Category: Arts & Culture

Washington, DC museum confronts US slavery history while highlighting African American culture.

Washington DC – “There will never be a Negro president in this country,” a young African American man is seen saying to James Baldwin, a renowned writer and civil rights activist in San Francisco in 1963. Baldwin assures the young man: “There will be a Negro president of this country, but it will not be the country that we are sitting in now.”

This spine-tingling clip, playing at an exhibition aptly called Making a Way Out of No Way, is part of the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture, which will be inaugurated on September 24 by Barack Obama, the United States’ first black president.

The museum’s journey to opening day is 100 years in the making, but it is the fact that it was built without a pre-existing collection that is truly spectacular. The museum’s founding director, Lonnie Bunch, started working on it 11 years ago with only a staff of two in tow and little budget to speak of.

Even though only 3,000 artefacts will be available for viewing on Saturday, a total of 37,000 objects were collected for the museum, mostly through personal donations. Traversing the US in the style of Antiques Roadshow, Bunch and his staff searched people’s basements and attics for pieces that would soon fill 37,000 square metres of space, tracing the history of black America.

The artefacts are grouped in 12 inaugural exhibits organised into three sections: history, community and culture. Highlights include the dress Rosa Parks was sewing before she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus, abolitionist Harriet Tubman’s hymn book, a $600 bill of sale for a teenage girl called Polly, and the coffin of Emmett Till, a teenager whose brutal murder in Mississippi in 1955 mobilised the Civil Rights Movement.

Congress appropriated $250m for the building – the first green-efficient structure on the National Mall – while Bunch raised a similar amount from private sources, such as major corporations and foundations, churches and scout groups – and individuals who wrote checks from as small as one dollar, he said.

The museum straddles a line between looking back at the US’s dark history and a hopeful message that focuses on African American achievements.

Repeatedly, Bunch asserted that the African American experience is a quintessentially American one. But some numbers suggest otherwise: one in every 15 African American men is incarcerated in comparison with one in every 106 white men. African Americans rank second by race for the highest poverty rates.

“We felt it was crucial to craft a museum that would help America remember and confront its tortured racial past,” Bunch said. But it also had to find the joy, hope, resilience, spirituality that was endemic in this community. So in essence the goal was to find that tension between moments of tears and moments of great joy.”

Because the exhibitions are arranged chronologically, visitors are instructed to start at the basement level, where the mood is sombre, lighting is dim, and ceilings are low – a fitting setting for the haunting story of the Atlantic slave trade in 15th-century Africa and Europe.

Exhibits there include whips, wrought-iron shackles, a segregation-era train carriage, a guard tower from the infamous Angola Prison in Louisiana, slave shacks, and an auction block that tells the story of babies torn from their mothers as they are sold at auction.

“Going through [the first] section [here in the basement] give[s] you the feeling of what it’s like to have been a slave in the bowls of a ship,” said Ruthann Uithol, the museum’s registrar. “That’s why it’s so dark; to give that oppressive feeling that they would have experienced.”

Shying away from calling it a “black” museum, its administrators are instead positioning it in the larger narrative of American history, but seen through the lens of African Americans. They are, however, aware that its opening is timely, with the country struggling to come to terms with itself in regards to race with widespread protests erupting in response to a number of killings of unarmed African American men by law
enforcement.

“The inauguration of our newest museum occurs as race and cultural differences dominate the national discourse,” said David J Skorton, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. “[It’s] a time when social and political discord remind us that racism is not, unfortunately, a thing of the past.”

The museum, which sits on the last plot of land at the National Mall, is assertive in its presence, its bronze-coloured walls sharply contrasting the ubiquitous white marble and limestone of the monuments that pepper what is dubbed “America’s Front Yard”.

Its signature exterior “corona”, made out of cast-aluminum panels, draws from African and American heritage. Its three-tiered shape is inspired by the crown of a Yoruba sculpture from West Africa, and the pattern of the filigree metal cladding is a nod to the ironwork of enslaved craftspeople in Charleston and New Orleans.

“We wanted to honour that skill,” said British lead designer David Adjaye, who was born in Tanzania to Ghanaian parents. “[We wanted] to talk about the fact that slaves … built the fabric of America, and that imagery … of original American architecture from 200 years ago, should also be celebrated on the National Mall.”

The “corona” encloses the building to ensure solar gain and to mitigate sunlight, but also to shield the glass skin around it that allows visitors to see the National Mall. “[We] sought to make a building which had a dark presence on the mall … for the history and stories of the African American communities has always been in the back to the main narrative of America,” Adjaye added.

As visitors make their way to the upper levels, they go through a transformative time lapse, all the while encountering the segregation and the Civil Rights Movement periods. It is noticeably brighter and the mood is uplifting as you reach the last floor, where African American heritage and culture is celebrated.

With music blasting in the background, a candy-apple red Cadillac belonging to rock’n roll legend Chuck Berry takes centre-stage, with homages made to Sammy Davis Jr, Ray Charles and Michael Jackson. A replica of the P-Funk Mothership, one of the most iconic stage props in the history of funk music, also makes an appearance.

