Miriam Makeba, the world-renowned South African singer, has died at the age of 76 after being taken ill near the southern Italian town of Caserta.

Makeba died on Monday after taking part in a concert for Roberto Saviano, a writer threatened with death by the mafia, an Italian news agency said.

“I’m not yet absolutely certain of the causes of her passing, but she has had arthritis, severe arthritis, for some time,” her publicist told an Italian radio station.

Makeba was best known to her fans as ‘Mama Africa’ as she became the distinguished voice of Africa and a symbol of the fight against apartheid in her home country.
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Everyone called her Mama Afrika. Her voice was like a bird singing in a cage. Many of us grew up listening to her proud music. She was a steady fighter against racism and discrimination in her native South Africa. I will miss Miriam Makeba, as will a lot of other people in the world. Words escape me.

Early this morning, we lost one of our Mothers, Mama Afrika. I once had the privilege and pleasure of seeing Miriam Makeba at an open air concert here in London and she was everything beautiful and more. Activist and singer, Miriam Makeba brought us all so much with her music and her strong, proud, elegant persona and though she rests now with her ancestors she will aways be alive through her music.

RIP Mama Afrika

Video via Mshairi

Technorati: Miriam Makeba

In 1957 EsKia Mphahele left his home in South Africa for what became 20 years in exile. First to Nigeria and then on to England, Kenya, Zambia and the US before finally returning home in 1977. He became the first Black man to to be offered a chair at the Wits University in Johannesburg where he taught African Literature. Mphahele, who started out as a journalist for Drum magazine was a huge literary presence in Africa as much for his own novels as for his work as a literary academic and critic. His most famous book is his autobiography “Down Second Avenue” which includes his early life in Apartheid South Africa as well as his time spent in Nigeria at the University of Ibadan.

Interlude

Saturday night. Darkness. Sounds of snoring from my uncle at the corner. Like the muted lowing of a cow. Tomorrow the other uncle sleeping with him on the floor will complain that he had been roused from his sleep by the snoring. My younger brother doesn’t stir beside me. Nor the youngest uncle the other side of him under the same blanket as we. They say I’m a bad sleeper and when sleep descends on me there is going to be tugging and tossing and rolling among the three of us. I know the cold air coming through the hole in the flooring boards will whip us out of sleep as it plays upon bare flesh, else one’s leg will rest on my neck and then I shall dream that some fiend is slitting my throat and I shall jump up with a scream… Tins of beer dug into the floor behind the stack and the strong smell of fermenting malt and grey spots on the floor around the holes. No policeman will find it easily. Policeman? Saturday night. The men in uniform may even now be sniffing about in the yard. Far to the west end of Marabastad a police whistle, the barking of dogs - no it must be in Fourth Avenue maybe because I hear heavy booted footsteps, it’s sure to be a person running away from the law, the police cells, the court and jail. Saturday night and it’s ten to ten. I can hear the big curfew bell at the police station peal “ten to ten, ten to ten, ten to ten” for the Black man to be out of the streets to be at home to be out of the policeman’s reach… The Saturday night buzz has now been muffled. Siki is walking down the street playing his guitar the one he carries about on him, the guitar he plays while he coughs on and on, for he has been coughing ever since I knew him, a long long time. Siki’s music comes and goes and comes and goes… the music fades and is gone fused with the night. “The white man is strong”, funny this comes to me as I seem to hear my mother say it: the white man’s strong I don’t know you mustn’t stand in his way or he’ll hurt you, maybe when you’re big I don’t know you will open your mouth and say what is in your heart but remember now the white man has a strong arm. Saturday night and I’m thinking of school and my classmates. I feel so weak, inferior, ignorant, self-conscious. Saturday night and I’m still thinking and feeling… Mathebula is asleep maybe but I think through his herbs he can see me wide awake. He put a stick into the fire when he went to bed as he always does to keep away other people’s baboons but he cannot tell us how to keep the police away. I wonder what the matter is with Mathebula’s herbs…

Links: The Es’kia Institute

Technorati: EsKia Mphahele

South Africa + Literature

Last Thursday, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network [IJAN] was launched together with the Charter [also in Spanish] and Call-to-Action, at a press conference in London. The launch was chaired by Selma James together with Michael Kalmanovitz of the Payday Network and social activist and founding members of Matzpen, Prof Moshe Machover. The launch of IJAN is the culmination of 2 years of intensive work by anti-Zionists across the world.

What is different about the IJAN? Unlike other Jewish organisations such as Jews for Justice for Palestinians Anti-Zionist and unequivocally committed

to the dismantling of Israeli apartheid, the return of Palestinian refugees, and the ending of the Israeli colonization of historic Palestine.

I really felt I was witnessing something different in the launch of IJAN and saw it as a very important development in the fight against world racism, imperialism and capitalist oppression because for the first time I was hearing Jewish people standing up against the state of Israel and the ideology which seeks to legitimise the oppression and genocide of Palestinians. IJAN represents a network of Jewish people who do not want to be associated with Zionism and Israel, support the right of return of all Palestinians and oppose the Jewish homeland and the reject the right of all Jews to live in Israel.

Zionism is racist. It demands political, legal and economic power for Jews and European people and cultures over indigenous people and cultures. Zionism is not just racist but anti-Semitic. It endorses the sexist European anti-Semitic imagery of the effeminate and weak “diaspora Jew” and counters it with a violent and militarist “new Jew,” one who is a perpetrator rather than a victim of racialized violence.

[Read more…]

Biko Lives by Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander and Niger Gibson is launched at Xarra Books in Johannesburg on Saturday @ 3pm. With you in spirit!

ABOUT THE BOOK:

This collection looks at the on-going significance of Black Consciousness, situating it in a global frame, examining the legacy of Steve Biko, the current state of post-apartheid South African politics, and the culture and history of the anti-apartheid movements.

Steven Biko ranks amongst the most important top three anti-apartheid movements key thinkers and revolutionaries - Nelson Mandela and Robert Sobukwe. Biko Lives! does three unique things, firstly, for the first time the very important 1972 interview with Steve Biko is published here. Secondly, for the first time Biko is being treated formally by other philosophers, in a non academic and accessible way and thirdly, the book up dates the ideas of Biko through a critical appraisal.

Biko Lives! Is the most important book on Biko since 1994 and is critically important to contemporary South Africa still struggling with racism and xenophobia amongst others social pathologies.

Racism in the Academy German style from Grada Kilomba. Those in the US and UK will recognise Ms Kilobma’s experience…

Academia is not a neutral location. This is a white space where Black people have been denied the privilege to speak. Historically, this is a space where we have been voiceless, a space we could not enter. Here, white scholars have developed theoretical discourses which formally constructed us as the inferior Other - placing Africans in absolute subordination to the white subject. We were made the objects, but we have rarely been the subjects. This position of object, which we commonly occupy, does not indicate a lack of resistance or of interest, as it is commonly believed, but rather a lack of access to representation by Blacks themselves. It is not that we have not been speaking; but rather that our voices - through a system of racism - have been systematically disqualified as valid knowledge; or else represented by whites, who ironically become the ’experts’ of ourselves. Either way, we are locked in a violent colonial hierarchy.

Download a copy of the End of the Rainbow: Increasing the sustainability of LGBT organizations through social enterprise”

The Last Plantation - Black police officers recount the systematic targeting of Cynthia McKinney by white U.S. Capitol Police Officers

An interesting piece on White Privilege from Rethabile’s blog

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

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Steve Biko