 5 young, ambitious, highly educated, upper class, privileged, well-off, diasporic women who grew up in Europe or the U.S., who have for various reasons returned home to Accra and their families, in Ghana.

The clothes alone are worth putting in the time.  But there's more to it than that.  Dialog is snappy, things can get very funny, the women are beautiful.

Some have objected to An African City being called the African Sex and the City, but it is Sex in the City in Accra, intentionally so, complete with the voice-over. However, I am not certain that certain elements are intentional, such as in all or nearly all episodes, short as they are, one of the women will at least verbally 'mean girl' it over a class 'inferior.' On Sex and the City, any character who behaved that way would be recognizable as a Bad Person, not a heroine or protagonist.  If this is intentional, this is presenting a modern African city as a real place, not an exotic fairy tale location, and I applaud the producers, director and writer.

It's interesting from several different directions, not only those of women's friendships, romance, sex, and fashion.  In some ways the most interesting aspect is that the central character, the voice-over narrator is, in the series, the daughter of Ghana's newly appointed Minister of Energy. Think about that .... It's quite like having Dick Cheney, your father, and you too are in the oil business, appointed Vice President in charge of regulating oil sales and military actions. Ghana has lots of oil ....

That's the class level of these women, the sort of class out of which comes Lupita Nyong'o, who played Patsy, in 12 Years a Slave.

They are not like thee and me ....

This is something I find very interesting about this series: how the international obscenely wealthy, no matter what religion, skin color, etc., have far more in common with each other than with thee and me.

I'm not quite sure the series intends to show us this.
Accra, and increasingly in cities like London, NYC, etc., the divide of the citizens are those at the level of wealth of these women, those who serve them, and nothing in-between, with a huge class of starving at the bottom. Lessons for us in the U.S. from this series.

The women in Sex and the City were never anywhere close to the level these women exist on -- but Mr. Big was, and that was the huge attraction of him for Carrie Bradshaw.  Equally telling, for the SatC friends, as for the An African City friends, going to Dubai, that arbitrarily constructed city-size shopping mall-playground for the international wealthy, is one of their criteria of Best Times Evah -- and puleeze, have somebody else pay for the trip and the acquisitions!

The first five episodes are on Free Hulu, and all ten are on YouTube.

MD's Eastern Shore: Oldest Free Black Community in the U.S.?

Dig at Eastern Shore site, built by freed slaves, shows it may be U.S.’s oldest black community -- it may be older than New Orleans's Treme. There's a video that goes with this story from yesterday in the Washington Post, which provides another level of  visual commentary to it worth contemplating.

There is another of these not unusual for Maryland free communities outside of Chestertown, also still inhabited, called Wharton. There's been an archeological explosion of illuminating finds in the last ten - fifteen years of digging down into Maryland and Virginia's soils.

This isn't true only about African American or colonial English history either; there's bits and pieces of Spanish and French history to be found on occasion.  As for the First Peoples of the Chesapeake, there is far more to be found than previously believed could be discovered..

The thing about Talbot County is, it’s rich in history,” said Carlene Phoenix, president of Historic Easton, who lobbied for the neighborhood research. “But when it comes to especially African American history, it was always about slavery. But now we’ve got another story.”

The project researchers found that many Talbot County slaves were freed after the abolitionist Quaker preacher John Woolman came through Easton in 1766, urging fellow Friends to abandon slavery.

Easton sea captain Jeremiah Banning, who personally bought his 21 slaves in Senegal, freed them in his will.

And the researchers came upon the story of a slave, Grace Brooks, who purchased her freedom and that of her children and grandchildren with money she earned as a midwife.

Many of these now-free blacks probably made their way to the Hill, which was fast becoming an island of liberty surrounded by plantations, Green said.

Well, Maryland, after Virginia, was the mother of slavery. But it wasn't all slavery in Maryland, was it?  Which is even more interesting and illuminating to the discovery of our earlier national history.