And while Obama is prominently featured in the museum, a glaring shortfall is the very little space assigned to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, who led the Civil Rights Movement, possibly because of family feuds over his estate.

However, from the same era, viewers will recognise iconic tributes such as a sculpture of athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising a black power fist at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Bringing in the modern era, Black Lives Matter, an activist movement, which has held a high profile in recent campaigns against violence towards African Americans, is also featured.

“We added a section on the Black Lives Matter movement, so people will be able to learn and see that history as it’s unfolding,” said Joanne Hyppolite, the “cultural expressions” curator.

“There is a photograph of Michael Brown’s father and the Reverend Al Sharpton doing [the] Hands Up Don’t shoot, which is a new gesture that’s come into the lexicon of African American communication to express protest and defiance. As history continues to unfold, we will continue to update those sections.”

The star, who is of Egyptian heritage, won the prize for his role in the USA Network drama Mr Robot.

He said he hoped his win would open the door for more ethnic minority actors.

“For me to stand here as not the typical leading man and to have come home with this speaks a lot about where we’re headed,” he said.

“I think we can keep going a lot further in that direction, not just in entertainment, but socially and politically, and strive to be as progressive as possible.”

Malek held off competition from actors including bookmakers’ favourite Kevin Spacey, who was nominated for House of Cards, The Americans’ Matthew Rhys and Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk.

The last non-white winner to win the trophy was Andre Braugher for Homicide: Life on the Street in 1998.

Since then, the winners have included James Gandolfini for The Sopranos, Damian Lewis for Homeland, The Shield’s Michael Chiklis, Jeff Daniels for The Newsroom and Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston.

In his acceptance speech, Malek said: “I’m honoured to stand here and represent my family and every single person who’s helped me get this far.”
Referring to his surprise win, he joked to the audience: “Please tell me you’re seeing this too.”
Malek was born in Los Angeles in 1981 to Egyptian parents. He went to Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, California – graduating in 1999 along with fellow actor Rachel Bilson.

In 2004, Malek got his first major TV role in Gilmore Girls and went on to appear in 24, The Pacific, Over There and The War at Home.

His film roles to date include Larry Crowne, Twilight: Breaking Dawn – Part 2, a recurring role in the Night At The Museum series.

Malek began starring in Mr Robot in 2015, a role that has also netted him a Critics’ Choice Award.

Malek was one of several ethnic minority actors to triumph at Sunday’s ceremony.
Courtney B Vance and Sterling K Brown, who both appeared in The People vs OJ Simpson, won the best leading actor and supporting actor in a limited series categories respectively.

And Regina King was named outstanding supporting actress in a limited series or movie for her role in American Crime.

Meanwhile, Alan Yang and Aziz Ansari called for better Asian representation on screen after winning the Emmy for outstanding writing for a comedy series for Netflix series Master of None.

Host Jimmy Kimmel made several references to diversity during the ceremony in light of the “Oscars So White” controversy earlier this year.

“Here in Hollywood the only thing we value more than diversity is congratulating ourselves on how much we value diversity,” he said in his opening monologue.
“The Emmys are so diverse this year the Oscars are now telling people we’re one of their closest friends.”

He joked that the ceremony was almost too diverse – with other notable winners including Susanne Bier, who was the only woman nominated in her category of best limited series director.

Kate McKinnon, Saturday Night Live’s first openly lesbian cast member, also won her category of outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series.

Imbolo Mbue’s rise to the top of the literary tree is a true fairy tale of New York.

The 33-year-old Cameroonian writer, who was born in a house without running water or electricity, became the talk of the town when she got a million-dollar advance for her first novel, “Behold the Dreamers”, in 2014.

Two years later the book that Mbue wrote at the kitchen table of her tiny New York apartment — often while breastfeeding her babies — is getting the kind of reviews that authors dream of.

The New York Times called it a “dissection of the American dream that is savage and compassionate in all the right places”.

The critical reception on the other side of the Atlantic — where it was published simultaneously in French — has been equally warm, with Le Monde hailing “the discovery of a formidable writer”.

“I started the book when my first child was a baby,” Mbue told AFP, “and I rewrote it while nursing my second.

“I perfected the art of holding them with one hand and writing with the other,” she laughed.

“People afterwards said, ‘How wonderful for you!’ And I said, ‘Oh, no it wasn’t. Really, you don’t understand!’”

Mbue’s tale of a migrant from her oceanside hometown of Limbe who lands a job as a chauffeur for a Lehman Brothers executive — just before the bank’s collapse triggered a global financial crisis — is a bittersweet tale of great expectations slowly shattered.

Folly of the 1 percent

Despite the latitude that the subject matter gave her to skewer the people who drove the world into recession, Mbue’s immigrant heroes take a surprisingly tender view of the follies of the privileged one percent of US society they serve.

This gives the book what the Washington Post called “a kind of angelic annunciation of hope, which ultimately makes her story even more poignant”.

