Africa unite

Liberation Heroes III

By Tesfu Telahoun

Liberation Heroes launched with Angola’s Antonio Agostino Neto and continued last week with Dr Neto’s mentor and comrade, the great Guinean revolutionary and thinker, Amilcar Cabral.
This issue introduces firstly Aime Cesaire and how he influenced his contemporaries, Senegalese Leopold Sedar Senghor and fellow Martinique, Leon – Gontran Damas. These heroes are known as ‘les trios peres’. The friends met in 1930s Paris while in university and in 1934, the young Pan Africans began to publish ‘L’ Etudiant Noir’ (The Black Student), the first publication exclusively focusing on ‘Negritude’, or the ‘Africanization of the mind,’ as Cabral eloquently described the movement (Negrisma – see Liberation Heroes, Capital 495/496)
Aime Cesaire was born in Basse – Pointe, Martinique (Caribbean) in 1913 and is regarded as one of the greatest men of letters from French speaking Caribbean countries. His works of poetry, plays and pan Africanist political insights make Aime Cesaire the ‘Grandfather of liberation heroes.’
Cesaire hailed from a very poor family who could not give him material inheritance. Instead, his parents focused all their meager resources on giving the bright boy a good education. To further this goal they moved the family from the small town of Basse – Pointe to the capital of Martinique –Fort de France. At his new school Cesaire was to meet lifelong comrade and fellow thinker, Leon Dumas.
Cesaire obtained a scholarship when he was 18 and traveled to Paris, France to attend such prestigious institutions such as the Ecole Normale Superieure and even the elite Sorbonne.
When in Paris, Cesaire met and fraternized with Black students from across Africa, the West Indies and African Americans. Perhaps the most important pan Africanist that Cesaire called upon was Senegal’s poet-politician Leopold Sedar Senghor. Cesaire like many other liberation heroes, was profoundly influenced by Senghor’s “Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poesie negre et Malgache”, published in 1948 and regarded as the greatest work in Black African writing in the French language.
Cesaire did not linger long in Europe. After marrying Suzanne Roussi, in 1939, he returned to his native Martinique. This giant of African liberation literature was also a great teacher, illuminating the fires of creativity and black pride in countless hearts.
As for active political involvement, Cesaire had risen to assume various distinguished posts including mayorship of the capital city, the Martinique Deputy to the French National Assembly, and diplomatic duty. However, he became disillusioned with politics, specifically on the breaking by government of publicly stated promises. Describing in ‘Discours sur la colonialisme’ (1955) he wrote:
“I am talking of millions of men and women who have been skillfully injected with fear, inferiority complexes, trepidation, servility, despair, abasement.”
In the same landmark book, Cesaire pulls no punches when he deftly illustrates the nature of the relationship between colonizer and the colonized as analogous to that of the Nazis and their victims.
“People are astounded, they are angry. They say: ‘how strange that is. But then it is only Nazism, it won’t last. And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves. It is savagery, the supreme savagery: it crowns, it epitomizes the day today savageries: yes, it is Nazism but before they became its victims, they were its accomplices; that Nazism they tolerated before they succumbed to it, they exonerated, they were responsible for it, and it drips, it seeps, it swells from every crack in western Christian civilization until it engulfs that civilization in a bloody sea.”
My negritude is not a stone
Nor a deafness flung against the clamor of the day
My negritude is not a white speck of dead water
On the dead eye of the earth
My negritude is neither tower nor cathedral
It plunges into the red flesh of the soil
It plunges into the blaxing flesh of the sky
My negritude riddles with holes
The dense affliction of its worthy patience.

Taken from Cesaire’s seminal work, 1947’s Cahier D’un retour au pays natal’ (Return to my Native land).

