musique musiqueMalawi & Zimbabwe: 1916
Vintage photos from (then) Nyasaland and Southern Rhodesia (no labels/captions to decipher which photos are from which country so apologies for that. Help is appreciated from anyone who can. My efforts were futile. Some may also be from Kenya.)*Found and assembled by Liza Lemsatef Cunningham on ellelens.com
Portraits of Moroccan People, photographed by Leila Alaoui
Leila Alaoui is a French-Moroccan multi-media artist whose work focuses on “cultural identities and migration”, through short films, photography, and video installations.
In her photographic portrait series ‘The Moroccans’, Alaoui travelled the country with a mobile photo studio with the aim of capturing and archiving the “ethnic and and cultural diversity of Morocco” and the “aesthetics of disappearing social realities”. The photos above are taken from this series.
Alaoui’s work also branches out into activism with one of her most recent multimedia projects focusing on creating awareness on the lives of sub-Saharan migrants in Morocco.
See more of her work on her website.
A member of Wassasso ballet trains on Room Island, Conakry, Guinea in preparation for a performance scheduled for 9 April 2010 at Palais du Peuple, Conakry.
Credit: Sebastien Lénelle
NOTABLE AFRICANS: Reverend John Chilembwe
John Chilembwe was a Baptist educator and political leader who organized an uprising against British colonial rule in Nyasaland (today Malawi). Though details about Chilembwe’s early life are largely undocumented, it is believed that he was born in the Chiradzulu region of Nyasaland sometime around 1871 to a Yao father and a Mang’anja slave. The Mang’anja were the traditional ethnic group of the area but fell victim to enslavement by Arab and Yao slave traders; the Yao, originally from northern Mozambique, fled famine in their native country and served as middlemen for the Arab slave-raiders. Chilembwe, a mix of the two ethnic groups, embodied the plight of both. He grew up under the prevailing atmosphere of insecurity of the southern Nyasa regions. When the British colonized the area in 1891, naming it Nyasaland, they established newly organized governance and missions, and sought to control the indigenous people of the region.
In the autumn of 1892 Chilembwe met the Baptist missionary Joseph Booth, who had recently established the Zembesi Industrial Mission as an alternative to the older Scottish Presbyterian missions that exploited the indigenous population. Though Chilembwe initially applied to be Booth’s cook, he quickly became a close friend and ally of Booth and took care of Booth’s daughter. The missionary educated Chilembwe on his egalitarian philosophy and baptized him on July 17, 1893.
The pair traveled to the United States in 1897 to fundraise for the Mission. There, Chilembwe was plunged into a milieu that was highly critical of whites. He met and was influenced by the radical Zulu missionary John L. Dube from South Africa, Dr. Lewis Garnett Jordan of the Negro National Baptist Convention and many other African American preachers and radicals. Staying behind in the United States as Booth returned to Nyasaland, Chilembwe attended Virginia Theological Seminary and College at Lynchburg, Virginia in 1898 and 1899. In the United States, Chilembwe gained an increasingly global perspective on the struggle of people of African descent against injustice and white supremacy. He took these newly acquired political ideas back to Nyasaland in 1900, returning as an ordained Baptist minister.
Once returned, Chilembwe founded the Providence Industrial Mission with aid from the American National Baptist Convention. By 1912, he had established a chain of independent African schools, constructed a brick church and planted crops of cotton, tea, and coffee. His attempts to uplift the local population, however, were undercut by continuing exploitation of Africans by the British. Triggered by British mistreatment of famine refugees from Mozambique as well as the conscription of natives to fight the Germans in Tanzania during World War I, Chilembwe invoked the name of the American abolitionist John Brown and organized a rebellion against the British.
He and 200 followers staged an uprising on January 23, 1915 with the aim to kill all male Europeans. The revolutionaries killed three British subjects, including a particularly corrupt plantation owner named William J. Livingston, a descendant of failed Scottish missionary David Livingstone, who they beheaded in front of his wife and daughter.When the uprising failed to gain local support, Chilembwe fled to Mozambique, where he was killed by African soldiers on February 3, 1915. Though his rebellion was ultimately unsuccessful, Malawi, which gained independence in 1964, celebrates John Chilembwe Day on January 15th as his uprising is viewed as the beginning of the Malawi independence struggle.
Further reading:
(source)
A music video for South African artist Spoek Mathambo, a cover of the Joy Division classic “She’s Lost Control”, directed and shot by Pieter Hugo and Michael Cleary.
[Control] explores the world of township cults, street preaches and teen gangs and was shot on location in a squatted train boarding house in Langa, Cape Town. The cast is mainly made up of the neighborhood kids who run their own dance troop, Happy Feet.
[h/t: @colossal]
