African Underground: Democracy in Dakar - # 1 on Current TV
April 30, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Big thanks to everyone who took the time to vote for us on Current TV! After nearly 2 months on the top 10 - you folks helped to push it over the top and brought us to # 1!
This will ensure that Democracy in Dakar will make it to the airwaves sometime in the coming months - we’ll be sure to let you know.
Thanks again to everyone who took the time to watch and vote!
Nomadic Wax Nat Geo Remix featured on The World (BBC/NPR)
April 27, 2007 | Leave a Comment
The World’ (BBC/PRI) featured Nat Geo’s Global Remix on yesterdays program. Nomadic Wax track - ‘Keep it Real’ by Pato (Benny Beats remix - and mixed by Notable productions) as well as LF and Laylo’s ‘Marcha Soldado (Benny Beats remix) are featured on the compilation.
To listen to the program click here!
National Geographic Compilation
Many older Americans remember learning about the world through the pages of the National Geographic. The magazine has changed a lot over the decades. Witness an article in this month’s issue. It’s about hip-hop. The World’s Marco Werman says the article ties into a bigger National Geographic musical initiative.The philosophy at the National Geographic Society is to broaden the view that Americans have of the rest of the world. Tom Pryor is the editor of National Geographic World Music, the on-line music component of the society.
“We want to reflect the world as it is now. And be an accurate reflection of the way music evolves in different countries. We don’t want to just give you Colombia with a sort of folkloric view of, “this is cumbia, this is vallenato.” We also want to tell you Colombia is not just that but it’s Shakira and it’s also champeta music. it’s all these things together. It’s these brash up-start musics which hip-hop is really one of them in a sense, you know.”
That explains why the society’s flagship magazine this month featured an article called “Hip Hop Planet.” And the website National Geographic World Music has produced a new CD of international pop music — remixed by other global artists.
This track for example, is by the Tanzanian group X Plastaz. They invoke Masai vocalizing and western hip-hop.
Some years ago, National Geographic began to shed its reputation as covering the world from a middle-aged armchair. The article “Hip Hop Planet” is further proof of that. And as Tom Pryor says, in some ways it actually helped that the writer James McBride is himself a middle-aged man.
”He actually grew up in Harlem; he’s of that age of the first generation of hip-hop. But he didn’t really like hip-hop. He was a jazz guy when he was younger. So the story is sort of about his coming around to the recognition that this is a global force. I mean, hip hop conquered the world, its global music. i mean you can find it anywhere in the world, people rapping in their own languages.”
The Senegalese rapper Pato is also featured on the new National Geographic CD, “GeoRemixed.” The band recently played a key role in raising political consciousness among young voters in Senegal, and getting them out to the polls.And at a time when US music mogul Russell Simmons is suggesting certain words be censored from the American hip-hop lexicon, African hip-hop comes off as refreshingly old-school without trying to be.
“There really is a lack of cynicism in African hip-hop. It’s still seen as having a social message, you know being something very positive. You know it didn’t go down that sort of bling and girls and that whole route that American hip-hop went down. You know in some ways it’s kind of innocent and it’s almost a little bit naive in some ways. It’s kind of touching. But there’s still an element of social responsibility, of this is music that can change things. And I miss that in American hip-hop, I really do.”
It would be ironic if National Geographic makes more Americans realize this. After all, many in this country will recall when the glossy pages of the magazine used to depict Africans as naked savages beating drums. Now the magazine shows just how plugged in to global culture many Africans really are.
web resources:
National Geographic - Hip-Hop Planet
African Underground reaches # 2 on Current TV
April 27, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Thank you to all who voted for African Underground: Democracy in Dakar on Current TV! You pushed us all the way to number 2 out of thousands of films. We’re almost at number one and we’ve got a few more days left to go (yes they repeat the contest every week - you’re not going crazy). If you haven’t voted yet - now is your chance!