These communities such as in Easton and Wharton, were instrumental in helping the enslaved escape.  One of those who escaped via such assistance was Frederick Douglass.  His first wife was a free woman of color who lived in this community. In the 1850's these communities were vital to the formation of 'safe houses' along the "Underground Railroad's" route out of Virginia and Maryland, to Philadelphia, New York and New Jersey, and then on to Canada.  (With the Fugitive Slave Act and southern bounty hunters and slave traders forever abducting even free people of color born and bred in the north for sale down south, it wasn't safe for an escapee to stay in the U.S.)

Easton is where we C'towners go on Easter morning for a splendid service of Gospel, followed by a splendid church breakfast.   The church pictured above was originally built by Quakers, and not that much later turned over to African Americans so they too could have a place of worship.

Then there is this response from a reader of the above-linked article that brings more historical information about these free communities:

We have a community here in Staten Island, NY called "Sandy Ground" that was founded by free blacks from the Eastern Shore. We had huge oyster beds and the "Oystermen", who learned their trade in Maryland settled here in the early 1800s. Many of their decendents still live in the area and get together yearly for the Sandy Ground festival. Nice to know the roots of Sandy Ground. Keep digging, history is fascinating!

*Hip Deep Angola* Premieres

The first episode goes up today and will be available at www.afropop.org

It will air on WNYE 91.5 FM in New York Saturday at 11 p.m. and Monday at noon.

You can also hear it (right now) at
http://soundcloud.com/afropop-worldwide/hip-deep-angola-part-1-music

[Sorry -- the photos didn't come through in the press release, cut and pasted below. ]

* * *

PRESS RELEASE 
September 13, 2012 
Afropop Worldwide 
info@afropop.org / 718-398-2733

HIP DEEP ANGOLA TO AIR
FOUR-PART RADIO SERIES BEGINS IN SEPTEMBER

Premiering in September and continuing in four episodes through November, AFROPOP WORLDWIDE’s HIP DEEP ANGOLA will present an unprecedented exploration of the history and contemporary reality of this southern African nation -- a story told in music.

Angola is not an easy place to report from even now, but until recently, it was almost impossible. From 1961 to 2002, it was at war on its own territory, emerging with little in the way of infrastructure. Now, fueled by oil revenues, it’s undergoing a massive national construction project unlike anything else in the world.
Produced by HIP DEEP co-founder Ned Sublette, who traveled to Angola in July, and featuring commentary by leading musicians and distinguished scholars, HIP DEEP ANGOLA will air on public radio stations around the  country via Public Radio International. (In New York City it airs on WNYE, 91.5 FM, on the Saturday following distribution date at 11 p.m., and again on Monday at 12 noon.) It’s available streaming as of the distribution date at www.afropop.org.

1
HIP DEEP ANGOLA 1: MUSIC AND NATION IN LUANDA (distribution: September 13) explores the role music played in the creation of a uniquely Angolan consciousness as the country struggled toward independence in the 1960s and ‘70s after centuries of colonialism. Our guide will be Dr. Marissa Moorman, historian of southern Africa and author of Intonations: A Social History of Music in Luanda, Angola from 1945 to Recent Times.
On the ground in Angola, producer Ned Sublette talks to critic and musicologist Jomo Fortunato, and to guitarist and bandleader Carlos Vieira Dias. We’ll hear the pathbreaking Ngola Ritmos, who dared sing songs in Kimbundu publicly when it was prohibited by the Portuguese. And we’ll hear the voices of Teta Lando, Urbano de Castro, Artur Nunes, and Luis Vizconde, from the age when the guitar-driven style called semba ruled, as well as some snazzy ‘60s guitar instrumentals. We’ll also check in on the new generation of semba, via Paulo Flores and Yuri Da Cunha.

