Howard W. French (http://www.howardwfrench.com)

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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Copyright The Online Photographer

Apropos the video we linked the other day, I would just like to throw this out there for what little it’s worth…if any young or beginning photographer of real ambition within the sound of my voice would like to radically improve his or her photography quickly and efficiently, I suggest shooting with nothing but a Leica and one lens for a year. Shoot one type of black-and-white film (yes, even if you’re completely devoted to color and digital, and hate film and everything it stands for. You don’t have to commit to this forever; it’s an exercise). Pick a single-focal-length 50mm, or 35mm, or 28mm. It doesn’t have to be a “good” lens—anything that appeals to you and that fits the camera will do. Carry the camera with you all day, every day. Shoot at least two films a week. Four or six is better (or shoot more in the spring and fall and less in the dead of summer and winter). The more time you spend shooting, the better. The amount of film you shoot is related but not so important. (Photographing is like jogging: benefit accrues to time spent doing it, not how fast you go or how much ground you cover.)

Proof the rolls of film by contact and file them sequentially in a notebook. Get or make between one and six workprints per roll, however you choose to do it (even if you scan your picks and look at the pictures on a computer screen), and, every five or ten rolls or so, have one nice print made, or make it yourself. Craft well, but don’t crop and don’t fuss; just take what the camera gives you.

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Posted at 10:17 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times

By Mo Ibrahim

Published: May 28 2009 19:53 | Last updated: May 28 2009 19:53

The recent debate about aid, sparked by Dambisa Moyo’s book Dead Aid, has polarised the development community. I have long argued that it is investment and good governance, not aid, which will solve Africa’s problems. However, effective aid has an important role to play in the quest for sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction.

In her book, Ms Moyo suggests that government bonds can take the place of development assistance. This is unrealistic. First, debt markets are not open to the African countries that most need capital. Second, the cost of government bonds is materially higher than that of World Bank or other institutional aid. Why should African governments pursue a detrimental line of financing to satisfy an ideologically-led approach to development?

Furthermore, even before the economic downturn, most financial institutions were not interested in investing in sub-Saharan Africa in a sustained manner, despite the fact that for the past 10 years the rate of growth has exceeded that of Europe. It is implausible that they will be interested now.

I ran a successful mobile phone business in Africa that was profitable and run according to the highest standards of corporate governance, but we failed to raise any tangible finance from the same banks that were investing endless funds into the US sub-prime market. Shortly before Celtel was sold, to raise less than $200m in debt, we had to pledge telecoms operations in 14 countries across the continent, generating $1bn in annual revenue. Those same banks lent $2.5bn of the $3.4bn to a Kuwaiti firm to buy the same asset. For now, financial markets do not understand Africa. This must change.

We need a holistic approach to development in Africa that is centred on good governance. This must encompass African governments, civil society, the private sector and donors.

During the cold war, money was poured into African states with no accountability or transparency according to the mantra: “He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard.” That weakened institutions, entrenched corruption and consolidated personal rule. Though things have improved, governance failures exacerbate the problems.

However, Africans do not hold a monopoly on governance failures. It is the failure of financial institutions in developed countries to govern themselves that led to a global crisis that surpasses anything in recent history – one that their governments have responded to with aid in the form of bail-outs. We must acknowledge that bad governance is as endemic in rich countries as in the developing world. This is borne out in the controversy in the UK over politicians’ expenses. That is why we must improve the accountability and transparency of donors, the private sector and African governments in a governance campaign. This requires a greater focus on outcomes and data collection. It is encouraging that President Barack Obama’s visit to Ghana has the stated aim of underlining the importance of civil society and governance on the continent.

The critical argument should not be about aid or no aid – no one can question the necessity of pure humanitarian aid as long as it satisfies basic good governance criteria. The argument should be about where to focus aid to achieve the best returns for donor taxpayers and aid recipients. I propose two areas to focus aid: the hardware of Africa, infrastructure and regional integration; and human software, in the form of education and health.

The reality is that most African countries are sub-scale and fundamentally unable to compete in a global market. If economies the size of the UK, Germany and France find regional integration necessary to ensure growth, then 53 un-integrated African states have a competitive disadvantage. This fragmentation is evident in Africa’s transportation infrastructure, geared towards trade outside rather than within the continent. Africa needs to integrate its economies and open their borders to each other. Development aid can help these efforts and facilitate intra-African trade. This capital investment cannot succeed without investment in education and health.

Finally, while debate on development aid is of great importance, more of this energy should be spent on climate justice. Africans have emitted the least carbon per capita but will have to face the greatest consequences of its emission. A worthier use of the time of these great African and other economists is to devise a solution that allows the continent to meet the adaptation and mitigation costs of climate change.

The writer is founder and chair of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation

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Posted at 9:27 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Sunday Times

The Sunday Times
May 24, 2009

A sweltering Saturday afternoon at Feather Sound Golf Club in Florida: he unfolds the small plastic chair he paid five bucks for in Walmart and plants himself at the back of the sixth green. “This is the life,” he sighs, “watching your kids play sport.” The clipped Czech accent hasn’t changed but the expression is unrecognisable. Ivan Lendl is beaming.

I have travelled from London to write a feature on Lendl and his five sporting daughters. Two of them, Isabelle, 18, and Daniela, 16, are golf prodigies and were playing this afternoon in a Future Collegians World Tour event at Feather Sound. The arrangement was that I would interview Lendl before the round and then follow him as he watched them play the 18 holes.

The walk was as enjoyable as any I have spent on a golf course but the interview wasn’t quite what we had planned. His girls are witty and lovely and brilliant but how do you spend a day with a tennis legend and ignore the quirks and traits that drove him to the top?

In the perfect world of Ivan Lendl there is no subjectivity. There are no politicians, no newspaper columnists, no grey areas. There are facts, box scores, black and white … his vision of a sports daily is something along the lines of France’s L’Equipe.

He merely wants to read that in the second minute of the third period a guy was penalised, the other team scored and it might have turned the hockey game. Please, no opinions. “I’m not interested in a psychological profile of the guy who took the penalty and what motivated him,” he says.” - Greg Garber, The Hartford Courant, 1993.

“So, you didn’t like reading profiles of other athletes,” I suggest.

“No.”

“Why?”

“Well, you can call me sarcastic - and probably rightly so - because I know what was written about me and how much of it was wrong, or untrue, so I would read a profile of Jack Nicklaus and sit there, wondering, ‘Why am I reading this? How much of this is true?’ So I grew rather hesitant to take information from that. I want the facts.”

“Has that changed? Are you interested now in other sportsmen and what drives them?”

“I am very happy to read question and answer. I am very happy to watch question and answer. I am not going to read or watch somebody’s opinion about something.”

“So you are still mistrustful of writers?”

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Posted at 10:44 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Guardian

The growing power of China’s internet activists, who secured the release of Deng Yujiao, has its government on the back foot

29 May 2009

For millions of Chinese internet users, nothing could come as better news than the release of Deng Yujiao, a woman who killed a government official, saying she was defending herself against attempted rape. Someone as ordinary as Deng Yujiao, who admitted she killed an official and would usually face the death penalty, walked away on bail after just 17 days in detention. Her early release means she is probably going to be charged for a lesser crime, if she is charged at all.

This news story, with the figures of the “ordinary waitress” and “abusive government official” had the key ingredients to be picked up by internet sources. A grassroots movement railing against Deng Yujiao’s treatment dominated blogs and forums. This movement also began to influence the wider media, hailing Deng as a hero and calling for a fair trial for the waitress and harsh punishment for the government officials responsible. Without the overwhelming attention and pressure from internet users, this would be no more than a common criminal case, a woman who fought off a drunken man attempting to rape her, and killed him in self-defence. This is as close as we Chinese get to democracy.

Chinese netizens are growing in power, through their powers to expose both individuals and the government. The online community is more aware of the net’s power to influence as well as to inform. In the recent prison death in Yunnan province and in Deng Yujiao’s case, members of online communities actually came forward and effectively took part in the criminal investigations, attempting to replace state media and the police. In Deng Yujiao’s case, netizens interfered in a number of ways, whether legal or not: visiting her in the psychiatric hospital, probing the crime scene, attempting to protect evidence, and publishing personal details of government officials and their families.

One can’t help asking, not whether there will be another Deng Yujiao, but when? A senior official admitted that public servants have become perceived as public enemies. He has every reason to say so, not because every public servant is corrupt and lustful, but because the public’s frustration under non-credible single party rule is ascending to a boiling point.

Without political reform, the sword of Damocles is still hanging above the government’s head. The government’s grasp on power may be absolute, but it is also vulnerable to public opinion. It lurches from one extreme to another, transforming students’ peaceful protests into bloodshed and turning requests for an investigation of shoddily built schools by parents whose children died in the Sichuan earthquake into media bans and house arrests.

The Chinese government has been known to stand back in the face of all sorts of challenges. On one hand this allows them to carefully watch the situation and react with a single effective move; on the other, they almost always miss the golden window of opportunity to stem the public’s rage before it becomes critical.

