AFRICA

What to Expect from The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah

I am old enough to remember when Jay Leno took over the Tonight Show from Johnny Carson. It was recognized at the time as the end of an era. But Leno did his thing, and because of that, it was the beginning of an era as well.

We’re looking at the same phenomenon on the Daily Show as South African Trevor Noah follows Jon Stewart, who (let’s face it) can’t be replaced. I miss the Stewart era, but I am looking forward to Noah’s time in the host’s chair. I have been a fan of Noah’s for a couple of years now, and if you haven’t seen his work, you owe it to yourself to track down his HBO special and some of the YouTube clips out there.

The first thing to note is that the show is going to be different in its approach. We’re all different people, and Noah is coming from a different time and place than Stewart. As Noah told Entertainment Weekly, he is a “31-year-old half-black, half-white South African man who immigrated to the United States in 2011 and Stewart (as a 52-year-old Jewish man who grew up in New Jersey). “The way we look at the same story will be completely different,” he said. “We have different access to different jokes, different sides, different sensitivities … the most important thing is the place that you come from.”

“We’re still dealing with the same issues, it’s just a different angle we’re looking at things from—and it’s my angle, really. I’m taking things in a slightly different direction, but to the same endpoint.”

Noah speaks seven languages and does some of the best accents and impersonations I have ever seen. So, you’ll see more of that. As an immigrant, he’s got a different take on America than a native, and as a man of mixed-race heritage from a country that abolished legal segregation in his lifetime, he has the standing to talk to us about race.

My friend, Gys de Villiers is a South African actor (he played de Klerk opposite Idris Elba’s Nelson Mandela in “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom) who explained, “Because of his mixed race, he can say things in South Africa that an Afrikaaner like me or a Zulu might not be able to and have the same credibility. Like Obama, he’s neither one nor the other and so he can speak to both.”

Noah himself told Rolling Stone that his show will wind up coming from a more diverse group than the previous incarnation of the Daily Show did. “Already we have people coming in and the racial diversity of the correspondents has gone up dramatically …. Gender-wise, we’ve got a ton of great female writers, too. In the new submissions, 40 percent of the final writers we decided to go with are female. And finding those voices is difficult but we’re lucky in that I’ve worked with great people of every color and I’ve worked with fantastic female writers as well. So we’re bringing that into the room.”

One thing that will feature in his Daily Show that Stewart’s didn’t is New York City itself. Like just about every newcomer, he’s got observations about the city, how people behave, and of course, the subway (he reckons it would be a great opportunity for us all to discuss climate change). Stewart, a Jersey boy, took much of the comedy potential of the city for granted.

One tiny hint – -don’t just watch the first episode and make a decision. The first week will be a four-part miniseries, so you’ll have to at least watch for the whole week.

New New Yorkers: Gys and Jaci de Villiers, South African Theatre Folk

by Jeff Myhre

The 19th Annual New York Fringe Festival just wrapped up another successful orgy of theatre for those who didn’t leave the City for the last half of August. There were 185 shows, and while I didn’t get to more than a handful, my favorite was a one-man show called FAFI, which is a coming-of-age production about a white South African boy growing up under apartheid. The actor, Gys de Villiers, and the director, his wife Jaci de Villiers, wrote the work together, and it premiered at the festival. In their native South Africa, they are very well-known for their work on stage, TV and in film. Internationally, Gys portrayed F.W de Klerk in “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom” opposite Idris Elba.

They have recently immigrated to New York. For New Yorkers, going to Africa would be an adventure, but they see the adventure in going the other direction. They came here about four years ago on holiday and stayed in Williamsburg in Brooklyn. They loved it and eventually, decided to try their luck here.

For those of us who have been here a while and have become a bit jaded, their enthusiasm for New York is a breath of fresh air.

Jaci explained, “Artists are respected here, and while there is a lot of very keen competition, it’s a very healthy environment for creative people.” She’s right – sometimes, we take that for granted.

They have been married 9 years, together for 13 years. They met in the theatre, and there was a professional and personal attraction. For a great many couples, working together puts you in the fast lane to divorce court, but the de Villiers are different. Gys says, “Working together increases intimacy. We come home after rehearsals or a performance and we just keep going over things.” Jaci echoes this saying, “Making the work better makes the marriage work.”

