December 1st - Blacksoil Film Fest
November 29, 2007 | Leave a Comment
African HipHop Foundations present:
18.00 bovenzaal I love Hip Hop in Marocco
20.00 bovenzaal Hip Hop Revolution +
African Underground
22.00 bovenzaal Bomb it (director present)
19.30 benedenzaal African hip hop videoclips / deejays
stand met African hip hop cd’s
21.30 benedenzaal Opnames African Hip Hop Radio discussie olv Andrew Makking
22.00 benedenzaal Cabo hip hop showcase met
GMB, Concrete en Vieira (ZPK)
23.00 benedenzaal Solo for Dolo met dj WIX
Fri - Nov 30 - Get Down Fridays - NYC
November 29, 2007 | Leave a Comment
GET DOWN FRIDAYS!
Every Friday starting December 7
10pm-3am
DJ Laylo spinning everything your heart and hips want to hear.
Come ready to work up a sweat as we keep it funky fresh with the
best classic hip hop, soul, funk, reggae, latin, house, and afrobeat!
@ Rose Club
345 Grand Street
bet. Havemeyer & Marcy
L to Bedford - J/M to Marcy - G to Metropolitan
* NO COVER - FREE *
Senegal’s democratic shine dims under Wade-groups
November 29, 2007 | Leave a Comment
By Nick Tattersall
DAKAR, Nov 28 (Reuters) - Senegal’s carefully polished reputation as a bastion of democracy in turbulent West Africa is dimming as its octogenarian leader, Abdoulaye Wade, grows increasingly autocratic, rights groups say.
Political posturing aimed at positioning his son to succeed him, the detention without trial of critical journalists and the diminishing powers of parliament all betray Senegal’s faltering democratic credentials, Wade’s critics say.
They say his obsession with hosting an international Islamic conference next year — a two-day event for which luxury hotels and new highways are being built in Dakar — have pushed more pressing social and economic problems off the political agenda.
“The Republic’s agenda is dominated in the short term by the organisation of the Islamic Summit and in the medium term by political manoeuvring around President Wade’s succession,” said Alioune Tine, head of African human rights group RADDHO.
“The presidential role has become an arch-institution which is not just overbearing but enslaving and subjugating all the other institutions, reducing them to dwarf status,” he told a news conference in Dakar on Wednesday.
Wade’s son, Karim, is an influential presidential adviser and head of the government agency managing the infrastructure projects for the Islamic conference, a role which has seen him increasingly involved in public debate and raised questions about his own political ambitions.
“This skilfully maintained veil of mystery (around Karim) allows his accomplices and henchmen to sow in the public mind the idea that the son of the head of state could legitimately succeed his father,” Habib Sy, director of Senegalese anti-graft group Aid Transparency, wrote in a local newspaper this month.
Wade’s spokesman has publicly denied that Karim is the president’s anointed successor.
WEAKENING PARLIAMENT
Senegal’s reputation for political stability has long made it a favourite among western donors and investors. It was one of the first African countries to espouse multiparty politics in the 1970s and is the only West African country other than the Atlantic archipelago of Cape Verde never to have seen a coup.
But riots swept across the capital last week after police tried to evict thousands of street vendors. The protests were fuelled by wider discontent over Wade’s perceived failure to address high youth unemployment and rising food prices.
Diplomats and local civil society groups have voiced growing concern over the increasing power of the presidency.
Macky Sall, the country’s parliamentary speaker, was unceremoniously sacked by Wade as deputy leader of the ruling PDS party two weeks ago after summoning Karim to appear before a finance commission charged with overseeing public spending.
Some political commentators fear Sall may now also lose his position as head of the national assembly.
“If he is removed from parliament as he has been from the party, it will totally ruin what credibility remains for the national assembly,” Tine said.
The senate is an even weaker balance against the power of the executive. The PDS won 34 of 35 seats in an August poll boycotted by the opposition, while the remaining 65 senators are appointed directly by Wade.
Journalists who have criticised Wade have found themselves jailed, triggering criticism from the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
“The government’s continued use of criminal defamation and insult laws to jail and prosecute journalists undermines Senegal’s democratic credentials,” it said this month after four journalists held for critical stories were provisionally freed. (Editing by Pascal Fletcher)
© Reuters 2007. All Rights Reserved.
In French Suburbs, Same Rage, but New Tactics
November 27, 2007 | Leave a Comment
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
PARIS, Nov. 27 — Two years after France’s immigrant suburbs exploded in rage, the rituals and acts of resentment have reappeared with an eerie sameness: roving gangs clashing with riot police forces, the government appealing for calm, residents complaining that they are ignored.