Chinese people’s wealth is no doubt growing by the day, yet so is their demand for more political rights. The government increasingly finds itself in a difficult place under scrutiny by internet users. These days it at least wants to be seen to be governing with a benign hand. Deng Yujiao’s unprecedented release comes at a price; and the price tag reads “legal credibility.” The waitress deserves a fair trial — but a trial nonetheless. Her release is undoubtedly worth celebrating for millions of netizens who care about her, but it also marks a sad day for the Chinese judiciary. Public opinion must be respected but should never shift the course of law. Democracy prevailed? Justice served? Not quite.

http://tinyurl.com/nvaw6e

Posted at 9:09 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Prospect

The final stretch on the road to Yarkand, about 125 miles from China’s border with Pakistan, feels like the middle east. Each village is a collage of single-storey mud-brick homes with turquoise door-gates. People travel by donkey cart or scooter-rickshaw. Men greet each other the Muslim way (palm to the chest and a slight bow); women wear headscarves. In small villages many signs are still in Uighur, the local language. But for how much longer?

The absorption of China’s far west begins with renaming cities—Yarkand, once a regional capital, to Yecheng, Kashgar to Kashi, Urumqi to Wulumuqi—followed by building a new city around the local population. From three miles outside the bustling tree-lined city of Yarkand, huge gated communities for Chinese army officers flank either side of the road. Propaganda posters depict happily resettled Han, the ethnic majority from eastern China—who are squeezing Uighurs into the ever tighter space around the central mosque and bazaar.

The town of Yarkand was about the halfway point of a 3,000-mile journey I made recently from Lhasa in Tibet through the Chinese border zones with Kashmir, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan all the way to Urumqi near Mongolia. There is no better way to view China’s combination of hard and soft power at work—from the People’s Liberation Army to high-altitude railroads to the sprightly “Han pioneers”—stretching out towards the energy-rich Caspian basin. The west also seeks control here, via Nato and Texaco. But in central Asia, the west must catch up with the east.

Throughout the 19th century, Russia and Britain fought the great game for control of the vast buffer zone between their empires. If the inhabitants of this area had been given any say, two large countries would exist today: the first would be a peaceful kingdom that might be called Shambala, a spiritual homeland for the millions of Buddhists spread across India, Tibet and other Asian nations. The second, the home for the Uighur population and their Turkic brethren, would be Turkestan, a variant of which has been established twice, albeit both times briefly, in the 19th and 20th centuries.

That neither Britain nor Russia prevailed in their battle does not mean there was no winner. Today, China possesses nearly all of this territory, in the form of its two largest and most troublesome provinces: Tibet and Xinjiang. All that exists of “Shambala” is world music and meditation CDs.

And China is poised to win the 21st-century version of the great game in central Asia. Many people focus on China’s neo-mercantilist quest for energy and influence in Africa, the middle east and even South America, but every superpower abroad is an empire at home. And China’s internal consolidation is the story of a multi-ethnic empire being reborn using strategies familiar from America’s westward expansion—combined with the more postmodern extension of the EU.

Westerners have come to view the plight of Tibetans and Uighurs as simply the latest in an ugly continuum of Chinese human rights abuses, most visible in Tiananmen Square two decades ago. But the story is actually much more strategic than ideological. Tibet and Xinjiang are as crucial to China’s claims to unity and sovereignty as Taiwan is: weakness from within would undermine its global power projection. In the midst of a worldwide recession, many observers believe China will face not just unrest but major instability. Yet this drastically underestimates the Communist party’s grip on power and its long-term ambitions. China’s $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves mean it can afford to nation-build, industrialise and play geopolitics at the same time. If you only started to care about the Tibetans and Uighurs when you saw the brutal crackdown of the March 2008 riots in Lhasa—when about 100 Tibetans were killed—then you woke up decades too late.

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Posted at 12:46 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Wall Street Journal

MAY 28, 2009

BEIJING — A hotel employee whose arrest for murder sparked a wave of national sympathy in China after her lawyers said she was fighting off a rape attack has been released on bail, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Deng Yujiao, 21, was arrested May 10 after she allegedly stabbed two local government officials with a fruit knife in the Xiongfeng Hotel in central Hubei province, killing one of them.

Ms. Deng got in a quarrel with Huang Dezhi when he “mistook” her for a bathhouse attendant and asked her for “cross gender” services, according to a police report.


Deng Yujiao at a hospital in Badong, in central China, on May 18.


Mr. Huang’s colleague, Deng Guida, eventually intervened and the argument escalated when he pushed Ms. Deng onto a couch twice, and she “took a fruit knife and stabbed” Mr. Deng four times, including once in the neck, the report said. She also stabbed Mr. Huang in the forearm. Mr. Deng, who worked for an office overseeing investment projects in Badong city and isn’t related to Ms. Deng, later died from his injuries.

Badong County officials said the local public-security bureau is investigating the case, and Ms. Deng hasn’t been formally charged. A public-security report said she was initially detained for “suspicion of intentionally killing” Mr. Deng.

Ms. Deng’s lawyers have said she was acting in self-defense when the men tried to rape her after she refused to have sex with them for money.

The case sparked public anguish over the issue of violence against women, and a flood of sympathy for Ms. Deng in comments flooding in to Chinese Internet forums and blogs.

An essay posted on a Web forum hosted by the People’s Daily newspaper called the stabbing a “heroic act” and a milestone for women’s liberation. The date of the attack — May 10 — “will forever be remembered as the day on which a [girl] bravely defended herself and fought against the corrupt official when her life was threatened,” said the author, writing under the name “Shenzhou Shouwang,” or “Watching Over China.”

In an forum on the same Web site, a user called Guo Chunfu wrote that Ms. Deng “used her own acts to show that even the underprivileged can have a dignified life.”

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Posted at 11:22 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Chronicle of Higher Education

Shanghai

Kang Zhengguo remembers where he was when his hopes were crushed. It was 6 a.m. on June 4, 1989. He had just awakened and turned on his shortwave radio, hoping for good news. Two weeks earlier, Deng Xiaoping had imposed martial law in an attempt to contain the protests that had gripped China since April, but the students had refused to relinquish Tiananmen Square. Kang, a bookish literature professor at Xi’an Jiaotong University in the central city of Xi’an, had been jailed for his ideas during the Cultural Revolution. He had reason to be wary of a student movement. Still, like intellectuals across China, he supported the demonstrations, hoping, even as the People’s Liberation Army advanced on downtown Beijing on June 3, that they might bring needed political reforms. “We had an illusion,” he recalls. “We thought if the students were really strong, the soldiers would turn around and support them.” Now, tuning in to Voice of America, he heard that the opposite had happened. The army had opened fire.

Hundreds died, many of them bystanders and workers who stood in the path to Tiananmen Square. Within hours, Xi’an Jiaotong students were blasting news of the slaughter over the university PA system and gathering on athletics fields to march downtown. Kang scrawled AIM YOUR GUNS HERE on a piece of paper and pinned it on his chest. Then he joined the crowd — altering, with that modest act of protest, the course of his career.

For many Westerners, the enduring image of China’s 1989 protests was of a nameless man staring down a tank, an unforgettable scene that spoke to the power of individual resistance. But the protests were not so much a Chinese 1960s as they were a quiet nationwide uprising, a simmering defiance that spanned class, education level, and geography. In the month and a half before the army opened fire, students at universities around China took to the streets. Workers went on strike. Old people distributed food and water. Even thieves, participants recall with nostalgia, called a moratorium on stealing. Intellectuals across the country showed particular enthusiasm. At Xi’an Jiaotong, Kang says, “70 percent of the faculty supported the students.” Another 20 percent were too scared to voice an opinion. Only administrators who had an interest in maintaining order publicly opposed the protests. But the military crackdown in the early hours of June 4 decisively squelched any hope of openness and reform. For the hundreds of thousands of people who took part in protests across China that year, the assault indelibly affected their lives, forcing some into exile, others to prison, and dooming many more to stagnant careers. More subtly, the slaughter at Tiananmen shaped intellectual currents for decades to come. Now, on the 20th anniversary of the crackdown, participants say Chinese academic and intellectual life is profoundly different.

Before the crackdown, Kang had been on track for a full professorship. But because of his involvement in the student protests, his prospects for advancement at Xi’an Jiaotong evaporated. He applied to other universities, only to be told that his academic and political record was a problem. That was, in a way, the lesser insult. By 1994, when he left Xi’an to take a position at Yale — an opportunity that came, by a stroke of luck, after a professor in the Chinese department picked up a book of literary criticism Kang had written years before — his colleagues had begun to question the wisdom of democratic reform. In 1996, China was gripped by a book called China Can Say No, which urged readers to turn inward and reject the “Western” construct of democratic reform. Two of its authors claimed to have protested at Tiananmen Square.

Kang, now 64 and settled with his family in New Haven, has continued to assail his government for the deaths in 1989, describing his memories in his recent book Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China (W.W. Norton, 2007). But when he returns to China now, he is a maverick. “My relatives and my friends criticize me” for bringing up politics, he says. “They say, ‘China is much better now than before. Our daily lives are much better than they once were.’” Even other professors, he says, have moved on. “They talk about buying a house, buying a car, going abroad on vacation, putting their kids in this or that school. No one discusses politics.” He pauses, searching for an explanation. “It’s not that they’re afraid. It’s that they’re not interested.”

On May 4, 1919, thousands of students from 13 Beijing universities gathered in Tiananmen Square to protest their government’s weak response to the Treaty of Versailles, which included terms that many felt were unfair to China. The movement soon spread to Shanghai and from students to workers, paving the way for the formation of the Communist Party. Party leaders viewed the May Fourth movement as so critical to the Communist revolution that in 1958, when they unveiled the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the center of Tiananmen Square, the faces of the 1919 protestors were carved into one side.