Their process is pretty straightforward. Gys says, “For FAFI, and almost all of our work, I threw loads of ideas onto paper and Jaci took that and provided a structure and added her own perspective.”

They created the backbone of FAFI while in New York four years ago, and developed the piece for the stage when they decided to move here.

They translated the piece into Afrikaans and performed a version of it two months ago in SA because the audience there knows all about the apartheid system the country had, it instructs a bit less. And it is considered controversial in some quarters.

Gys told me “Twenty years after the segregation of the races ended, there are still some people in my white Afrikaans-speaking community who believe apartheid wasn’t a bad system and that it will even make a comeback. I think its delusional to think that way, but they do, and my views challenge their identity.”

Gys was an artist back in the 1980s working at The Market Theatre known for its “Anti-Apartheid Struggle” plays, while Mandela was still in jail. Yet their work doesn’t feel like a political piece.

“FAFI is a very personal one. It’s my life story, scenes from it anyway. But in a place like South Africa was, the political is very personal in many ways,” Gys says.

Jaci points out that the brainwashing young Afrikaaners got was pretty rigorous, and it was really being drafted into the Army that had the most impact on Gys, whose attitudes about race evolved from a very conservative background.

“Yes, I was being trained to kill my fellow South Africans because they were black and that training, being property of the state like that, it sealed the deal.”

Now that they have their Green Cards (a multi-year process that required the assistance of an immigration lawyer), securing union membership and an agent are the next challenges. Gys met with one agent who said, “What am I going to do with that accent?” Well, he has a definite South African accent, and he is realistic that it will influence the roles he can get. His attitude is a pretty positive one, though, “I don’t mind being the seventh Russian on the left. I am here to work.”

And you may well see them Off-Broadway before too long. Jaci told me, “America is the land of opportunity, so we are developing a few productions of our own, FAFI is the first of several.”

In five years, they can become citizens. They look forward to being African-Americans.

African Gay Rights Continue to Go Down

by Brian Connolly

While Marriage Equality continues to spread over the United States of America and Europe like an unstoppable tidal wave, our African brothers and sisters are suffering a wave of anti-gay sentiment and anti-gay laws.

So why are African leaders getting away with laws that in some cases offer nothing but death as an option for being gay?

African politicians are referring to being gay as “learned” behaviors, and being gay as “disgusting” and a “genetic distortion”. The unfortunate effect of leaders using these sorts of negative descriptions for homosexuality is the uneducated populations willingly absorb these connotations and live by them as fact and absolute truth. So what is a peasant farmer in Uganda, who has no access to education, to believe. Would he question his political leaders as being right or wrong? Well the outcome here is the farmer more than likely will adopt the anti-gay rhetoric being publicized as normal by political leaders and more alarmingly spread this anti-gay sentiment and embed it in the minds of the next generation via his children and grandchildren.

The African education system is lacking also as a tool for equality, with teachers being the primary guilty party for truancy, and even if they were present full time would they teach equality in the state run classrooms? The short answer is no. Education for the most part is run by the same anti-gay politicians. So our new African generations will most likely not gain valuable equality information from school either.

So where do our new generations of Africans learn about the world, the struggle for equality and the future of societal change?

Cell phones – Africa’s cell phone use has risen to well over 650 million in recent years and is being used for many outreach activities, more noticeably and successfully as a mobile banking system (M-PESA) for the many Africans who have no where to store money or the ability to enact transactions to buy food, materials for survival. These cell phones can access Twitter, Facebook, the internet at large and as we have seen in global development, the information age has spread the societal movement and development faster than ever before. Campaigns spread around the world at incredible speeds and gain support like a typhoon, most memorable was the campaign “Kony 2012”, however ill-fated as it was we are unable to deny the incredible level of support this campaign generated in such a small space of time.

Perhaps Africa will also generate its own whirlwind of online campaigning and support in time via gay equality movements from the local civil society of Africa, and we outsiders to Africa must support, hit our like buttons, comment and create a deafening call of support that African leaders are unable to ignore, so our brothers and sisters in Africa are encouraged to continue fighting for their equal and human rights to love, be free and be who they are open and proud.

