Here's Ben Mbatha's Kadoli, from 2007. It lasts all of 8:54 minutes, but hold your horses! U haven't seen Franco or Tabu Ley or Mbilia Bel go the farther, farther distance -- the Congolese way. Have U?
Kadoli is but one instance of the "afterglow of creation", if I may p(h)un Stephen W. Hawking. S'il vous plaît.
Don't you just luv the tune! Juliet, I suppose, didn't (did she, that Juliet?) get such attention, such moves, from Romeo. Nor did Romeo from Juliet, Romeo didn't have no Coke, either.
How much farther ahead than Kadoli is Kenya's pop music these days? Is it, as it should be, sufficiently far? We must ask.
I'm looking for good African music, not good Nigerian or Kenyan or South African or Ghanaian or Congolese or Tanzanian or Ugandan or Angolan music. I'm not finding enough Kenyan pop music to fill one or two Saturday or Sunday afternoons of 'down-time' without too many encores. But I've just found another good Kenyan song, Susumila's Ihale. It's a gem.
Ihale is even more musical (with a more adventurous use of voice) than Obe Baba, which I said some nice things about just a day or so ago. The visuals are just as good, and in parts, I think, better. There's more energy here. More creative, and more 'competitive', body language. A touch of Naija mannerism, in fact.
I like the self-confident use of Kiswahili in Ihale. Susumila does not hesitate to flaunt his poetic licence in his use of language. Credit to his Director and Producer too. Give me a song I like, on my own terms, and I'll play and write about it -- regardless of which part of Africa it's from. Simple as that.
Of course I like Sauti Sol's Sura Yako and Nerea. Still, Sauti Sol, as a band, needs to be more fecund than it's been -- and not by doing a sort of Nishike and/or Nerea Remix. Sura Yako ft. Iyanya is already remixed, with mixed results.One or two songs a year will not take you far, in a field "overpopulated" by very hard-working and enterprising Nigerian artistes.
Of course I like Elani's Kookoo.
Other Kenyan musicians whose work I have tweeted or blogged, or will tweet or blog, appreciations of can be found at my twitter (@MauriYambo) or on my blog. More is to come.
It's not too late to start doing serious planning all along Africa's coastline -- and along the continent's great rivers. How big a threat to Africa do rising oceans pose? NASA suggests at least one way of looking at the threat, as seen above. Just looking at the immensity of Africa should suggest (prompt) more localized solutions as well.
Land-locked countries would appear less threatened by rising seas, but that would be a wish rudely to be shaken by catastrophic events that may initially seem to occur in slow-motion. Who doesn't trade with other countries via the seas, these days? Not Uganda. Not Rwanda. Not Mali. Not Zambia. None.
Rising seas pose secondary threats as well to the hinterland of every country with a coastline, such as Tanzania, Kenya, South Africa, DRC and Nigeria. The coming flooding of Egypt, from rising seas and a clogging the Nile Delta, will be of epic proportions, and will pose mortal danger to the great monuments -- which are all of Africa's heritage, and not just Egypt's. More existentially, flooding may lead to unprecedented migration into the rest of Africa, Europe and elsewhere.
And yet migration in itself may be the lesser problem, more serious ones being the attendant political instability, armed conflict and redrawing of national boundaries. So, if there is going to be armed conflict along the Nile's catchment, it will far less likely be over how to share the Grand Old River's waters, as some have suggested. Rather, it will be over there being too much water in low-lying and, in the circumstances, hapless Egypt. Hapless but with deadly arms.
Migrate is a new song, released only on July 8, 2015. A memorable song. They do do something creative and even inspired with their voices that I like. Yes, refined. Smooth. The visuals are laid back and, mmm, cool. An altogether self-assured mind has put together all this fine stuff.
Blazeman and Cashson will go places with this, is what I'm thinking just now.
Definitely headed in the same direction as the best of African pop music is headed. What do you think?
Raj and Stella Mwangi just dropped a new hit, OBE BABA Remix. It's good, all in all, though the vocal range is limited. The visuals are refined, upbeat. The artistes are super-confident. The production is clean. Super dress code, moves. The lyrics are a mix of languages, as we're all used to now across Africa. U can do mo, creatively. Raise the bar high n higher. Make Kenya proud, y'all:
Simmel (1955: 13-14) says several remarkable things about conflict (Kampf) in society. His reasoning often appears convoluted, and, just as often, quite profound. All in all, he is emphatically a precursor to all who engage in serious thinking about the place of conflict in social life these days.