Click here to vote for Democracy in Dakar to get on TV!
http://www.current.tv/watch/22824784
Nomadic Wax All-stars open For G-Unit’s Tony Yayo
April 21, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Verge Music Conference with G-Unit’s Tony Yayo
Saturday, April 21
6-10 pm, Avalon - Landsdowne St.
Boston, MA
Featuring Chosan (Sierra Leone), Eli Efi /DJ Laylo (Brazil/DR) and DJ Boo
Nomadic Wax All-stars Open for Talib Kweli on the Virgin Mega Tour!
April 20, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Virgin/CMJ Mega Tour with Talib Kweli
Wednesday, April 25
3 pm, Haynes Auditorium - Mount St Vincent
Riverdale, NY
Featuring Chosan (Sierra Leone), Eli Efi /DJ Laylo (Brazil/DR) backed by the Nomadic Wax Allstars!
Closed show! Students with ID only
Election Boycott Threatens Senegal’s Democratic Reputation
April 12, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Dakar 12 April 2007 |
Tran report - Download 413k
Listen to Tran report
Even though Senegal is located in a part More Spokesman Yankhoba Seydi, of the Rewmi Party, which came in second "Let us talk about the rules. There are many things that are wrong The president’s office says the opposition is boycotting because it is scared of being crushed in the next election. Election observer Alioune Tine says the presidential election was fair, despite some problems. International observers also said the vote was free and fair, despite minor problems and some inequality in media coverage. Tine, the director of the Senegal-based human rights group, RADDHO, "You know the president is a man who wants people to recognize his RADDHO is one of about a dozen civil society groups, called the Civil Forum, trying to stop the boycott. "I think that the problem with the opposition is that the condition The Civil Forum submitted a letter to President Wade last Friday requesting to mediate a meeting between the two sides. Presidential spokesman Amadou Sall says there is no need for civil "We do not know why [under] this condition we [would] we receive This all comes as Senegal fine-tunes its request to the United At stake is up to $800 milllion to finance a large-scale business and residential development. Team leader Sogue Diarisso says he is confident Senegal’s high rank He says Senegal is starting out much higher rating than other poor But Chris Fomunyoh, the Central and West Africa program director for "When you have a huge segment that is not participating in the The twice-delayed legislative election is scheduled to take place
of the world known for volatile and violent politics, it is the only
West African country to not have had a coup. Seven years ago, it held
democratic elections that brought a new party to power. But, after
President Abdoulaye Wade was re-elected earlier this year, opponents
cried fraud and have vowed to boycott the upcoming legislative
election. Local civil society is alarmed, while analysts consider the
long-term impact of this potential boycott. Phuong Tran has more from
Dakar.
President Abdoulaye Wade outlines his next term after official results declare him the winner of Senegal’s election, 1 Mar 2007
than 10 opposition parties say they refuse to participate in an
election they say will be unfair. They say the president won his
re-election through fraud.
in the presidential election, says his party wants electoral changes
before participating.
in the registration process. Let us check the multiple cards that [are]
issued for the voters," he said.
says the opposition needs to recognize Mr. Wade fairly won almost 56
percent of the vote, before the president will meet with them.
competence, to recognize [his] qualities, et cetera, it is a human
feeling," he said.
is to discuss or to boycott. It was not the best way to [encourage]
dialogue and to make our electoral system [stronger]," he said.
society to play referee. He says the constitutional court already ruled
elections were fair.
civil society. To do what? I really do not know if the president will
do it," he said.
States Millennium Challenge Corporation, which rewards poor, but
well-governed countries with grants to reduce poverty.
for good governance will not drop significantly, as a result of the
threatened boycott.
countries, in terms of democracy, and that the threat of a boycott does
not change the solid core of Senegal’s democratic history.
the U.S.-based election watchdog group National Democratic Institute,
says a boycott can hurt a country’s democracy, in the long-term.
political process, it is difficult to expect that those that win power,
through that process, will have legitimacy they need to be able to
govern," he said.
June 3. The president’s office has said that it does not plan to delay
the election again, regardless of opposition party participation.
