Books 8  NEW

New and noteworthy

This Round-Up of books during Black History Month keeps you updated on works reflecting the imagination and creativity, and the problems and potential, of Black writers, artists, philosophers and activists, entrepreneurs, media leaders and politicians.

The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994. Edited by Okwui Enwezor. Prestel: Munich London New York. 2001.

Histories of Africa have all too often been the handmaiden its colonizers: written to purge the western mind of guilty actions inflicted upon "the lesser breeds without the law". In this huge volume editor Enwezor and his contributors toll the end of this delusion. The work is as large as the continent: a wonderful collection of essays and artefacts of peoples art, cloth, posters, photography, architecture, theater, literature and film reviews.

Primary texts augment the visual dimensions of the book. These encompass many actions of the historical moment in essays, speeches, manifestos and pamphlets. Dramatic themes leap from the pages: Negritude, black consciousness, pan-Africanism and African socialism.

The central pillar of this massive work confronts you directly: African independence movements and liberation struggles were methods for achieving not only African political autonomy but cultural self-awareness. Peoples thought to be pacified waged non-violent and civil disobedience campaigns that tested the limits of colonial regimes, while armed struggles were the final method of gaining freedom in territories as far apart as Ben Bella's Algeria and Nelson Mandela's South Africa

Enwezor rescues African voices from their obscurity at the margins of western discourses and documents for all but the most rabid racists how the pulsating flows of energy from popular struggles impacted on modern culture.

Unlike many attempts to encapusulate African modernism, this work is no paen to multi-culturalism or to the white man's influence on blacks. It is shaped by an insistent will to "recollect and interpret history". Enwezor urges us to appreciate Africa's own place in the writing of new narratives that open our understanding of the 20th, and perhaps the 21st century, too.

Because colonial history meant the dispersal of modernist African culture and artists throughout the world, Enwezor and his researchers scoured cities and remote locations throughout Africa, as well as Paris, London, New York, and even Australia. The results were a rich, interdisciplinary exhibition organised by the Museum Villa Stuck, Munich and shown at the House of World Cultures in Berlin, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

This published work is an important contribution to the rexamination of modern African conciousness. It explores the links of African modernity to European models of political practice, the arts and intellectual forms. To his credit, Enwezor leaves the reader with many questions; perhaps the most important is: How can post-colonial, post-modern Africanist intellectual perspectives become a vital part of reconstructing today's African Realpolitik?

Massaquoi, Hans J. Destined to Witness: Growing up in Nazi Germany. Fusion Press: London 2001 Photos by the author.

Amazingly, when Hans Massaquoi was a lad in 1930s Germany, this "kinky-haired, brown-skinned boy like his blond and blue-eyed school mates" idolised Hitler. Child of a liaison between a wealthy Liberian diplomat and a German nurse, young Hans grew to manhood and survived the "racial madness" of Hitler's Germany. "Blacks were so few in number that they were relegated to low-priority status in the Nazis' line-up for extermination", he recalls. His survival skills proved useful later as a US soldier coping with segregation in the armed forces and post-war American society.

Hans astonishingly survived the war and found his way to the US where he became managing editor for Ebony, the leading African American periodical. From this vantage point, for forty years Massaquoi witnessed the struggle for racial equality in the US, and the rise of independence movements in colonial Africa and the West Indies.

Massaquoi concludes that western governments, industry and concerned individuals must work together to ensure the complete acceptance of diasporic peoples, among them African Descended Germans in Germany and African Americans in the US.

Destined to Witness is a remarkable expression of "a roller coaster of racism from different cultures and continents," says the New York Times Book Review. The Chicago Sun applauds the author who "through a combination of guts, smarts, luck and a really good mother, manages to waltz through the darkest abyss of the 20th century". Poet-writer Maya Angelou praised Destined to Witness saying: "We need this book for a balanced view of the Holocaust, which was not a 'Jewish thing'. Hate is hate, it knows no colour, and knows all colours well".

In post-war, posturban riot-ridden America, the mainstream media were among the most significant perpetrators of racial exclusion. Black journalists, to their credit, were in the forefront of ensuring that the media employed, promoted and listened to black staff and black communities.

This book recounts how Black journalists, starting with a band of few in 1975, grew to several thousands today. In the process, says Dawkins, "The tribe became a nation". Veteran newsman C. Gerald Fraser, formerly with The New York Times, says: "Dawkins work is a timely and original study of black journalists who went to work in the white media".