Friendship expressed through musical dance performances

By Addis Mulugeta

On June 17, 2008 at the auditorium of the Embassy of Russia a Bharatanatyam dance recital by Pandmashri Sarojia Vadidyanathan and her troupe had performed a shared culture to culture experience . The event was organized by the Embassy of India.
It was part of the activities to celebrate the Ethiopian Millennium and the 60th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between India and Ethiopia and was sponsored by Indian Council for Cultural Relations, New Delhi.
To start the performance H.E. Mr. Girma Birru, Minister of Trade and Industry and H.E. Mr. David Ruach Tang, State Minister of Transport and Communication, along with H.E. Mr. Gurjit Singh, Ambassador of India, inaugurated the function by lighting a Indian traditional lamp.
On the occasion there were many dignitaries, members of parliament, ambassadors, diplomatic corps and a number of dance aficionados from Ethiopia and India. The troupe consisted of 8 members, 5 dancers including Guru Saroja Vaidyanathan and three accompanying orchestra artists, who gave an enthralling performance of one and a half hours in front of a capacity crowd at the auditorium.
Five dance sequences were presented, such as Ganapati Ravan, is a composition of the great poet of the freedom movement, Subramania Bharati, the Pushpanjali invokes the blessings of the various gods. The poet prays to Ganesa to remove obstacles to Pasrashkti for courage, to Kartikeya to provide strength and to Saraswati for sharing their blessings upon Mahabharata Shabdam, is the mini dance drama that depicts an episode from the epic 'Mahabharata ', where the Pandava brothers lose everything to their cousins, the Kauravas, over a game of dice. The Pandava king 'Yudishtra 'loses his kingdom, his brothers, himself and his wife Draupadi to Kurava kind Duryodahana.
Tilana was also one of the dance performance characterized by fact paced movements, and various sculpturesque poses, thereby making a fitting course to a Bharatanatyam recital.
Mahadeva Shambho, Mahadeva Shambho is a composition in praise of Lord Shiva and describes the glory of Shiva and his many epics. It also describes Shiva as the one with the Ganges in tresses and the crescent moon adoring his forehead as a crown. The composition describes in amazement the incident of Shiva drinking the position emitted while churning the milk ocean to save the world etc
Aigiri Nandini Aigiri Nandini is a devi stuti in praise of Goddess Durga who vanquishes "the bull headed demon Mahishasura ". She is the consort of lord Shiva and the sovereign queen of the three worlds.
Ambassador of India to Ethiopia Gurijit Singh underlined during the occasion that the event commemorated the 60th anniversary of India-Ethiopian friendship and the new Ethiopian millennium. The major significance of the occasion was that it strengthens both countries cultural, idea and people to people experience sharing, he said.
Bharatanaytam is one of the oldest dance forms of India. It was documented as a performing art in the 19th century by the Tanjore Quartet, whose musical compositions for dance form the bulk of the Bharatanatyam repertoire even today.
Bharatanatyam is one of the most popular and widely performed dance styles and is practiced by male and female dancers all over India. Due to its wide range of movements and postures and the balanced melange of the rhythmic and mimetic aspects, Bharatanatyam lends itself well to experimental and fusion choreography. Degree and Post Graduate courses covering the practice and theory of Bharatanatyam as well as the languages associated with its development are available at major universities of India.

Alliance Ethio-Francaise celebrates Music Day

By Abiy Demilew

less than a month, after the colorful celebration of an Ethiopian Music Festival, the alliance Ethio-Francaise has continued by celebrating Music Day, with French and Ethiopian musicians in tandem.
International pop, rock, jazz and Ethiopian music styles are lined up in the Music Day celebration list of events.
Alexo (France) & musicians and Ethiopian singers have colored the alliance gallery yesterday, the opening of the celebration, followed by the new flavors of Munit & Jörg, who have recently joined the Ethiopian music scene with a release of a live album, Just the Two of Us.
Munit & Jörg continued to bang the music scene with a magnitude of the media attention and stage performances. “The media attention and the popularity of our work and album, is much more than our expectation so far,” Munit revealed Capital.
The album was recorded and released as a promotional spring point for the future works, according to Munit. “But it went further than our expectations and now we are forced to sit and think about the next works.”
The duet has performed numbers of local and international songs with jazz, rock, pop and other styles on the album and they have already given out many concerts including at the Alliance’s Ethiopian Music Festival and the large free concert at Hager Fikir Theatre.
The 7th edition of the Ethiopian Music Festival, dedicated for one of the living icons of the golden age of Ethiopian music, Girma Beyene, boosted in Addis 7th - 17 May 2008, embracing various local artists of the golden and contemporary ages.
Girma Beyene, a renowned pianist, composer and arranger of the golden age of Ethiopian music, didn’t have a word to say by the end of the festival, which has made its tribute for him, and for him, that was a re-birth.
He had sat on the floor and watched Dawit Melesse and Theodros Tadesse sing one of his legendary masterpieces Set Alaminim.
Girma was almost struck dumb to hear the newest version of this same song, Wond Alaminim, by the magnificent performance of the duet, Munit & Jorg.
Francis Falceto, French music researcher, critique and producer of the ethiopiques series, defines Girma Beyene in his book Abyssinia Swing, a pictorial history of modern Ethiopian music, as one of a pioneering generation of artists that has a huge influence on current Ethiopian music.
Munit told Capital that, she was very surprised to see the response of the audience and Girma himself as she was singing ‘Wond Alaminim’ with a new approach.
“He left precious few recordings behind him as a vocalist: it was above all as a pianist, organist, composer and arranger that Girma made his mark on what is today agreed to be the golden age of Ethiopian music,” said Francis Falceto, French music researcher, in Capital’s exclusive at the end of EMF-7, Sax-Summit. “Throughout the heyday of vinyl record production (1969-1978), the figure of Girma Beyene dominated the recording sessions.”
Going into exile in the USA in 1981, before appearing in the country few weeks ago, Girma departed the Ethiopian music scene, sinking into the anonymous “Little Ethiopia’ of America’s East Coast.
The then-privileged partner of Alemayehu Eshete, Girma innovated, through his simple and to-the-point playing, melding the lightness of pop into the ethos of a changing Ethiopia. Admired for his musical elegance, Girma none the less met one of the saddest fates in Ethiopian music. Though his countrymen still remember his charming voice and his knack for pop, they have totally forgotten his role and importance as an innovator.
According to the Alliance booklet, there has been a renewed interest of late in the work and personality of Girma Beyene. International groups such as the Either/ Orchestra, the Daktaris, Le Tigre (Platante), The Ex, Badoum Band and Antibals have added some of Girma’s major compositions to their repertoires.