In 1989, when students once again converged on the square, they chose the monument as their base. “May Fourth was very important to Chinese history,” says Wang Chaohua, a student organizer who appeared on the government list of 21 most-wanted leaders after the Tiananmen crackdown. “Like the students of May Fourth, we wanted to propose something new.” In both 1919 and 1989, says Wang, who recently completed a doctorate in Asian languages and literature at the University of California at Los Angeles, “political authorities did not command the public imagination. The vacuum was filled by intellectual energy.”

Students first gathered in the square on April 15, 1989, to mourn the death of Hu Yaobang, a reformist who had been purged from Communist leadership two years earlier. Most of the students had been born on the eve of the Cultural Revolution and grown up in a time of pervasive political theater; they saw demonstrations as an effective means of influencing policy. But other factors contributed to unrest — among professors as well as students. Nascent economic reforms had yielded insufficient results for the educated class. Instead, intellectuals had watched as party leaders used their power to ensure the success of their own children.

“One of the fires that lit [scholars] was that they had been treated so poorly,” says Perry Link, a historian at the University of California at Riverside. “They had tiny salaries and couldn’t travel very much, so they had a lot of personal complaints. That fueled their thought about what went wrong with China in a concrete sense.” One slogan shouted in the square was “Raise the pay of intellectuals!”

Students also wanted more freedom in their personal lives. Before 1989 universities tightly controlled students’ private activities, imposing curfews and restrictions on dating. In the square, students danced and listened to the music of the pop star Hou Dejian. In the excitement of the protests, one student leader, Li Lu, informed a crowd that he was still a virgin. He and his girlfriend staged a wedding on the Monument to the People’s Heroes, as other protesters toasted the couple with salt water from their hunger strike. “What do we want?” Wu’er Kaixi, another of the movement’s leaders, asked of his generation in the 1995 documentary The Gate of Heavenly Peace. “Nike shoes. Lots of free time to take our girlfriends to a bar. The freedom to discuss an issue with someone.”

In the wake of June Fourth, as the massacre is known in China, that freedom came. Deng intensified market reforms, embarking on a 1992 tour of southern China, the country’s cradle of manufacturing, that ushered in rapid economic growth. As China prospered, government money flowed into academe. In the late 1990s, China launched Project 211 and Project 985, which funneled billions of yuan into dozens of universities. The Ministry of Education expanded opportunities for scholars to go abroad and announced new research funds for those who stayed home. At the same time, ministry and university party cadres loosened controls over students’ personal lives.

Since 1989, “they’ve been trying to remove some of the sources of frustration that drove intellectuals into the streets,” says Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian of Chinese protest at the University of California at Irvine. “There’s much less micromanagement of daily life on campuses. There’s less control over academic trips. There’s a wider array of books you can buy in bookstores. Students can now be part of global youth culture.”

At Xi’an Jiaotong University, Kang recalls, the months following June Fourth were grim. Sirens wailed, and offenders were seized in the street. The fall semester of 1989 started with a witch hunt, with professors and students brought in for questioning. Then, in a grim Orwellian twist, came the parties. Nearly every weekend that winter, Kang says, his students invited him to a dance. “After June Fourth, boys and girls could go here and there together,” he recalls. “Administrators wanted students to date. They wanted them to turn decadent.”

“The kids who followed us were able to own pairs of Nike shoes,” says Wu’er, reflecting on his earlier explanation for the protests. “It’s a deal the Chinese Communist Party made with the people: We’re going to let you get rich, but you have to surrender your political freedom.”

Not everyone profited. While Kang Zhengguo listened, horrified, as radio announcers relayed news of the deaths in Beijing, across town Zhou Qing was strategizing. For over a month, Zhou, a 25-year-old staff writer at Northwest University, had coordinated protests in Xi’an’s New City Square. On June 5, fearing more bloodshed, he dispatched trucks outfitted with loudspeakers, urging students to return home. Then he fled to the hills, where he hid out in peasants’ sheds for three months. When he finally slinked back into town to check on his girlfriend in late September, he was seized at gunpoint.

Zhou spent the next two years in a Xi’an prison that was, he says, “like a movie.” He was put to work in an assembly line that was required to turn out 12,000 matchboxes a day. If his line didn’t make its quota, they didn’t eat. Guards occasionally singled out prisoners for “vaccination,” an intimidation tactic that entailed inserting insects into a cut in the forearm, yielding a slow and hideous infection. As punishment for trying to escape, Zhou was transferred to a labor camp where he spent another eight months surrounded by 17and 18-year-old political prisoners. At mealtime, older prisoners bullied the students out of their food. “One student used to come to me and tell me his dreams,” Zhou recalls. “He dreamed of a street filled with steamed buns.”

Other activists got away. Many of the 1989 movement’s most famous leaders fled, like Wu’er and Wang, to the West. Several enrolled at U.S. universities. A few continued to advocate for human rights from abroad. Others went into business. Wu’er now manages an investment fund in Taiwan. After earning an M.B.A. from Harvard University, Chai Ling, another student leader, started a Boston software company that provides free Web portals to universities in exchange for students’ contact information, promoting its product with press releases that invoked her role in the square. (Chai has also filed suit against the makers of The Gate of Heavenly Peace, who include several prominent China scholars in America, for linking on their Web site to news articles that reported critical information about her company.)

But outside of labor camps and Western democratic havens, the memory of what happened dulled. For a few years following 1989, videos about June Fourth — known in Mandarin simply as liu si, or “6/4” — circulated on the black market. Then the government began a campaign of forgetting, first spinning the event and then erasing it. The popular Chinese search engine Baidu now blocks at least 19 derivations of “six four,” including Chinese character homophones, the abbreviation “sf,” and “63+1.”

Such controls are far from total, but they can be very effective. On June 4, 2007, a newspaper in Chengdu published a small advertisement recognizing the mothers of the 1989 victims. Online, chat-room users speculated about how such a message could have gotten past the paper’s editors — until it was revealed that the young clerk who took the ad didn’t recognize the event. What might have been a quiet act of resistance was instead a measure of a nation’s forgetting.

“My students don’t know what it is,” says a professor at a city university in Shanghai who witnessed the protests as a teenager. “You say June Fourth and they say, ‘What, my birthday’?”

Even the staunchest critics of China’s regime acknowledge it now allows discussion in areas that were once off limits. After his release from prison, Zhou became an investigative journalist, tackling sensitive issues like food safety, and only sometimes encountering government intervention. At the same time, some contend that economic growth has merely allowed the Chinese government to fine-tune its control of dissent. As the government’s spending power grew, so did the carrots it could offer for obedience. “The government has great ambition for scholarly work that can make considerable breakthroughs, like shooting satellites into outer space,” says Wang Chaohua, who edited a volume of work by Chinese intellectuals titled One China, Many Paths (Verso, 2003). “But to do work in the social sciences and humanities, you need to have a real independent spirit, and that isn’t what the government wants to see. So you have a lot of political intervention.”

Intellectuals who follow the state line are rewarded with trips abroad and generous research grants, critics say. “There are many research programs now that are sponsored by the government,” says Wang Tiancheng, a former law professor at Peking University. “It’s a type of corruption. They’re buying scholars.”

Wang, now a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Human Rights, knows that power play firsthand. He spent five years in prison in the 1990s as one of the “Beijing Fifteen,” a group of intellectuals persecuted for their opposition to one-party rule. When he was released from prison in 1997, no university would hire him. “If you don’t go along with the Communist Party, if you don’t censor yourself, you’ll lose out on many benefits, including promotions and honors,” he says.

Inquiries related to June Fourth are particularly out of bounds. The events of 1989 shaped the work of the writer Ma Jian, who shuttled supplies to students in the square. His most recent novel, Beijing Coma (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2008), is told from the perspective of a student who is shot in the back during the 1989 crackdown, only to live through two decades on life support — a not-so-subtle metaphor for what Ma sees as a numb post-Tiananmen China. The writer lives in London, where he is insulated by international fame, but he says the friends he saw on his trip back to China this spring were detained shortly after he left merely for associating with him. “Just a month ago we were eating together in Chengdu,” he says, naming one friend. “And now he’s in jail.”

This past April 15, 20 years after the death of Hu Yaobang first brought students to Tiananmen Square, it was filled with police. The Monument to the People’s Heroes was cordoned off, and a blue sign near its base read, in Chinese, PLEASE DO NOT ENTER. Most of the people at the square that afternoon were tourists from the provinces; many wore the red and yellow baseball hats of organized tour groups. These days Beijing’s students are more likely to congregate a few blocks away, at the flashy malls of Wangfujing.

Some say economic nationalism cannot hold. Since December, more than 8,000 scholars and professionals have signed Charter 08, a manifesto calling for the Communist Party to obey the Chinese Constitution and respect human rights. The Internet presents a thorny obstacle to government control, with new Web sites and code words springing up as soon as others are blocked. And even government-financed research trips can backfire. Scholars who leave for a few years tend to return with new ideas.

“The leadership of Hu Jintao is trying to return to a neo-Confucian education system where people don’t challenge certain values,” says Merle Goldman, a historian of Chinese intellectual life at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. “That’s impossible in China today because of its openness to the outside world. No matter what this regime does, it’s going to be very difficult for them to control the academic community.”