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15 vie for Senegal’s legislative polls
April 11, 2007 | Leave a Comment
afrol News, 10 April - At
least 15 political parties have officialised their intentions to
contest in Senegal’s 3 June legislative polls by forwarding their lists
of candidates to the Interior Ministry which has three days to approve
or disapprove them.
Already the polls
have become sour by the confirmed boycott of the main opposition
parties, including those of the key contenders of President Abdoulaye
Wade in the 25 February polls.
Officials of Mr Idrissa Seck’s Rewmi, Pari Socialiste and AFP, said
their boycott was necessitated by President Wade’s alleged rigging of
the polls, although they were declared free, fair and transparent by
the international observers and authenticated by the constitutional
court in Senegal.
The boycotting opposition parties control more than 40 percent of the
votes in the last Presidential polls, which is why the boycott is
expected to discredit the legislative polls.
The angry opposition parties said they can take part in the 3 June
polls only if the electoral roll has been cleansed and the replacement
of the autonomous electoral commission by an independent national
electoral commission because the former allowed voting process to be
rigged in favour of the ruling Parti Democratic Senegalaise (PDS) of Mr
Wade.
Opposition leaders have also asked President Wade to sack the Interior
Minister, Ousmane Ngom, whose office organised the last elections.
Their other demands had to do with the cancellation of the demarcation
of the constituencies, which they alleged, was done to favour PDS.
President Wade turned a deaf ear to the opposition complaints. His
party is expected to continue its winning spree during the 3 June
legislative polls.
Senegal postponed the legislative polls which was should have taken
place side by side with the 25 February Presidential polls. It was
first postponed in 2005 following a massive destruction by flood in the
country.
At the time, President Wade argued that instead of organising
elections, his government opted to raise funds for the flood victims
whose compounds had been invaded by waters.
By staff writer
© afrol News
15 lists filed for Senegal legislative elections in June
April 11, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Dakar,
April 10 (NNN-APS) Fifteen political groups or coalitions of parties
have filed their lists of candidates with the Interior ministry for the
June 3 legislative elections.
The Interior Ministry, which is in charge of organizing the
elections, has three days after receiving the lists on Friday to
validate the lists based on accepted criteria.
Several political parties of the opposition have decided to boycott
the June legislative elections as they consider the Feb 25 presidential
polls won by President Abdoulaye Wade with 55.90 of the cast, was an
"electoral masquerade".
These parties are the most significant ones in the opposition
because they represent more the 40 per cent of popular support
according to the result of the last presidential election.
They demand the cleaning of the electoral rolls and the creation of
an independent national electoral commission in the place of the
autonomous national electoral commission (CENA) whose performance did
not satisfy them during the presidential polls.
Senegal Food Stand Feeds Community on a Few Dollars a Day
April 11, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Dakar 09 April 2007 |
According Before the sun rises, Astou Diaw, 47, and her daughter, Yoni, ride a Before "I wanted to help out my husband and our seven kids," she said. "It A ten-minute bus ride later, Diaw arrives at her husband’s metal shop, which is also the kitchen for her food stand. Mother and daughter work quickly. They heat a bucket of water, and stir beans over a fire that will go While Yoni washes glasses, Diaw fills a large silver bowl with the Mamadou Diop comes in for the local drink, a heavily-sugared frothy local drink that tastes like a spicy mix of coffee and tea. He is a security guard who leaves his house before sunrise every day to travel 30 kilometers to Dakar. "I come when I have the money. Sometimes, when I do not have money, A group of men debate the recent presidential elections in Senegal. Four hours and dozens of customers later, Diaw counts her change. "Mondays are the hardest because most people do not have money yet Folding her apron, Diaw takes a lentil sandwich with mayonnaise. Despite her cash problem on most Mondays, Diaw was able to make $2,000 last year from her food stand. This is in a country where about half the population is unemployed,
Breakfast diners at Diaw’s food stand
to most poverty indicators, almost half the population of Sub-Saharan
Africa is living on less than $1 a day. One Senegalese food stand owner
shows how far a dollar goes in this part of the world. Her
aluminum-sided, cardboard-roofed sandwich and coffee stand in Dakar has
become the community kitchen for hundreds of people, mostly men who
come from far away to work in the city. For a little over one dollar,
diners can afford breakfast, lunch, hot coffee, plus a helping of
morning news. Phuong Tran has more from Dakar, Senegal.
bus through Dakar’s faintly-lit streets to get to her corner breakfast
stand where she has sold bean filled baguettes and coffee for four
years.