And while the scale of the unrest of the past few days does not yet compare with the three-week convulsion in hundreds of suburbs and towns in 2005, a chilling new factor makes it, in some sense, more menacing. The onetime rock throwers and car burners have taken up hunting shotguns and turned them on the police.
More than 100 officers have been wounded, several of them seriously, according to the police. Thirty were hit with buckshot and pellets from shotguns, and one of the wounded was hit with a type of bullet used to kill large game, Patrice Ribeiro, a police spokesman, said in a telephone interview. One of the officers lost an eye; another’s shoulder was shattered by gunfire.
It is legal to own a shotgun in France — as long as the owner has a license — and police circles were swirling with rumors that the bands of youths were procuring more weapons.
“This is a real guerrilla war,” Mr. Ribeiro told RTL radio, warning that the police, who have struggled to avoid excessive force, will not be fired upon indefinitely without responding.
The police have made more than 30 arrests but have been restrained in controlling the violence, using tear gas to disperse the bands of young people and firing paint balls to identify people for possible arrests later.
The prefecture of the police in the Val d’Oise area, where most of the violence has occurred, said Tuesday night that there were no reported injuries among civilians that could be linked to the police.
The events of the past three days, set off by the deaths of two teenagers whose minibike collided with a police vehicle on Sunday, make clear that the underlying causes of frustration and anger — particularly among unemployed, undereducated youths, mostly the offspring of Arab and African immigrants — remain the same.
“We have heard promise after promise, but nothing has been done in the suburbs since the last riots, nothing,” said François Pupponi, the Socialist mayor of Sarcelles, which has been struck by the violence, in an interview. “The suburbs are like tinderboxes. You have people in terrible social circumstances, plus all the rage, plus all the hate, plus all the rumors, and all you need is one spark to set them on fire.”
On Tuesday, there were the first signs of the violence spreading beyond the Paris region when a dozen cars were set afire in the southern city of Toulouse.
In the wake of the unrest in 2005, the government of then-President Jacques Chirac (with Nicolas Sarkozy, now the president, as the tough, law-and-order interior minister) announced measures to improve life in the suburbs, including extra money for housing, schools and neighborhood associations, as well as counseling and job training for unemployed youths. None has gone very far.
At that time, Mr. Sarkozy alienated large numbers of inhabitants in the troubled ethnic pockets of France, but afterward reverted to a low-key approach, which he has maintained ever since. During his presidential campaign, he stayed away from the troubled suburbs, aware that his presence could inflame public opinion against him.
In his six months as president, he has largely focused on injecting new life into France’s flaccid economy through creating jobs and lowering taxes and consumer prices.
His most notable initiative in dealing with youth crime has been punitive: the passage of a law last July that required a minimum sentence for repeat offenders and in many cases allowed minors between 16 and 18 years old to be tried and sentenced as adults.
Since September, Fadela Amara, his outspoken junior minister charged with drawing up a policy for the suburbs, has been holding town hall meetings throughout France in preparation for what is to be a “Marshall Plan” for the suburbs. Her proposals are scheduled to be made public in January.
“We’ve been talking about a Marshall Plan for the suburbs since the early 1990s,” said Adil Jazouli, a sociologist who focuses on the suburbs. “We don’t need poetry. We don’t need reflection. We need money.”
After he returns from China on Wednesday morning, Mr. Sarkozy plans to visit a seriously wounded senior policeman at a hospital near the northern Paris suburb of Villiers-le-Bel.
It was in Villiers-le-Bel on Sunday afternoon that the deaths of two teenagers identified as Moushin, 15, and Larimi, 16, occurred, the event that set off the latest unrest. The teenagers were riding without helmets on a minibike that collided with a police car; rumors that the police had caused the accident elicited calls for revenge.
The crash was reminiscent of the electrocution deaths in another Paris suburb in October 2005 of two teenagers, who, according to some accounts, were running away from police. That event set off the worst civil unrest in France in four decades, plunging the country into what Mr. Chirac called “a profound malaise.”
But Mr. Sarkozy, still reeling from huge transit strikes and student protests throughout France this month, is unlikely to use the current unrest as a vehicle to turn introspective or vent his rage too loudly at those he once called “scum.”
In 2005, he vowed to clean out young troublemakers from one Paris suburb with a Kärcher, the brand name of a high-powered hose used to wash off graffiti; when he pledged in another suburb that year to rid poor suburban neighborhoods of their “scum,” he was pelted with bottles and rocks.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister François Fillon told Parliament that the clashes were “unacceptable, intolerable, incomprehensible,” and he pledged punishment for the offenders in the affected suburbs.