But others say the academic community may control itself. On a trip back to China in 2000, Kang Zhengguo spent a few days with several former colleagues. In 1989, when they were professors and administrators at Xi’an Jiaotong, the men had joined him in speaking out against the violence in Beijing. Later his colleagues fled to Shenzhen, a freewheeling city that has sprung up in the wake of economic reforms. Two became successful businessmen; one philosophy professor became a high-level government official. Kang hoped the old friends, now all safely in senior positions, might reminisce about China’s era of protest, but his attempts to bring up the Tiananmen demonstrations failed.

One colleague, the official, instead peppered him with questions about American universities; he hoped to send his son to study abroad. “I was nostalgic,” Kang says. “And they were indifferent.”

Mara Hvistendahl is The Chronicle’s China correspondent.
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I’m off to China soon, where I’m pushing to complete work on my Disappearing Shanghai photography project, which I hope to publish in book form in the coming year. I’ve been working hard on this, re-scanning hundreds of 6x6 negatives on a rented Imacon (expensive!).

There will be a rather different emphasis with this summer’s photography proper, with a focus on intimate interiors in both the old neighborhoods I’ve haunted for the last five years and in the newly built neighborhoods on the city’s periphery, where tens of thousands of people have been relocated.

I’ll be updating my website Click here to see it quite a bit over the weeks ahead. I’d also encourage people interested in my work to visit my Flickr stream. A good way to do so is through the link below:

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Copyright The Washington Post

May 26, 2009

KISUMU, Kenya — With the U.S. economy in turmoil, his job as a truck driver no longer secure and his upwardly mobile life in the Dallas suburbs in jeopardy, James Odhiambo decided it was time for a change.

He wanted a healthier lifestyle for his family, less anxiety, fewer 14-hour days. So he recently traded his deluxe apartment, the pickup truck, the dishwasher and $4.99 McDonald’s combos for life in a place he considers relatively better: sub-Saharan Africa.

“Right now I’m no stress, no anxiety,” said Odhiambo, 34, relaxing in his family home in this western Kenyan city along the shores of Lake Victoria. “Think of it this way: When I was in the U.S., I was close to 300 pounds. Now, I’m like 200. The biggest thing for me was quality of life.”

While that may seem counterintuitive to Americans accustomed to bleaker images of Africa, recent studies have documented the flight of immigrant professionals from the United States to their home countries. Chinese and Indian workers increasingly say they see better opportunities and lifestyles at home. And diaspora associations of Nigerians, Ghanaians, Kenyans and other Africans say their members — mostly from middle-class backgrounds — are joining the exodus, choosing life in the land of slow Internet connections and power outages over the pressures of recession-era America.

“I personally know many people who are going back,” said Erastus Mong’are, who works as a program manager for an insurance company in Delaware and heads an association of Kenyans living there. “The people I know here work two or three jobs just to make ends meet, while in Kenya — despite its problems — people seem more happy. They seem to be getting more time with family. More relaxed. Here, if my neighbor sees I’ve parked in his spot, he becomes so upset.”
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In a broad sense, the return migration to Africa is in line with studies suggesting that despite persistent poverty and civil unrest in places such as Congo, Somalia and Sudan, much of the continent has been buoyed in recent years by a sense of optimism driven by economic growth. Pew Research Center studies tracking global attitudes have found that people’s level of satisfaction with their quality of life is rising across much of Africa, while it has stayed level or decreased in the United States. For Odhiambo, disillusionment with the American way of life grew more or less with his waistline.

As a lean young man, he moved to the United States to attend a community college in Upstate New York, an idea nurtured by images of American life he saw on television growing up in a middle-class family in Kenya: “Diff’rent Strokes,” “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “Beverly Hills, 90210.”

“You’d see all these manicured lawns, all this organization,” he recalled on a recent day, while having a long lunch at an outdoor cafe without once looking at his watch.

He arrived in the mid-1990s with a sense of possibility in a land promising immigrants a better life. After college, he moved to Texas and worked as a long-haul truck driver, crisscrossing the country delivering auto parts, televisions, soda bottles and big containers from China. He marveled at innovations such as the car cup holder; he was inspired by government efficiencies that made it possible to get a driver’s license in one day. And as his pay improved, he and his wife moved into a luxury apartment complex outside Dallas called Sonoma Grande at the Legends.

“It was really nice,” Odhiambo recalled, noting that it had a pool, a Jacuzzi, a gym and other treats unheard of in Kenya.

But as his workdays grew longer, he hardly enjoyed any of those amenities. He worked 14-hour shifts trying to keep up with his $800 monthly rent, payments on a new Ford Ranger pickup, health insurance that did not cover a pair of tinted prescription glasses needed for long hours at the wheel, and bills driven by must-haves such as air conditioning.

“I couldn’t get any exercise at all, and I was restricted to truck stops for food,” he said. “I’d go for the buffet — meat with gravy, fried chicken — or fast food. I didn’t have time for my daughters. In the movies, they only show one side of America.”

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Copyright Newsweek

Until recently, the way Chinese artists got famous was to talk politics. The generation that grew up during the Cultural Revolution and the difficult years that followed was highly politicized and gained global recognition for its tongue-in-cheek images of Mao Zedong and Tiananmen Square, often rendered in eye-popping color. Wang Guangyi’s kitschy communist-style propaganda posters incorporated iconic consumer logos, such as Coca-Cola and Porsche, and Yue Minjun mocked the fast-changing world with his paintings of large-mouthed men grinning relentlessly.

Though still hot, those new-wave artists are giving way to a very different group: the “me-first” generation, whose members talk about each other and themselves. Born in the 1980s under China’s one-child policy, they were still children during Tiananmen and are much less interested in politics and far more concerned with individuality. Unlike their elders, who use art to criticize the growing commercialism and inequality of post-Mao China, the younger generation is a product of that rapid economic transformation. Their parents doted on them. They’ve been exposed to a broader range of media, including the Internet, videogames, Japanese manga and Korean soap operas. Coffee rather than tea drinkers, they are as comfortable listening to American rock and hip-hop as to Cantonese pop.

Their work reflects their experience, informed by global fashion, technology and media. What they lack in edginess they make up for in innovation and an openness to experimentation with new media, like video and electronic art. “Whereas their parents were raised to listen to their superiors and to respect tradition, the ‘me’ generation are primarily concerned with themselves,” says Nicole Schoeni, director of Hong Kong–based Schoeni Art Gallery. “It’s about the individuals, about consuming, about having fun. A lot of the artists like to work with mixed media. They’re much more willing to be more adventurous with the medium they are using.”

Many embrace cartoons, using an imaginary world of cute, simplified characters, often with exaggerated features, clearly influenced by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. Victoria Lu, creative director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai, calls the style Animamix, combining the words “animation” and “comics” to describe this new esthetic, which idolizes youth and play and ignores adult politics. “These artists and their artworks are like surfers in the vast ocean, rising and falling with the waves of the times. Unable to hold to a fixed position or direction,” Lu says, “they often create shifting worlds which invite the viewers to traverse space and time, and construct a reality and meanings that closely reflect one’s embedded desires and fantasy.”

Beijing-based artist Yang Na, 27, paints doll-like, seductive women who resemble avatars in online chat rooms. With out-of-proportion heads, false eyelashes, pouty mouths and perfect porcelain skin, her characters appear sprung from sexual fantasy and convey a message of seduction, but also one of superficiality and emptiness. “These women are a symbol of our era of consumption,” Yang explains. “Enveloped in a lifestyle of greed and excessive materialism, these girls look alike. But their interest in the latest fashion masks inner confusion and obsession, a kind of emotion only youth has. Being young means being both perfect and imperfect, gorgeous and sick, happy and despondent.”

Han Yajuan, 29, plays off the appetite of young Chinese girls for the latest fashion accessories with her cartoon-style images of newly empowered women rendered as cute characters. Her figures have all the trappings of contemporary city girls: flashy cars, designer sunglasses and bulging shopping bags. They appear to live guilt-free lives of consumption, which the artist says embodies the dreams and aspirations of her generation. “Han clearly shows empowered females that are benefiting from the economic boom,” says Mila Bollansee, a curator based in Beijing. “Yet if her theme is that of a strong, independent woman, she’s also fully aware that women in China are not on an equal footing with men. Her message is for each individual to take responsibility for him or herself in this new society.”

Some observers note that for all their cuteness and flippant humor, these cartoonlike characters evoke a sense of loneliness, anxiety and spiritual emptiness. Karen Smith, a well-known Beijing art critic, believes the “me” generation is struggling with being single children who marry single children, overindulged by parents and in-laws but expected to one day support them. Many artists are thus escaping into fantasy worlds, such as the dreamscapes of Wu Dinglong, 27, or Sun Lei, 24, an animation artist who in Smith’s words creates “evocative interpretations of modern life from the perspective of youth today” using hand-drawn animation cells that are then photographed and fed into a computer to create moving images. It’s perhaps the greatest sign of progress that through such works young Chinese artists are observing their worlds but have gone from criticizing their country to examining, and criticizing, themselves.

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Some of my photography, nicely organized:
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I’m in the midst of a major update of my website: howardwfrench.net. Stay tuned.

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Copyright The New York Review of Books

Excerpted from a very fine piece about Japan’s woes by always interesting Buruma.

… In 1960, after widespread demonstrations against the renewal of the US–Japan security treaty had led to the resignation of Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, his successor, Ikeda Hayato, announced a government plan to double everyone’s income through high-speed growth. Enriching the population under the paternalistic rule of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was a deliberate attempt to deflect political energies into economic well-being. The middle class was offered a deal: material wealth in exchange for political acquiescence, a virtual one-party state with no more protests, and the dutiful army of salarymen would be taken care of. Labor unions had been pretty much tamed, sometimes with the strong-arm help of gangsters. And Japanese pacifism was guaranteed by a constitution, written by Americans in 1946, which banned the use of armed force. Responsibility for national security was handed over to the US, which had (and still has) military bases all over the Japanese archipelago.