Two young Ashanti princes Ghana arrived in 1837 at the Netherlands court of King Willem I for their education in matters European. Their story It is written in the first person by one of them - the eponymous Kwasi Boachi.

This novel provides a fascinating account of 19th century European social and colonial history, and its contradictions, from Kwasi's singular vantage point. Revered by Hollands nobility because he too is royal, he is also despised and feared by most of his schoolmates because he is black and exotic. Unable to return home because he is now more Dutch than Ashanti, and unable fully to become Dutch, Kwasi is perpetually out of place.

These dilemmas give him fresh insight into many of the racist developments we associate with the 19th century: images of "barbaric savages" portrayed in the newly invented photograph medium, in ethnographic freak shows, and in psuedo-sciences like phrenology to "prove" the inferiority of black and colonial peoples.

In Japin's novel, Kwasi's attempts to integrate are contrasted with those of his cousin, Kwame, who eschews things western and longs for home. Their diverging aspirations and destinies poignantly counterpoint each other.

As the twentieth century dawns, the elderly Kwasi, now master of a coffee plantation in Java, writes his autobiography. Japin's work is "An elegantly and ultimately moving fictional reworking of another troubling chapter of Europeans in Africa and Africans in Europe," says writer Caryl Phillips.

Two themes intertwine sinuously in this elegant, and lovingly crafted presentation of the work of this master of photography. There is a powerful stream of images as seen and felt by jazz musicians. Riffin' in the background is the hurt, horrors and hopes of black people in poverty-stricken Harlem uptown, and the arrogance and dedicated blindness of money making downtown. It is only at night that these two different worlds in one city meet in the midtown hotels and bistros or the clubs in Greenwich Village.

De Carava affirms that Jazz is "a music purchased with dues of harship, suffering and pain, optimism and love" Through its "friendly improvisations that speak with admirations" we glimpse great musicians on the stage: Dizzy, Ella, Sarah, Prez, Bird, Errol, Hawk, Count, Mary Lou, Duke, Max, Miles, Louis, Milt, Billie and their fifties and sixties contemporaries.

In the intervals we go with him home to Harlem: jazz maker, creator of a hundred musical idoms, but a forgotten space for a society's hard working people. The author urges his audience to sense how art and artists have struggled to confront and transcend the "politics of time, place and personality".

De Carava, who ranks among the greatest black photographers from James Van der Zee to Gordon Parks, is a life-long New Yorker and distinguished professor of photography at the City University. In his 50-year career he has contributed to the groundbreaking exhibition "The Family of Man" organised by Edward Steichen at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1955.

Largely unpublished, he was first recognised for his images of daily life in Harlem produced in collaboration with the poet Langston Hughes in the classic "Sweet Flypaper of Life". A retrospective exhibition of his photographs opened in 1996 at the Museum and toured America and London, Stockholm and Berlin and Paris.

In this very personal, semi-autobiographical work, Phillips, a novelist and crime writer, and a Londoner of Guyanese birth, seems determined to push his writing themes beyond race and location. Using incidents and literary portraits of people and places drawn from the urban landscapes of Black Britain, Phillips explains how living in the city has shaped his attitudes, choices and creative process. Readers may contest his view of the declining significance of race in Britain and that the futures of blacks in the USA and Europe are divergent.

In a world of increasing globalisation a nation's unique culture must be placed at the centre of its political and economic development.

For Curwen Best, popular culture most eloquently and democratically expresses the aspirations and needs of a people. To that end, he explores the work of his native Barbados' major artists in the fields of literature, drama and music.

Among the many who are critiqued and illuminated are the historian and poet Kamau Brathwaite, the poet, playwright and radio dramatist Jeanette Layne-Clark, and the singers Gabby, Marvo Manning, Johnny Koleman and the chanter Lil' Rick. Throughout, the author pays homage to that unique Barbadian contribution to Caribbean music known as the tuk band, whose structure, rhythms and melodies lie at the heart of the best of the island's art.

More than just of interest to Barbadians, this book will serve as interesting reading to anyone interested in Caribbean Culture, or national identity, as it is through its popular culture that Barbados has forged its identity, says the author.

Curwen Best received his doctorate degree at the University of Birmingham. He lectures in Literature and Popular Culture with the Faculty of Humanities, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados. He is author of the book Barbadian Popular Music: and the Politics of Caribbean Culture which provides an imaginative look at popular culture and it's influence on nations.