“Those who shoot at policemen, those who beat a police officer almost to death, are criminals and must be treated as such,” he said, adding, “We will do everything so that tonight there is a maximum security presence.”
Under heavy security on Tuesday night, Mr. Fillon visited Villiers-le-Bel, where the two youths had died, in what he called a show of support for the police and firefighters. About 1,000 police officers were deployed there.
Critics of the Sarkozy government complain that many areas in the suburbs are without a police presence, and that the only time there is a show of security is after violence erupts.
“Sarkozy promised to send more police to the suburbs, but in so many places there are fewer police than there were two years ago,” said Mohamed Hamidi, the French founder of Bondy Blog, a popular political blog created in the Paris suburb of Bondy after the outbreak of violence in 2005. “He didn’t keep his word. Who suffers from all the violence and the burning cars? The people who live in these neighborhoods.”
In Villiers-le-Bel on Tuesday night, the atmosphere was tense, with white police trucks and antiriot police officers on the streets. Earlier in the day, about 300 people, including children, marched silently in memory of the two dead teenagers.
At a bakery on a small plaza in town, Habib Friaa, the baker, mourned their deaths, especially that of Larimi, who had started an apprenticeship with him two months ago.
“Baking was his passion,” Mr. Friaa said. “He was a courageous young man, someone who had hope.”
Ariane Bernard contributed reporting from Paris, and Basil Katz from Villiers-le-Bel.
Senegal Muslims show love of work in peanut-picking
November 27, 2007 | Leave a Comment
By Nick Tattersall
KHELCOM FIELDS, Senegal, Oct 29 (Reuters) - Thousands of Senegalese Muslims, from bankers to bus drivers, flocked to the country’s dusty peanut fields this week in an annual show of devotion to the powerful Mouride brotherhood.
Bent double under blazing sunshine, ranks of men, women and children harvested the groundnuts by hand from the dry earth after a call to work — or “Ndiguel” — from the Mourides’ spiritual leader, Serigne Saliou Mbacke.
It has become a key fixture for Mourides, a Sufi Islam movement whose doctrine of hard work as a route to paradise has made it a powerful economic and political force in Senegal.
“Pray as if you will die tomorrow and work as if you will live forever” is one of the oft-quoted teachings of Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, the Muslim mystic who founded the movement in 1883.
Many of the devotees stay for days or even weeks, sleeping at night in clusters of tents spread across tens of thousands of hectares of plantations — known as the “Khelcom fields” — around the holy city of Touba.
“The working and living conditions are very difficult, so you are obliged to show solidarity,” said Saliou Niang, 25, a student in hotel management, sipping mint tea under the moonlight after a day toiling in the dust.
“It’s a spiritual training you receive here. In a world that is becoming more and more individualist, you learn to share, to work together,” he said, as other Mourides sang religious chants and drummed in the background.
GLOBALISATION
Mouride influence runs deep across Senegal.
Brightly painted taxis and buses carry mottos such as “Djeuredjef Serigne Fallou” (Thank you Serigne Fallou), a former Mouride leader, or “Grand Marabout”, revered for his mystical abilities to heal the sick and change the weather.
Hand-painted depictions of the one surviving photograph of Bamba, his face wrapped in a flowing white scarf, adorn shop fronts and businesses in towns around the former French colony.
Mouridism is largely confined to Senegal and neighbouring Gambia, unlike the larger Tidjane brotherhood which has spread more widely across West Africa from Morocco.
But the marabouts’ teachings to go out into the world and bring back wealth to build up the movement has led the Mourides to establish a formidable trading network across the globe.
From street sellers in New York, Paris, Rome and Madrid to import/export dealers in Hong Kong and Dubai, many of the Senegalese doing business abroad are members of the brotherhood.
Type “Khelcom” into an Internet search engine and one of the first pages to come up is “Khelcom-Wheels-Dealers”, a used car dealer serving the Senegalese community in South Hackensack, New Jersey.
Known even by fellow Senegalese as wily operators, these jet-setting Mourides have been dubbed “Modou Modou” because, when caught selling fake designer goods, they give the ubiquitous name “Modou” in the hope of not being identified.
“All Mourides when they travel just need to get money to bring back to Touba,” said Hamdan Thiam, 45, who lived in the Canary Islands, Barcelona and Paris before returning to Touba to study Bamba’s teachings more deeply.
As a result, Touba and neighbouring Mbacke have grown from just a tiny village at the time of Bamba’s birth to become Senegal’s second-largest conurbation after Dakar, with a population of more than half a million.
“Touba is the middle of paradise,” said Thiam, grinning in the shadow of the city’s vast marble-covered mosque.
© Reuters 2007. All Rights Reserved.