This system, put in place in 1955, when the LDP was formed, and cemented in 1960, suited the Japanese political and business elite, who could now concentrate on industrial expansion. It suited most Japanese, who wanted nothing more to do with war. Like a reformed alcoholic, many Japanese feared that even one little sip of military action would lead to another bender. And it suited the US, which wanted Japan to be a reliable bastion against communism. So CIA money was funneled into the already well-stocked coffers of the LDP for several decades, to make sure all signs of leftism were kept at bay; rather like what happened in Italy, where the Christian Democrats benefited from a similar arrangement.

When the US and its allies occupied Japan after the war, one of the main goals was to establish a stable democracy. To the eternal credit of General MacArthur’s administration and Japanese democrats, they succeeded. But in the LDP state, democracy began to suffer from lack of use, as it were. The left was both marginalized and, briefly, radicalized. As happened in Italy and Germany, the fragments of the 1960s protest generation exploded in acts of mindless violence in the 1970s: airline hijackings, purges of “traitors,” murder sprees on behalf of Palestinian liberation, and other revolutionary causes.

The electoral system, skewed to favor conservative rural constituencies, made it hard for more liberal parties to challenge the supremacy of the LDP, which was soon corrupted by the vast amounts of money slushing through the system. The ruling party, in fact a huge pork-barrel operation, became increasingly gummed up by a congeries of factions led in recent years by members of political dynasties going back at least three generations. Prime Minister Aso, for example, is the grandson of Yoshida Shigeru, prime minister in 1946, and one of the chief architects of the LDP state. Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, a recent predecessor, was Kishi’s grandson.

The postwar deal (often called the “Yoshida deal,” or the “1955 system”) had another consequence, which is now becoming painfully obvious: it marginalized Japan as an international player. While China and even India receive enormous attention as rising powers, Japan, which still has the second-biggest economy in the world, is seldom in the news, except when some hack politician says something silly about the role of women or the last world war. No Japanese political thinker has made any impact in the West, or indeed anywhere else. Intellectually and politically, Japan seems to exist in a peculiar bubble of its own.

It did not look this way twenty years ago, when all kinds of intelligent people were warning us about Japan’s imminent dominance of the world. The “Japan model,” of brilliant bureaucrats steering huge business and industrial conglomerates toward ever greater victories on the world markets, was seen as either a great danger or something to emulate, or both. Pundits declared that “soft” economic power was much more important than the “hard” military kind. Even if the slump of the 1990s did not exactly destroy the “Japan model,” with its fuzzy borders between private and public enterprise, it certainly showed up its vulnerabilities. And the recent collapse of the “American model” has caused even greater havoc, because of Japan’s sacrifice of domestic consumers’ interests to the demands of its export industries, now in search of customers.

The ups and downs of the Japanese economy, however, don’t explain the country’s relative isolation and political sclerosis. Of all people, the man who saw this coming was Kishi Nobusuke, the ultra-nationalist wartime minister of armaments, arrested in 1945 as a war criminal, only to be released from prison in 1948, when fiercely anti-Communist politicians were suddenly in demand. He was the prime minister who provoked mass demonstrations when he signed a new security treaty with the US in 1960. Kishi was opposed to the “peace constitution” from the beginning. Handing over responsibility for national security to a foreign power, he said, was a humiliating abdication of national sovereignty, rather like the unequal treaties in colonial times. This view is still shared by a significant number of Japanese conservatives. What Kishi wanted was a system in which two more or less conservative parties would hold each other in check. A one-party state, bent on nothing but economic gain, would not only lead to the corruption of power, but put Japan on the sidelines of all but business affairs.

Unprepossessing as Kishi was, he had a real point. Under pressure from the US, which soon regretted having promoted pacifism, Japan created the so-called Self-Defense Forces. But the SDF still couldn’t contribute much to international conflicts except for the odd engineering project. Even for Japanese engaged in patrolling duties, as several hundred now are off the coast of Somalia, the spirit of the constitution had to be compromised. Some, both in and outside Japan, might consider barriers to military action to be a very good thing. But the lack of consensus over the continuously fudged constitution and the odd status of being a kind of vassal state to the US have created anxieties, resentments, and frustrations, which have a depressing effect on political debates in Japan and on Japan’s relations with the outside world.

A glimpse of this can be seen in Kurosawa’s movie Tokyo Sonata. Boredom with Japan’s lack of international status and the emptiness of its pursuit of materialism is why Sasaki’s elder son decides to go to Iraq with the US Army. He craves an ideal, something to fight for.[3] Perhaps this is what the novelist Murakami Ryu meant when he said, “We have everything in Japan except hope.”[4] The same frustration explains the popularity among young Japanese of comic books celebrating Japanese heroism during World War II, and why the rise of China is causing such fear, as well as resentment, especially when Chinese officials use history as a tool to stoke nationalism or to extract political or economic concessions from Japan.

A national debate on Japan’s constitution is long overdue. The conservative Yomiuri newspaper tried to promote this idea in its pages after the 1991 Gulf War, when Japan was criticized for not offering anything but a financial contribution. The proposal was not radical, but simply to make Japan’s right to self-defense explicit. Ozawa Ichiro, a former LDP politician who started his own opposition party in 1993 and more recently, until his resignation in May, led the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), went one step further and argued that Japanese forces should be able to take part in international combat missions under the auspices of the UN. He also wants all US forces, except the Seventh Fleet, to vacate their Japanese bases.

The debate stalled, however. Instead, often provoked by unguarded statements by right-wing politicians, there are endless polemics about history, not so much by historians, which would be proper, but by politicians, journalists, and commentators with political agendas. As long as defenders of the “peace constitution” bring up Japan’s former militarism as a reason to oppose constitutional change, conservatives will argue that Japan did nothing wrong, indeed, that Japan fought a noble war to liberate Asia from Western imperialism.

Such statements by officials are usually followed by swift resignations from public office, especially when they reach the foreign press, causing yet more resentment among the nationalists. The latest spat of this kind occurred last year, when Air Self-Defense Force Chief of Staff General Tamogami Toshio wrote an essay depicting Japan as a wartime victim, dragged into the Sino-Japanese conflict by Chiang Kai-shek and tricked by the US into waging the Pacific war. Japanese journals are still arguing for one side or the other, depending on their political views.

In this respect, Japan is trapped in the 1950s, bogged down in arguments that should have been settled decades ago. Without settling them, however, it will be difficult for Japan to be trusted by its Asian neighbors and have a diplomatic influence commensurate with its economic weight. China will continue to gain influence, probably at Japan’s expense. Meanwhile, the US armed forces are still in Japan, financed to a large extent by the Japanese themselves, even as many people resent their continued presence.

The biggest change since the LDP state was established is that the government can no longer keep up its side of the bargain with the Japanese middle class: the slump took care of that. This has not yet had the effect of repoliticizing the middle class; there are no big demonstrations, at least not yet, nothing except an anxious waiting for worse to come.[5] The election of Barack Obama, which electrified Europeans, fascinated Japanese too. But the main worry in official circles upon the Democrats’ great victory was that the new president might care more about China than about Japan…

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Copyright The Washington Post

In 2003, Nuhu Ribadu, a bookish police officer with a legal degree, became head of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission of Nigeria. His job was to investigate corruption — a problem that Ribadu estimates has cost Nigeria more than $380 billion since independence in 1960.

One of Ribadu’s first moves was to go after the Nigerian scams that duped e-mail recipients around the world into get-rich-quick schemes. He went after dirty politicians, too, helping Nigeria recover more than $5 billion in stolen assets. But Ribadu went too far. After charging a powerful state governor with corruption in December 2007, Ribadu was removed from his post. After two attempts on his life, he fled to Britain in September. Last week, Ribadu sat down with Outlook editor John Pomfret to talk about Africa, corruption and trying to stay alive. Excerpts:

How bad is corruption in Africa?

It’s a massive problem. $140 billion — that is the African Union’s estimate of the cost of corruption to Africa annually. This is about 25 percent of total GDP in sub-Saharan Africa.

It is the reason why Africa is Africa today. Not long ago, we were at par with several other parts of the world. Today we are really decades away, and it is certainly because of corruption.

You investigated and prosecuted your own boss, Tafa Balogun, the inspector general of police.

This is a gentleman who was in charge of law enforcement. We got as much as $150 million that he was keeping in terms of money and properties.

How much does a police officer make per month in Nigeria?

The average I think, maybe maximum $200.
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So how did you get him?

We had a reporting system whereby transactions above a certain threshold had to be reported to us. And we saw this policeman with a billion nairas [$1 = 150 naira] in his account. And that’s what triggered the investigation.

You also investigated governors of Nigeria’s powerful states.

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Copyright The New York Review of Books

Before the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley
by Christopher John Farley

Amistad, 216 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Bob Marley: Herald of the Postcolonial World?
by Jason Toynbee

Polity, 252 pp., $69.95; $22.95 (paper)
The Book of Exodus: The Making and Meaning of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Album of the Century
by Vivien Goldman

Three Rivers, 325 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Soul Rebel: An Intimate Portrait of Bob Marley
by David Burnett

Insight Editions, 141 pp., $39.95
1.