Astou Diaw
sandwiches, Diaw sold local juices, water and peanuts. But a breakfast
stand seemed a better way to help support her family.
is hard work and sometimes I cannot cover my costs. But even though it
is really hard, I still am able to help out more than before."
into her signature spicy lentil sandwich, a best selling 50 cent long
baguette.
lentils. By seven thirty, she takes her seat for the morning rush.
Customer Mamadou Dieng
I will still come by and she will sell me on credit," he said. "Here I
can eat good home cooked food. Women like her help us out a lot. We do
not have much money. At Astou’s stand, for less than 50 cents, you can
be full."
She is short of the six dollars needed to cover her expenses on bread,
butter, coffee and beans.
to pay at the beginning of the work week," she said. "Maybe tomorrow
will be better."
Leaving her daughter to work the lunch shift, Diaw leaves and waits for
the bus to go home.
and for those who work, their average annual salary is about $700.
Print Version
In Senegal, a life of begging and beatings
April 11, 2007 | Leave a Comment
click to enlarge
Thies, Senegal — MOUSSA Ba’s eyes shine with a fierce passion for
poverty and dirt and suffering, because he believes they are good for
children. He’s not ashamed to say that he is a hard man, and that each
of his 30 beggar boys is terrified of his whip.
Filthy and ragged, these boys, as young as 5 or 6, scurry barefoot
through the dusty streets with tomato paste cans as begging bowls,
knowing that if they come back two days running with no coins for Ba,
they will pay the price.
"There is no child who is less lucky than the others. There is only a
child who is more cunning than the others," Ba said. "Of course it
makes me angry. If I see such a temperament, then it’s a flaw in
character, so I do get angry and I do beat them."
Although many Senegalese see what Ba does as a racket, he isn’t merely a modern-day Fagin. He is a religious teacher, or marabout, and the boys are his talibes, or students, sent by their parents to board and learn the Koran. Most come from distant rural villages.
In Senegal, the talibes often spend less time in the daara,
or school, than on the streets begging. It is a form of child labor so
pervasive and harsh that it has caused a public outcry here. The
government outlawed child exploitation and trafficking in 2005, but
critics say it has done little to enforce the law.
The United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF, estimated in a 2004 report that Senegal has 100,000 child beggars, mostly talibes — almost 1% of the population.
"Now most marabouts are more interested in money than
teaching," said Malick Diagne, deputy director of Tostan, a U.S.
humanitarian organization that is working to help the beggar boys.
"Sometimes you see kids late at night crying, ‘I can’t go home because
my amount of money has not been collected yet.’ "
Here on the streets of Senegal’s second-largest city, the tin can boys dodge the traffic and approach cars with pleading eyes.
People often give them food and objects that are white, such as rice,
candles, sugar or pale cookies, believing that this will protect the
giver from evil. The boys usually sell their haul cheaply to women in
the market to augment the daily quota of coins for their marabout.
*
RURAL Senegalese children have been learning from marabouts in Koranic schools since the 11th century, according to Tostan. But in the 1970s, drought and poverty hit rural areas and many marabouts drifted to cities and began to rely on begging.
The ragged man’s shirt that hangs on tiny Mamadou Jalo makes him look
even thinner than he is. He speaks haltingly, in whispered confidences,
his big, dark eyes glancing about tremulously.
He doesn’t know his age, but locals put it at about 6 or 7. He does
remember his mother and the enveloping warmth of her cuddle in the days
before his family sent him to Ba.
"I miss it," he said. "When I finish school I’ll go back to see my mother."
He lives in constant fear of not collecting the coins he needs to escape the whip.