The picture below illustrates the current state of anti-gay laws on the African continent.

Home work: Filmmaker Yared Zeleke’s Origin Stories

by Jordan Mattos

It takes a certain level of conviction to stay true to one’s roots when balancing the demands of a bustling metropolis. The filmmaker Yared Zeleke is an Ethiopian storyteller who swims against the current, making films that detail his experiences back home and abroad. His first feature, currently in development, was selected as one of the 15 international projects for the Cannes Film Festival’s lucrative L’Atelier program in 2013. Raised in the slums of Addis Ababa, Zeleke earned his MFA in Directing from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and has worked with various NGO’s in Norway, Namibia and the U.S. All the while, he has preserved his artistic integrity while redefining where he calls home. I had a conversation with Mr. Zeleke about current artistic pursuits and the conditions facing today’s artists in the Big Apple.

Can you talk about your upbringing?

I grew up in the slums of Addis Ababa during one of the darkest periods of Ethiopia’s 3,000-year history. Emperor Haile Selassie had just been deposed in a military coup and the country was consequently thrown into cycles of war and famine. The ongoing conflict and chaos in my country caused me to also lose my family and home while a young boy. Despite the disturbances, I had a happy childhood.

How has your sense of home influenced your next film?

My first feature, Lamb, is analogous to my life’s journey in that it is deeply personal and inescapably political. It is a semi-autobiographical drama about the heart, heartache, and humour of everyday life in my homeland.

You are now back in Ethiopia. How did you feel being an artist in NYC?

It’s challenging…

Your film The Quiet Garden (2009) is about people asking to escape from the city’s noise. Would you or did you ever live in Manhattan?

I once lived in the Lower East Side, right before it got out of control with rent and well-off tourists. I wouldn’t want to return there or probably any part of Manhattan even if i could. Rent, especially, continues to increase for meagre spaces even in inconvenient locations. More and more young people are moving in, who are not necessarily artists themselves.

Film financing is a complex matter, especially during times of economic difficulty. How do you manage?

Grants, grants, and more grants. My work has been funded by several major European sources.

Why do you think artists resist calling their work political?

Politics is such a dirty word.

Your films directly confront difficult to dramatize anxieties. Housewarming (2009) confronts dead-on the alienation felt by an immigrant woman longing to be back home while attempting to fit in at a stylish dinner party in Brooklyn.

Housewarming is about homesickness, particularly as an immigrant in New York. Tigist (Patience) is a short documentary about a girl from the Ethiopian country-side who dreams of being a pilot and comes to California to learn to fly.

Women play an integral role in many of your films.

Strong women raised me in Ethiopia. My primary caretaker was my grandmother who was revered for her storytelling skills as much as she was for her coffee ceremonies. She was born in Kaffa, after all, the birthplace of the coffee bean.

Many of your stories deal with being an outsider and the relationship between defending one’s individuality or being accepted into a group.

The traditional African proverb,”it takes a village to raise a child”, rings true about my upbringing. The adults in my neighbourhood collectively looked after all of us as children by keeping us distracted from the horrors of the Derg with school, church, and the movies. I remember my aunt’s spiced bread; my cross-dressing cousin’s comedy act; the forested, majestic mountains surrounding the city; and the bonﬁres, singing, and dancing during the holidays. I incorporated all these memories into my stories.

For more information about Yared Zeleke and Slum Kid Films, visit http://vimeo.com/user942327

Project Phoenix Rising is here to help Kids in Libya

by Lane Campbell

Today we interview Tommy Jordan. Tommy Jordan has organized Project Phoenix Rising with a small group of volunteers around the globe. The team is working to bring a modern classroom experience to students in Libya. Tommy Jordan is no stranger to being in the spotlight having gained worldwide fame after posting a YouTube video of himself using a handgun to destroy his daughters laptop. That video today has over 38 Million views on YouTube. The controversy that erupted following the video featuring his non-traditional parenting practice was enormous. Today Tommy hopes to use that celebrity status to raise money in order to help others in Libya with Project Phoenix.

What is Project Phoenix?

Project Phoenix started out as a plan for western companies to bring tech into Libyan schools; we wanted to augment the learning experience in Libya with modern technology using the same official curriculum that students are learning from books. We refer to the original concept as our phase one plan but it was more of our first official request to work in Libya.