Bob Marley died of cancer on May 11, 1981, at the premature age of thirty-six. By then he was well known to college kids worldwide, but few could have foreseen the celebrity he has attained since. Born in Jamaica, he is the only third-world performer to be elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 1999, the BBC named his “One Love” the “Song of the Millennium”; the same year Time declared his 1977 Exodus the “Best Album of the Twentieth Century.” Voted the third-greatest songwriter of all time in a 2001 BBC poll (behind Bob Dylan and John Lennon), Marley has sold an estimated 50 million records worldwide. On the 2007 Forbes list of “Top-Earning Dead Celebrities,” he ranked twelfth, with his estate earning an estimated $4 million. His posthumous greatest-hits collection, Legend (1984), is among the top-selling compilations of all time. Twenty-seven years after his death, there is perhaps no country where his songs—wry ballads and martial anthems, with soothing or stirring melodies—aren’t familiar.

The songs tell a familiar story of black slaves, mainly West Africans brought to work Jamaica’s fields of indigo and sugar cane, combining their own diverse cultures with those they found and making something new. Like many of his contemporaries—young country people who migrated to the city seeking work, only to end up in its swelling slums—Marley absorbed the political and musical currents that flowed through Jamaica and its capital, Kingston, in the years before and after its independence in 1962. Among the sounds were spirituals sung in clapboard churches and folk songs toiled and danced to in fields and shacks; newer rhythms from neighboring islands—mambo from Cuba, calypso from Trinidad; and increasingly, with the advent of the transistor radio and the spread of “sound systems” (turntables and enormous loudspeakers that made musical block parties possible), American doo-wop and rhythm-and-blues.
French-American Foundation Translation Finalists

In a city full of artists and entrepreneurs seeking to forge a new national culture, Marley and his peers—like many others in the third world at the time—adapted these sounds to their lives on the margins. From the early 1960s, Marley became part of the rapid evolution of Jamaican popular music: mento, the calypso-inflected dance style dominant in the 1950s, gave way by the decade’s end to the kinetic hop called ska, and then, in the mid-1960s, to the languid shuffle called rocksteady; finally, a few years later, came the driving, spacious sound of reggae—the style Marley brought to a worldwide audience.

Emerging from the alleyways and harborside recording studios of Kingston in the late 1960s, reggae combined sweet vocal harmonies with an odd new rhythm. Adapting a cadence common to boogie blues, the style’s young artists transformed its characteristic musical feature—offbeat accents between main beats—into the dominant trait of their new sound, thereby forging a music at once familiar and eerily strange to foreign ears.[1]

Marley was a brilliant synthesist of musical styles, and his influence on the world’s popular music can still be heard from rock to rap to samba to jazz. An ingenious songwriter who was also an electrifying performer, he made music whose “thud-sobbing,” as Derek Walcott once wrote, evokes “a sadness as real as the smell/of rain on dry earth.”[2] He used the language of the King James Bible to sing of romance and revolution, emancipation and freedom. When they were written, his songs evoked for many, especially in Africa, the hopes that came with national sovereignty in a decolonizing age. But they now transcend their time and place and are heard from Liverpool to Lagos, Tennessee to Tibet, Sydney to São Paulo.
2.

Born in 1945 in the hills of Jamaica’s “garden parish” of St. Ann, Robert Nesta Marley descended from the Maroons, fugitive slaves who had waged a guerrilla war against the British for the better part of two centuries. His mother, Cedella Malcolm, was an eighteen-year-old dark-skinned peasant girl; his father, an itinerant white Kingstonian in his sixties who claimed (falsely, it seems) to be British-born. Young Nesta spent his early years in the dusty hamlet of Nine Miles, but moved, by his twelfth birthday, to Kingston. Settling in Trenchtown, the onetime squatter camp just west of the city center that had absorbed the postwar influx from the countryside, Marley witnessed firsthand the poverty of the “sufferahs” whose aspirations he would later give voice to in his songs.

In a passionate but flawed biography, Before the Legend, Christopher John Farley, a former music critic at Time and now an editor at The Wall Street Journal, describes the young Marley, a slight, poorly dressed “yellow-bwoy,” as an easy target for the city’s bullies. He shared the light complexion of the upper middle class but not their social status. As an adult, he would speak of “not hav[ing] prejudice against myself”: “Me don’t dip on the black man’s side nor the white man’s side,” he put it; “me dip on God’s side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white.” It seems likely, however, as the Jamaican-born Farley argues, that Marley’s adolescent striving was in part motivated by a desire to prove himself to his black peers.[3]

Farley’s book, though marred by trite philosophizing, is correct in its essential argument: that the story of Jamaican music during Marley’s formative years—the 1960s—is crucial to the larger history of popular music in the twentieth century. For example, Jamaican music in the 1960s sowed the seeds for the efflorescence, a decade later, of hip-hop, the most popular genre of music in the United States, and the world, today. The figure commonly credited as the progenitor of hip-hop in 1970s New York, DJ Kool Herc (né Clive Campbell), was a Jamaican-born immigrant who’d grown up watching Kingston disc jockeys “toasting”—declaiming lyrics over their records’ instrumental sections—at city dances.[4]

In and out of school in his early Kingston days, by his mid-teens Marley was mostly out. He worked briefly as a welder, but spent much of his time hoping for a career—or at least a moment of ghetto notoriety—in the nascent music business that had sprung up in the capital. Since youth, Marley had nurtured dreams of being a musician: “You nuh hear me say,” he’d told his mother, “is nothing else me want to do besides sing?” At sixteen he cut his first single, an aphoristic ditty called “Judge Not” released by Beverley’s Records in Kingston on the eve of independence in 1962. The following year, he formed his first group.

As a teenager, Marley spent his time listening to American vocal groups like the Drifters and working out harmonies with two neighborhood friends, Winston McIntosh and Neville “Bunny” Livingston. Marley was a tenor who ranged to a ringing falsetto; McIntosh was a tall, brash basso profundo who went by the name of Peter Tosh; Livingston (later Bunny Wailer) was, like Bob, a tenor and a childhood acquaintance from St. Ann. Calling themselves the Wailers, the trio was soon recording with the island’s top session musicians for Clement “Sir Coxsone” Dodd, owner of the city’s largest sound system and of Studio One, then the most important recording studio in Jamaica.

Their repertoire included covers of hits by the Beatles and Dion and the Belmonts and a few scripture-inspired tracks that Marley would update in later years—including “One Love,” the future Song of the Millennium, which began as a ska riff on Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready.” Despite all the records the Wailers sold for Coxsone—their first of many number-one Jamaican hits, in February 1964, was “Simmer Down,” Marley’s peace paean to the city’s “rude boys” (stylish street-fighting members of youth gangs)—they never received royalties. The three survived on a small weekly stipend from the producer; Marley often slept on the studio floor.
3.

In 1972, Jamaican filmmaker Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come became a surprise hit at the Venice Film Festival. In the film, the reggae singer Jimmy Cliff plays a country-born slum dweller who becomes a gun-toting outlaw, a folk hero who ducks into the studio to cut hit records as he flees from the cops. With a superb soundtrack featuring some of Kingston’s best acts, the film introduced reggae and its culture to the world.

By then, the twenty-seven-year-old Marley had had several local hit songs with the Wailers, married a local girl (and sometime vocal collaborator) named Rita Anderson, and spent time working in the United States, where his mother had emigrated in the early 1960s. Marley had also become drawn to Rastafari, the faith that he would make synonymous with reggae. His lyrics were increasingly influenced by the distinctive biblical and political language used by Rastafarians in Jamaica. The sect had been born in Kingston a few decades before, when a group of Marcus Garvey’s followers celebrated the 1930 coronation of Haile Selassie I as emperor of Ethiopia as a fulfillment of Garvey’s supposed prophecy to “look to the East for the crowning of the African king.”[5]

To the Rastafarians, who revered Selassie as the living Christ, the Emperor’s later reputation as a vainglorious dictator (and his eventual death) mattered less than his stature as ruler of Africa’s last uncolonized land. The sect’s impoverished members—among them the Kingston musicians who introduced the Wailers to the faith—chanted Selassie’s name at drumming ceremonies and sang hymns of “going home” to an Ethiopian Zion. Developing an elaborate eschatology drawn from the King James Bible, their outlook and speech were shaped by the scriptures: they frowned on modern medicine and refused to eat meat, encouraged the ritual smoking of marijuana (for “good meditation,” according to their reading of the Old Testament), praised “Jah” (as they called Selassie, after the King James’s Jehovah), and scorned “Babylon” (the corrupted capitalist West). Moreover, citing the Samsonite edict of Leviticus 21:15 (“they shalt not make baldness upon their head”), they prohibited the cutting of hair. By the time Bunny and Peter joined Bob in London, where he was on tour, in the summer of 1972, all three had begun to let their hair grow into matted, ropy dreadlocks.

In the fall of 1972, the Wailers met with Christopher Blackwell, the Kingston-raised scion of a wealthy colonial family whose London company, Island Records, had just released the Harder They Come soundtrack. They made a stark impression: all nappy hair and practiced scowls with the charisma of beautiful young men at once poor and proud. Blackwell later recalled, “It was like the real character [Ivan] from The Harder They Come walking in the office.” The Wailers needed a break. Since leaving Coxsone Dodd’s label, they had worked with Lee “Scratch” Perry, an eccentric studio genius and Dodd protégé who had helped them develop a potent new sound. After being poorly paid by Dodd, then battling for a time to keep their own hole-in-the-wall record label afloat, their work with Perry had proven just as unprofitable. Blackwell gave them £4000 to make an album—their first real payday. They refused to sign a contract: they felt their word was good enough.