"I’m sad. I don’t like the marabout. He beats me and he
makes me beg for money. I have to get 250 CFA [50 cents] a day. If it’s
two days running, he beats me with a whip. He beats me very hard.
Everyone is beaten."
The children spend nine hours a day begging and five hours learning the
Koran. At 8 a.m. the boys are sent out to beg for three hours, then
they return to the shack for learning, which involves chanting Koranic
verses, until 1 p.m. They beg for their lunch until 2, learn the Koran
until 5, then are sent out to beg until 10.
Humanitarian agencies in Senegal have worked for years to halt the exploitation of talibes,
but with little success in this overwhelmingly Muslim country where
charity to beggars is a deeply ingrained part of the culture. Some
agencies set up shelters or drop-in centers for the boys, only to find that within a few months they had no customers. For talibes, life on the streets is a habit hard to break.
When they finish schooling in the daara, typically in their
mid-teens, not all go home, said UNICEF country representative Ian
Hopgood. Many remain on the streets, begging — the only life they
really know.
The government denies it has been slow to prosecute those who exploit children.
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"The government is determined to stop the begging and roaming of
children in the streets and their exploitation, and will enforce laws
and regulations on the matter," Information Minister Bacar Dia said,
addressing a meeting on the issue in October.
The 46-year-old Ba, who was a talibe from age 6 and saw his
own father only twice, believes the hard, unrelenting life on the
streets gives his boys an education no school can offer; it makes them
tough enough to face the worst that life can throw at them.
Like most daaras, his is a half-built house where
he squats for free. The rusted corrugated iron roof leaks copiously in
the rainy season. The boys sleep like sardines, without mattresses.
Flies swirl into the air when any of them stirs. The boys rarely wash,
and don’t need to, Ba contends.
"The fact you are dirty on the surface is not real dirt. What’s real
dirt is spiritual dirt," he said, brushing off the thought that poor
hygiene and crowding among the talibes could cause sickness.
"Nothing like that will happen. God has an angel with a big wing. The angel lays down its wing and the talibes lie
down on that wing and the angel lays its other wing over and if any
illness comes, it won’t hurt them. They can even sleep on the wet
ground and it won’t hurt them."
Marabouts such as Ba say they force children to beg for money for food because parents don’t pay fees.
Tostan, which is based in Thies, is working with 115 marabouts here, offering civics and sanitation classes for talibes and their teachers, providing basics such as soap and shoes, and offering small loans to enable the marabouts to wean themselves from begging. It also is encouraging townspeople to "adopt" their neighborhood talibes, to buy them food and clothing.
Oumou Sy, 75, feeds and washes about 10 talibes in her house each morning. She gives them coins for their marabout, even though she knows that perpetuates the system.
"They’re desperate," she said. "If you don’t do it as an individual,
they’re going to get beaten. If you can change the life of one talibe, it’s worth it."
*
NOT all the marabouts beat children for failing to collect enough money. Ahmad Sow, 44, who has about 27 boys in his daara, beats those who are lax in learning the Koran.
But even in one of the better and cleaner daaras such as Sow’s, life is hard for the boys, who beg six or seven hours a day.
Ba remembers begging all day as a child. He remembers the hunger, the
fear of being thrashed, and says he is now fervently thankful for that.
"Even if I was angry and frustrated as a child, I am grateful to God
for that now, because look where it took me. If I was not beaten and if
I didn’t live in harsh conditions, I would not be where I am today," he
said, sitting amid conditions that, materially at least, could hardly
be worse.
He extolled the beauty of learning as the honeyed voice of a young man
reciting the verses of the Koran rose in the small dirt courtyard.
"If you take a child and he leads a soft life, he’s spoiled," Ba said. "But the talibes learn to be strong and independent."
As darkness fell on Thies, Mamadou Jalo was still out begging in the streets.
Mamadou has only one dream, a yearning that stitches together his days,
makes some of them good and others terrible. It’s a dream that slips
through his fingers every single day.
"My dream is money," he says softly.
*
robyn.dixon@latimes.com