We hit roadblocks in our phase one plan; infrastructure isn’t in place over there to handle today’s technology. The electric power grid in Libya has big gaps and is not the most reliable, that alone presented a huge challenge. The more details we discussed the more roadblocks we conceptualized as obstructions in the process of deploying a classroom experience in the same manner done in the United States.

With phase 2 we began fresh with the concept of bringing an entire purpose built classroom to the students of Libya. We realized there is a large quantity of storage containers available at steep discounts; these containers are a by-product of our consumer-based economy. The containers are made of solid steel and are weather proofed to provide protection over months of travel onboard a shipping container. These containers can also be inexpensively shipped over seas making them the perfect option for our project.

After months of planning we have engineered these containers to be self sufficient in even the most inhospitable environments. Each classroom facility is designed to accommodate 12 students and a teacher, with tablet computers, high speed Internet, electricity, air conditioning and lighting inside. The design for a Project Phoenix Rising classroom facility includes electricity provided by solar panels and backed up by a diesel generator. Then we designed the classroom facility to be transported and accessed while it’s loaded on the back of a truck, making it possible for the facility to visit multiple communities each week. The exterior of the classroom facility features a canopy that will pop out the side for kids to work in the shade if there are too many kids in a community to sit inside the classroom facility.

What was your motivation behind this project?

We can trace the roots of the project back to when I first had the opportunity to work in Libya from 2006 to 2009. I love to travel and it was the first international work I ever did. During that experience I learned about the people and culture, it’s a beautiful country. Unlike so much of the world that has chosen to adopt a “westernized” culture, Libya has retained its own unique culture.

The concept for this project came together back in January 2013 while having a conversation with the head of a large international charity. I was helping them with something on their website and my ability to recognize words in Arabic came up in conversation. We started talking about how I learned to spell some words in Arabic, which brought up my experience in Libya. The project has evolved from those early conversations.

Who is involved in the project?

Many talented folks have been committing resources to this project. I would estimate that over $250k has been committed in resources from our friends. Those friends are:

Worldwide CAD – Murray and his architectural firm out of Texas has been helping us out with designs.
DEI Industrial – Chad and his team out of Texas have been instrumental in nearly every stage of this project.
TwistedNetworx – This is Tommy’s consulting company.
Lightworks – Lou has been advising on the lighting and electrical equipment, his recommendations have been instrumental in lowering power consumption.
Doctor Gillian Gillespie – She has been instrumental in connecting our project with the right charitable organizations and government agencies.

How can I help out?

We are raising money with GoFundMe.com

Please Donate Today! – http://www.gofundme.com/phoenixlibya

Today this is all a concept that requires we raise $100,000 USD to found the charity in the US and UK then to build the first prototype. The costs for these classroom facilities will be $65,000 USD so out of the $100,000 USD we raise at least that much money will go directly into the classroom. The rest of the funds will be used to properly setup our charitable organization within the United States and for travel. Donations made within the United States today are not tax deductible.

Why choose GoFundMe.com over using Kickstarter.com for funding?

I checked into using it and indigogo.com as well but settled on gofundme.com for a couple of reasons. There are big problems with using kickstarter.com for our concept; the first is they hold onto funds until you reach a goal set when you create the funding request. The second is they return all the funds contributed to the cause if we don’t reach our goal. With GoFundMe.com our team has access to funds as the donations are made. As a newer organization we need these funds to help the kids today. If we did the kickstarter.com route and didn’t reach out goal we wouldn’t have any funds to work with.

How is this charity structured today?

The project has undergone multiple changes in the last half year. It started out as a commercial venture. We thought it needed to be a commercial venture until we started talking about actually building schools. Then we realized it would need tremendous international support. We are going to use the funds donated to form a charitable organization so future donations will be tax deductible.

After the charity is formed we intend to get registered with the United Nations in order to obtain additional funding from the international community.

How can I learn more?

Tommy has featured Project Phoenix Rising on his website with far more information than we included on ManhattanDigest.com for this interview. If you are interested in learning more about the project or want to keep updated with the latest news it would be best to head over to http://8minutesoffame.com/phoenix-rising/ for the latest news and information.

AFRICA

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