The producer’s support, as Jason Toynbee writes in his sharp, serious study of Marley’s music and his rise to fame, represented more than a simple risk taken on an unproven act. By 1972 reggae had produced a few British chart hits (notably Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites” which went to number one in 1969). Most industry executives, however, still regarded the genre as good only for singles. Blackwell’s hope, according to Toynbee, was that savvy record-buyers (and increasingly powerful rock journalists) were ready to embrace a reggae singer as the creator of a rock album, the relatively new art object that the Beatles had helped establish as the emblem of rock stardom.

Blackwell flew to Kingston a few weeks later to check on his charges. The music Marley played him astounded him: falsetto harmonies over chicken-scratch guitar; gorgeous melodies incongruously carried by electric bass; subtly prominent syncopated drums. The ecstatic Blackwell set about turning these tracks into the album he wanted to market. Choosing nine of the dozen-odd songs from the Kingston tapes, he extended the length of each. To help ingratiate these exotic sounds with young British fans of guitar stars like Eric Clapton, Blackwell asked Wayne Perkins, an Alabama blues-rock guitarist who happened to be working on his family band’s record at Island’s studios, to overdub electric lead guitar parts on the Wailers’ tunes.

Marley, as Toynbee writes, was initially skeptical about Perkins’s contribution, but came around on hearing the subtle color his work added; he signaled his approval by offering Perkins a draw on his personal marijuana cigar (or “spliff”). In the group photograph taken for the dust jacket—the album, Catch a Fire, came packaged in a cardboard replica of a Zippo cigarette lighter—and on the UK tour the Wailers undertook on its release, Perkins, who was white, was not included. Marley’s appeal lay in the same mix of “tribal” mystic with electric rock that had proved so potent in Jimi Hendrix. But his act, unlike Hendrix’s, had to be recognizably Jamaican, and thus black.

If the sound was a mélange, the songs (with titles like “400 Years” and “Concrete Jungle”) left no doubt about the world and the history out of which they came. From “Slave Driver”:

Every time I hear the crack of
a whip
my blood runs cold
I remember on the slave ship
how they brutalize our very
souls
Today they say that we are free
only to be chained here
in poverty….

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From the Richmond Free Press:

Carolyn Howard French, 82, educator, civil rights advocate

Carolyn Howard French was outraged when a company proposed to strip mine shale in Orange County just a few yards from the historic African-American community of Careytown and her home, Brownland, a farm where six generations of her family has lived.

Joining with neighbors in the rural Barboursville area, she waged an ultimately successful three-year fight to prevent mining operations and protect her family’s ancestral home and the rest of the community that newly freed slaves founded after the Civil War ended in 1865.

Refusing to give up when county supervisors approved the mining plan, Mrs. French and her neighbors went to court, finally winning their battle in 2005 when the Virginia Supreme Court overturned the county’s decision to allow a mining road to be rammed through Careytown.

For Mrs. French, a retired educator and genealogy buff, the fight over the mine combined her lifelong passions for history and civil rights.

In the 1960s, she drove the family van, converted to an ambulance, in several protest marches for voting rights, including the Selma-to-Montgomery March in Alabama in 1965 and the Meredith March in Mississippi in 1966.

As an active member of the Orange County Branch of the NAACP, Mrs. French encouraged voting as a lontime poll worker in the county and later as a member of the county Electoral Board, where she was involved in supervising elections.

Long involved in civic affairs, she established the Orange County Council on Race Relations and was a founding member of the Orange County African-American Historical Society.

Mrs. French died Monday, April 27, 2009, after battling cancer. She was 82.

She was eulogized Monday, May 4, at the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., where she was born and grew up.

Mrs. French was married for 63 years to Dr. David M. French, a retired globetrotting physician who was a leader in establishing community health care programs in Africa, Asia and the United States, including Richmond, where he coordinated a health network program at Virginia Commonwealth University to funnel physicians to under-served areas of the state.

The couple, who had eight children, met while she was earning her degree at Mt. Holyoke College and he was a medical student at Howard University. While he pursued his physician carer, often moving the family, Mrs. French became a teacher.

She began at the Garden of Children, a nursery school her mother founded in Washington. She later worked with Head Start in D.C. and at day care centers in the Boston area, including the Crispus Attucks Day Care Center, where she was founding director.

She and her husband returned to her ancestral home at Brownland in 1986.

Along with Dr. French, her survivors include her childrench, Bertha Mae F. Harkless of Portland, Ore.; David M. French Jr. of Barboursville; Dorothy F. Boone of Richmond; Howard W. French of New York; Joseph B. French of Oakland, Calif.; Mary Ann French of Charlottesville; and Lynn C. French and James A. French , both of Washington, D.C.

From the Orange County Review

On Monday, April 27, Carolyn Howard French succumbed after a brave battle with cancer, surrounded by her loving family. The daughter of Dr. William J. and Dorothy Waring Howard, she was born in Washington, DC, but lived overseas for many years, traveling around the world, making friends and extending her warmth and hospitality to everyone.
French broke molds in all walks of her life: as an educator, family historian, political activist and a member of numerous civic and social organizations. She was a natural leader who enjoyed the process of creating and implementing change, and at various times was president of most of the organizations she joined. She also was a voracious reader and lifelong learner who continued her education at every opportunity.
Throughout most of her life French undertook extensive research projects that focused on the Howard, Waring and French families and involved all of her children and many of her grandchildren in trips to libraries, courthouses and archives in hot pursuit of information. At various times she was a member of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, the Historical Society of Washington, and the Orange County Historical Society. She was a founder of the Orange County African-American Historical Society.
A fifth-generation Washingtonian, French spent her early years in the historic Strivers section of Washington, DC. She attended the Garden of Children, which was founded by her mother, from age two until third grade, going on to Garrison Elementary School, Shaw Junior High School, the Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School and Mount Holyoke College. While at Mt. Holyoke, Carolyn met her future husband David M. French.
They married in 1945 and became the parents of eight children. French instilled in her children a love for the written word, precise language and intellectual curiosity.
During their 63-year marriage, French and her husband lived in Washington, DC; Cleveland, Ohio; Boston, Massachusetts; Detroit, Michigan; Newton, Massachusetts; Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire and Barboursville, Virginia. In each place she and her family lived, her time and energy were focused inwardly on family and outwardly on creating social change.
French’s career as an educator began at the Garden of Children, and included teaching positions at schools, Head Start programs and day care centers in Washington, DC and Massachusetts. In Côte d’Ivoire she served on the board of the International School.
In addition to her work in support of early childhood education, French worked in many capacities to ensure the rights of all citizens. She won the respect of civil rights leaders for courageously driving the family van, converted into an ambulance, during the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965 and the Meredith March in 1966.
French’s last 23 years were spent with her husband at Brownland, her ancestral home in the Virginia Piedmont. She became an active member of the Orange County Branch of the NAACP executive committee, established the Orange County Council on Race Relations and served on the Orange Downtown Alliance. She was appointed to the Rappahannock-Rapidan Community Services Board and was recognized by the Orange County Board of Supervisors for her work. Additionally, she was elected an officer of the Orange County Democratic Committee and ultimately served on the Orange County Board of Elections.
As a founding member of the Friends of Barboursville, Carolyn was active in a successful effort to prevent strip mining in Barboursville, which resulted in preservation of the ecology, and a historic and thriving African-American community.
She is survived by her husband, Dr. David M. French; children, Lynn Carol, Mary Ann, David Jr., Howard Waring (Agnes), Joseph Blaine, James Albert, Bertha Mae French (Guy Harkless) and Dorothy French Boone (Elwood); as well as 14 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

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A link to Bill Jay’s writings on photography.
Bill, a real force for the medium, died recently.

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Copyright The Nation - This article appeared in the May 18, 2009 edition.
By Howard W. French

May 4, 2009

When it was published fifty years ago, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart caused a stir for its revelation of something hitherto strange and unfamiliar in the world of literature: genuine African voices. Achebe was not the first African novelist, as he has sometimes wrongly been called, but his use of standard English to produce believable characters who inhabited a complex and authentic world marked two existing traditions of writing about Africa as evolutionary dead ends.

Before Achebe’s breakthrough, there had been folklore-based African narratives, more entertainments than novels, written in English vernaculars that sought to reproduce the aural texture of African pidgins. The most famous of these, The Palm Wine Drinkard and my Life in the Bush of Ghosts, was written by another Nigerian, Amos Tutuola, and published six years before Things Fall Apart was released by Heinemann. Today it is hard not to hear a condescending ring in Dylan Thomas’s praise of Tutuola’s book for what he called its “young English.”

Earlier still, there had been yet another tradition of European writers ventriloquizing what they imagined to be an African voice. The classic example is a novel published in 1939 called Mister Johnson, by Joyce Cary, a former British colonial officer in Nigeria. It is an ostensible tragedy written in a comical style with a central African character, the titular Johnson, whom Cary described as someone who “swims gaily on the surface of life.” Two decades ago, an essay about Cary in The New York Review of Books described the book’s lightheaded eponymous figure in terms that un-self-consciously echoed one of the oldest and ugliest stereotypes of Africans—their inability to master the concept of time: “A fragrant breeze, a blazing tropical sunrise, a pretty girl—such things so overwhelm him that past and future alike momentarily disappear.”