Like her characters Junde Jonga and his wife Neni, Mbue arrived in America at 17 with little more than her wide-eyed innocence and doggedness to declare.

Still Mbue had reason to feel embittered by the crash. The crisis cost her the good job in market research she landed after working herself through a master’s degree selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door.

With “so many Americans also out of work”, she found it hard to get work and started writing.

“I wanted to be a college professor but my husband said only I could tell this story.

“It’s funny because he didn’t actually read the book until months after it was sold. Then he asked, ‘What is it about?’”

Instead of sending her manuscript to any old agent, Mbue went straight to Susan Golomb, who represents Jonathan Franzen, one of America’s most admired novelists.

Age of Trump

“I spent three years pursuing her,” she recalled. “I stalked her basically. She finally read it and I rewrote it and then she rejected me again, before finally saying OK.

“I don’t give up easily,” she said.

Despite her success, Mbue is under no illusion about the American Dream in the age of Donald Trump.

“The odds are against you in America as an immigrant. I hope people realise this. Washing dishes or working in a cab, you get stuck and exhausted.

“You don’t come to America to fail, but you have to have a lot of weapons to succeed.

“I’ve done some tough jobs,” Mbue added, “but writing and raising children are the hardest things I’ve ever done.”

“I am not the sort of person who would chose this path (as a writer). I have that immigrant mentality of wanting stability. I cannot just think of myself.”

So despite her new-found fame, Mbue is not leaving her “very small” apartment.

“I am superstitious. I had so many good things happen there I don’t want to move. I am all cramped in there with screaming children, but I think if I move maybe my mojo will go away.”

Renowned Nigerian author Elechi Amadi has died of an undisclosed illness at the age of 82.

He was most famous for The Concubine, which pictured the culture of marriage and forbidden traditions and was originally published in 1966.

The Concubine has been a recommended text in schools across Africa.
His other books include Sunset in Biafra, Peppersoup, The Slave and The Road to Ibadan. He died in hospital in the oil city of Port Harcourt.

A physics and mathematics graduate of the University of Ibadan, he also joined the Nigerian army and continued serving in it during the civil war, despite coming from the Niger Delta, which was part of the breakaway state of Biafra.

Amadi hails from the first generation of Nigerian writers, in the league of the likes of Chinua Achebe, JP Clark, Cyprian Ekwensi and Christopher Okigbo.

Many of them attended the prestigious College Umuahia or the University of Ibadan, which shaped their literary prowess.

Many Nigerians grew up reading his first novel The Concubine, which focuses on love in a southern village, and how it came into conflict with traditional life. He will best be remembered for the way he portrayed life in rural Nigeria and for the convoluted plots and changing views in his novels.

Amadi was an officer in the Nigerian military at a turbulent time, the 1967-1970 civil war, when the military put down an attempt to create an independent state in the east.
It spawned Amadi’s only non-fiction work, Sunset at Biafra, in 1973, detailing his experiences during the war.

Though many books have written on the conflict, his work stands out for accuracy, neutrality and conciseness.

In 2009, he was kidnapped by gunmen in his hometown in southern Nigeria. He was rescued 23 hours later.

Is Egypt withholding information that could potentially disprove the existence of hidden chambers in King Tutankhamun’s tomb?

One unnamed scientist in a recent Guardian profile says that this is, indeed, the case, saying, “My understanding is that the Egyptians are in a state of denial about this.”

The debate began last year when Nicholas Reeves, a British Egyptologist, and Hirokatsu Watanabe, a radar expert, separately concluded that there were likely spaces behind the tomb’s walls, notes the National Geographic.

However, some in the community were openly skeptical about these claims and the evidence they were based on, so another round of high-tech scans was led by the National Geographic Society earlier this year.

Despite having received a report about the findings, Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities has not yet released the results, and press inquiries have reportedly gone largely unanswered.

According to Live Science, the general belief is that the new scans show no indications of hidden rooms, but the ministry “has refused to accept the new results.”

Political instability and declining tourism could be contributing to this stance.

Additional tests are expected to be conducted by Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities, reports Live Science.

Is Egypt withholding information that could potentially disprove the existence of hidden chambers in King Tutankhamun’s tomb?

One unnamed scientist in a recent Guardian profile says that this is, indeed, the case, saying, “My understanding is that the Egyptians are in a state of denial about this.”

The debate began last year when Nicholas Reeves, a British Egyptologist, and Hirokatsu Watanabe, a radar expert, separately concluded that there were likely spaces behind the tomb’s walls, notes the National Geographic.

However, some in the community were openly skeptical about these claims and the evidence they were based on, so another round of high-tech scans was led by the National Geographic Society earlier this year.

Despite having received a report about the findings, Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities has not yet released the results, and press inquiries have reportedly gone largely unanswered.

According to Live Science, the general belief is that the new scans show no indications of hidden rooms, but the ministry “has refused to accept the new results.”

Political instability and declining tourism could be contributing to this stance.

Additional tests are expected to be conducted by Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities, reports Live Science.