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HIP DEEP ANGOLA 2: 21st CENTURY URBAN ANGOLA: KIZOMBA, KUDURO, AFRO-HOUSE AND BEYOND (distribution: September 27) takes us to  the street in Angola’s dense, smoggy, oil-booming capital city of Luanda. Peace came to Angola in 2002 after forty-two years of war, and now everything is different.
The postwar generation of the last ten years communicates via text-messaging and electronic music. Producer Ned Sublette checks out kuduro (literally, hard-ass) – the high-energy electronic dance music that dominates Luanda today, as well as the the zouk-like couple dance of kizomba, a phenomenon that began in the 80s and still packs in dancers to Luanda clubs, and, on a more underground level, the computer-driven style called Afro-House.
We’ll talk to musicologist Stefanie Alisch, who’s been studying the world of kuduro in Luanda this year; historian Marissa Moorman about kizomba and the early days of kuduro; transgendered whirlwind dancer and rap diva Titica, the first out-gay African music star; 21-year-old superstar Cabo Snoop, whose “Windeck” became a hit via Bluetooth; Coréon Dú, executive producer of the weekly kuduro TV program Sempre a Subir; the charismatic, comic hosts of that program, the duo of Os Namayer, better known as Príncipe Ouro Negro e Presidente Gasolina (Prince Black Gold and President Gasoline); DJ Satelite, a leading beatmaker and producer on the Afro-House scene; and Jó Kindanje, the Angolan writer who published the first book on kuduro.

3
HIP DEEP ANGOLA 3: A SPIRITUAL JOURNEY TO MBANZA-KONGO (distribution date TBA). Today Mbanza-Kongo (Kongo City) is part of Angola, in the north where the Congo River divides Angola from the  Democratic Republic of Congo. When the first missionaries arrived there in 1491, it was the seat from which the Manikongo (king) ruled over a large area that reached to south of Luanda. It was a city of luxury, with perhaps as many as 60,000 people at its peak. To make this unprecedented program, producer Ned Sublette traveled to Mbanza-Kongo to rendezvous with Dr. Bárbaro Martínez Ruiz, professor of art and art history at Stanford.
We’ll learn about the simbi, the spirits that Martínez Ruiz describes as “the multiple power of god”; hear Antonio Madiata play the lungoyi-ngoyi, the two-stringed viola of the Kongo court; attend a session of the lumbu, the traditional tribunal of elders; listen to the voice of a deceased singer who took 500 years of genealogical knowledge with him when he departed; talk to a traditional healer; and meet Gabriel Bortolani, a Capuchin priest who has made a deep anthropological study of the area. With the help of historian C. Daniel Dawson and with Angolan composer and musicologist Victor Gama, we’ll examine Kongo-Ngola culture in the diaspora – in Brasil, Haiti,  Cuba, and more.

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HIP DEEP ANGOLA 4: THE CUBAN INTERVENTION IN ANGOLA (distribution date TBA). The twenty-seven-year-long Angolan civil war was also an international crossroads of the Cold War, involving Cuba, the Soviet Union, Zaire, South Africa, and the United States. When it was over, Namibia was independent, apartheid had fallen, Angola was a nation, and the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. Through music, interviews, and historical radio clips, this program will tell the story of Cuba’s massive commitment in Africa, tracing an arc from 1959 to 1991. We’ll talk to Piero Gleijeses, foreign policy specialist at Johns Hopkins University and author of Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa 1959-1976, and to Marissa Moorman, author of the forthcoming Tuning in to Nation: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1933-2002, who will share with us rare archival recordings of radio broadcasts featuring the voices of Agostinho Neto, Jonas Savimbi, and others. We’ll talk to Cuban trovador Tony Pinelli, who traveled in a brigada artística playing music for Cuban soldiers and for Angolans. And from Cuba, Angola, Zaire, and Portugal, we’ll hear some of the music that accompanied the struggle.

HIP DEEP ANGOLA was produced with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. A SPIRITUAL JOURNEY TO MBANZA-KONGO was supported by a 2012 Knight Luce Fellowship for Reporting on Global Religion. The fellowship is a program of the University of Southern California's Knight Chair in Media and Religion.