In interviews Achebe has suggested that his book, which has been translated into some fifty languages, was written partly in reaction to the patronizing caricature of Johnson. Things Fall Apart, however, unlike Mister Johnson, is tragedy pure and simple, both deeply personal—in the case of its main character, the excessively proud Okonkwo, whose Sophoclean fall is foretold by any number of omens—and collective, as Okonkwo’s society is sundered and then subjugated by the British empire’s one-two combination of missionaries and colonialists.

However remarkable on this score, Achebe’s first novel achieved far more than revealing genuine African voices. Things Fall Apart was the first novel in English to depict Africans who exist in an intricate moral universe; one that resonates with indigenous thought and values and concedes nothing, even in the face of the arrival of far more powerful outsiders. In place of the ignorant and superstitious “oogah-boogah”-muttering natives served up by generations of Westerners in literature and film, Achebe breathes life into sentient and articulate characters, people like Akunna, who delights in refuting a white missionary who insists that the Igbo divinities are false idols. “Yes,” says Akunna, referring to a carving. “It is indeed a piece of wood. The tree from which it came was made by Chukwu, as indeed all minor gods were. But He made them for His messengers so that we could approach Him through them. It is like yourself. You are the head of your church.”

Among the greatest qualities of Things Fall Apart is the vigor of its revolt against the everyday amalgamations and condescension that treat Africa as an undifferentiated wasteland. Indeed, without ever stooping to polemic, Achebe sustains this quiet rebellion on nearly every page. One way is through an accumulation of anecdotal detail. In passage after passage he remarks on differences both subtle and dramatic between the customs and laws of various clans in his Igbo ethnic group, and less frequently with references to the world beyond. Briefly, sometimes, he even resorts to wicked humor, yet still manages to be pointed, as in a discussion of alien marriage rites. “But what is good in one place is bad in another place,” a character remarks. “The world is large,” replies Okonkwo. “I have even heard that in some tribes a man’s children belong to his wife and her family.” “That cannot be,” comes the incredulous reply. “You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the children.” Achebe’s defiance of Western contempt is married to a subtle but unmistakable appeal to Africans not to submit to feelings of inferiority, and this achievement is all the more remarkable for the book’s utter lack of mawkishness.

One could fill a small library with books examining Africa’s failings from the standpoint of economics, political science or even culture, which is usually taken to mean something that Africans lack. Things Fall Apart suggests a different answer. In a recent interview with the NPR program Studio 360, Achebe described the novel as “the story of colonial rule, one people imposing themselves on another people, who in this case happened to be the owners of the land. So you had a situation in which people come from somewhere else and say to the people they encounter, Everything you do is wrong. Your religion is wrong. You have no education. You have no culture. So it was that kind of situation, and it triggers by itself tremendous resistance.” The complications from this wound and the manifestations of this struggle echo down through the entire fitful, shambolic and half-realized experience of a half-century of post-independence Africa, and as if by miracle, so much of the coming disaster is anticipated in Achebe’s prose.

The full weight of this tragedy dawns on the reader late in the book in a scene where Okonkwo and some of his fellow clansmen are summoned by the district commissioner in the nearest city after villagers have burned down the white man’s church after its congregants profaned their clan’s god. “An Umofia man does not refuse a call,” Okonkwo says. “He may refuse to do what he is asked; he does not refuse to be asked.” The men are persuaded that their grievances will be heard, only to be brought before a colonial tribunal, disarmed, humiliated and broken.

“We have brought a peaceful administration to you and your people so that you may be happy,” the commissioner says, adding a moment later as he announces their punishment: “I have brought you here because you joined together to molest others, to burn people’s houses and their place of worship. That must not happen in the dominion of our queen, the most powerful ruler in the world.”

For the self-righteous outsider, the entire encounter is about justice. For the natives, it is little more than a lesson in deceit and power. There are echoes here of the old lament often attributed to Native Americans: when the white man came, he had the Bible and we had the land. Now we have the Bible and he has the land.

In the words of the late Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Nigeria’s great musician of protest and one of Achebe’s legion of spiritual descendants, these modern institutions the white man has brought, from the statehouse to the courthouse, all ostensibly in the name of progress, but really as a means of imposing and extending their control, were but new “instruments of magic,” ill-fitting, alien ones that African leaders have eagerly appropriated nonetheless to “turn green into red” and “blue into white.” Indeed, the apprenticeship of the arbitrary and unjust begins in the wake of the tribunal’s judgment of Okonkwo, when the commissioner’s African messengers go to his village to demand payment of the imposed fine, secretly fattening the penalty by fifty bags of cowry shells to pocket the difference themselves.

What is most refreshing here is how deftly Achebe avoids the siren calls of neat moral conclusions that so often make literature of victimization unsatisfying. Tragedy and blame flow in two directions in his rare universe. “Does the white man understand our custom about land?” Okonkwo asks late in the novel. “How can he when he does not even speak our tongue?” comes the answer from a friend.

“But he says our customs are bad, and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say that our customs are bad. How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned against us? The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that hold us together and we have fallen apart.”

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Copyright Slate

An excerpt of a discussion of new books on Africa by Wangari Maathai and Zambian Dambisa Moyo:

…If bad politics is at the heart of Africa’s development problem, how did it come to be that way, and how can the region evolve in a different direction? Here the two authors, obviously, differ markedly. Dambisa Moyo is ready with evidence to back up her lengthy indictment of foreign aid as the source of bad government. She notes that during the Cold War, aid was given out indiscriminately to rulers like Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, who flew his daughter to a wedding on a Concorde the moment Western donors agreed to reschedule a loan. Were it not for the continued availability of concessional loans, she argues, African countries would be forced to get their acts together and meet international governance standards so as to be able to access global bond markets.

There is a lot to this argument. Foreign assistance in the past has simply fueled the patronage machine and helped keep corrupt rulers in power in places like Somalia and Equatorial Guinea. African governments, many of which receive upward of 50 percent of their national budgets from international donors, find themselves accountable not to their people but to overlapping and contradictory echelons of foreigners. Even seemingly benign interventions like humanitarian food aid can undercut local farmers or be used as a means of strengthening the ethnic base of particular politicians.

But Moyo’s case that Africa would have good government if it weren’t for the influx of aid stretches credulity. The roots of Africa’s political malaise go far deeper than the post-independence foreign-aid regime. Unlike East Asia before its encounter with colonialism, more than half of sub-Saharan Africa was not governed by a state structure at the time of the European scramble for Africa that began in the 1870s. The Europeans built colonial institutions on the cheap, seeking to govern vast tracts of territory with skeleton administrations. The big man of contemporary African politics is in many ways a colonial creation, since Europeans sought to rule indirectly by empowering a series of local dictators to carry out their purposes. And, finally, colonialism imposed a set of irrational borders on their colonies. South Sudan fought a 30-year civil war with the regime in Khartoum only because a long-dead British administrator in Cairo didn’t want to offend Egypt by giving it to Uganda, where it more naturally belonged…

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Copyright The New York Times

PHILADELPHIA — The jazz musician Sun Ra, ambassador from the Airy Kingdom World Tomorrow, creator of Enterplanetary Solar Exploding Music, and founder of the Astro Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra, is a hero of mine.

To my ears he was not only a genius composer, keyboardist and bandleader, but also constantly surprising. One minute he’s playing elevator schmaltz; then he’s making you float on air; then he’s making you deaf. I love that he was a sharp dresser, sort of kingly, sort of queenly, in faux leopard-skin capes and miner’s hats with lights.

I also admire him for transcending existential categories. He insisted he hadn’t been born, but always existed, coming to Earth from outer space, specifically the planet Saturn. Like many immigrants, he was self-invented, but radically so. He rejected being black or white or American or even human. He opted for extraterrestrial and wore his otherness like a crown.

You’ll find evidence for all of this in “Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-68,” a small, piquant exhibition of art, writing and ephemera related to his life at the Institute of Contemporary Art here.

Although he kept the precise facts of his early life under wraps, documents show that he was beamed down to Birmingham, Ala., in 1914 as Herman Poole Blount, affectionately known as Sonny. In 1952 he changed his name to Le Sony’r Ra, Ra being the ancient Egyptian solar god. And as a performer he became Sun Ra.

He had at least as many talents as monikers. In addition to being a musician, he was a poet, philosopher, painter, graphic designer, street lecturer, activist and entrepreneur, as well as a numerologist and mystic. He worked out the fate of the universe through interpretive readings of the Bible, the Koran and Flash Gordon comic books, concluding that “the only way this world can be saved from being completely destroyed is through music.”

With that in mind, he composed and played without cease for 60 years, first in Birmingham, then in Chicago and New York, and finally in Philadelphia, where he lived until just before his death in 1993.

He also recorded, packaged and tried to sell his music, which, because it was unconventional, wasn’t easy to do. It is the practical side of his career that this exhibition of album jacket designs, posters, news releases and socio-spiritual manifestos, most of them from his formative years in Chicago, focuses on.

Organized self-promotion was not one of his skills. He was too reserved and too much an outsider. Shy and studious as a youth, he got by on his prodigious keyboard talent. But a visionary experience he claimed to have had gives an idea of his sense of apartness.

“My whole body changed into something else,” he reported many years after. “I could see through myself, I wasn’t in human form.” He said he was taken on an intergalactic trip by creatures with “one little antenna on each ear,” who told him to leave school because “the world was going into complete chaos.”

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