He argues that conflict is inseparable from social interaction, and thus “sociation”; and is even itself a form of sociation. He sees conflict, indeed, as “one of the most vivid interactions” and, as an example of social interaction, by definition beyond the scope of social acts by the lone individual. Furthermore, conflict is not the cause of some sort of pathology of human interaction, but the resolution or ‘cure’ of such pathology.
Conflict is not, tautologically speaking for a moment, the cause of conflict – the cause of itself. Rather, Simmel sees it as both a consequence and a resolution – but of what? It is a consequence and a resolution of “divergent dualisms” – that is, of “the tension between contrasts” -- between, if you like, yin and yang, thesis and antithesis. His is not a deliberately Marxian conception, though he uses certain decidedly Marxian terms, such as (Simmel, 1955: 14-15): 1. "the antithetical and the convergent" (p. 14) 2. Conflict is "the synthesis of elements that work both against and for one another" (p. 14) 3. "Conflict itself resolves the tension between contrasts" (p. 14) 4. "unity of harmony and contradiction" (p. 15) But he is not anti-Marx. Instead, he chooses to strike his own path. The phenomenology of social life, as he has observed it, suggests to him that conflict's resolving function (effect) is triggered, ultimately, by the presence and interplay of certain “dissociating factors”: “hate, envy, need, desire” (Simmel, 1955: 13). To him, the most likely dialectical consequence of conflict is not necessarily a Marxian sort of overthrow -- though it may turn out to be that -- but rather peace between and among the parties. It is not conflict, then, that is to be resolved when there is conflict -- since, as we have already seen, it does not cause itself. Instead, attention must in principle and pointedly be paid to the dissociating factors -- the real causes of conflict.
Viewed more broadly, the “dissociating factors” -- briefly identified above -- call to mind, and are a selection from, the seven deadly sins of the bible, namely: (1) Lust/desire/lechery, (2) gluttony/over-consumption/ selfishness, (3) greed/avarice/hoarding, (4) physical laziness/ sloth/despair, (5) wrath/hatred/anger, (6) envy/jealousy, and (7) pride/vanity (see All About God Ministries, ChangingMinds.Org The Seven Deadly Sins, Wikipedia). Simmel thus reverts to Christian theology for clarity about, and validation (for him) of, the causality of conflict. Consciously or subconsciously, he turns that theology, that worldview, into his conceptual scheme. Abraham considerably distorts all this by observing that, for Simmel, conflict is not “a disruptive temporary phase. [Instead,] peace and conflict [are] equivalent faces of social reality; neither is inherently constructive or destructive” (Abraham, 1982: 109-10). For Simmel, conflict is neither disruptive but always temporary', nor temporary but always disruptive. It is a resolving process, with, though he does not explicitly say so, a clear dialectical trajectory (or "Laws of Motion"). Harmony and conflict are neither equivalent 'faces' of social life, nor, in defined situations, always co-present in equal measure. I don't think Simmel suggests that at all, even when he defines peace as the "synthesis" (that is, the 'sociation') of contending forces. In clear dialectical motion, "interpenetration" precedes "synthesis" and prepares the grounds for it. Prior to a particular form of synthesis, as Engels would point out, there is always some kind of imbalance -- the very reason a resolution ( a negation, if you like) is sought, or seeks to impose itself, before it is in turn negated: if not here, in this web of group affiliations, then there -- or there and then.
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Note: 1. Anchoring the above interpretation is this passage:
“Conflict is admitted to cause or modify interest groups, unifications, organizations... If every interaction among men is a sociation, conflict – after all one of the most vivid interactions, which, furthermore, cannot possibly be carried on by one individual alone – must certainly be considered as sociation. And in fact, dissociating factors – hate, envy, need, desire – are the causes of conflict; it breaks out because of them. Conflict is thus designed to resolve divergent dualisms; it is a way of achieving some kind of unity, even if it be through the annihilation of one of the conflicting parties...Conflict itself resolves the tension between contrasts. The fact that it aims at peace is only one, an especially obvious, expression of its nature: the synthesis of elements that work both against and for one another. [Conflict] is roughly parallel to...the most violent symptom of a disease which represent (sic) the effort of the organism to free itself of disturbances and damage caused by it” (Simmel, 1955: 13-14).
2. Georg Simmel lived from 1 March 1858 to 28 September 1918.
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