Thursday, September 19, 2013

PRESS RELEASE

DONALD MOLOSI PERFORMS WITH SHARON STONE AT THE UNITED NATIONS. Botswana-born actor Donald Molosi will join US actress Sharon Stone and UK musician Cat Stevens will take part in a musical in September honouring an environmental group founded by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, organisers said Wednesday. In an interview with CNN Molosi said “I last did a professional musical in 2005 in New York City and I am glad to be doing one again, eight years later. But as with all my performances, this is not just for entertainment. The musical sheds light on environmental issues and our audience is the world’s diplomats and heads of state. Someday I will use my talents for pure entertainment but for now the call to use one’s gifts for good causes is too urgent. I have to entertain and inform at the same time.” The musical "2050: The Future We Want" will be performed on October 3 at the United Nations in Geneva to mark the 20 years since Gorbachev, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, founded Green Cross International to address environmental issues as well as poverty and insecurity. “I am not just representing Botswana. I was chosen from hundreds of African performers to represent all of Africa so of course I have prepared myself to speak for other regions of Africa with intelligence and true representation,” Molosi said about the opportunity. This is the first time that a Motswana performer has performed at the UN. Molosi will star alongside the US actress and the British musician will be joined by a 100-strong choir. In Botswana, Molosi is best known for his role as Botswana’s First President Sir Seretse Khama in Blue, Black and White, an award-winning world-famous play also written by Molosi. “Even when I played Sir Seretse, it was not about entertainment only. It was about reconstructing a nation’s memory of its leaders. My work seeks to be entertaining on stage and useful off the stage. My audience should walk away energized to make a change,” says Molosi. David Woollcombe, President of Peace Child International, the main organizer of the event said in a statement: “Today sees the start of an inspirational journey to create an optimistic musical that will show how youth achieve the Future They Want.” Alexander Likhotal, President of Green Cross International, said the musical will use artistic language and vivid imagery to translate the problems facing humanity into a new form, that of theatre, and in doing so bring to wide attention the issues, urgency and priorities for action. "I can't wait to start working with [Molosi], 20 years after president Gorbachev launched his global mission, are showing that there is a way forward, but only if we act now," Stone said in a statement. In his statement Molosi said, “I grew up watching Sharon Stone in films and sharing the stage with her is a tremendous honor. I work extremely hard and I hope that I also give a memorable performance of my own in this musical. Apart from being an actor I am also a classically trained singer and most of my audiences do not know that. It is time for me to share that with my audiences, alongside my acting. I am ready.” Stone, Molosi and Stevens will function as storytellers in the piece, guiding the audience back through time from 2050 to today, showing how to resolve some of the critical challenges facing the world, including climate change and poverty, the statement said. The musical is being co-produced by Green Cross and Peace Child International, which began setting up musicals during the Cold War in an attempt to bring young people from the United States and the Soviet Union together to help resolve the conflict.

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Thursday, May 3, 2012

NOTIN’ DO U (Nothing Worries You)

your mind is philosophy.
your loyalty epically stays in love
and you love me in a way that
safely feels something like ‘prophetic.’
you see things in my soul
that elude my ordinary eyes
and i can feel it deeply when we talk.
it is in the way you casually lean your body
towards mine and then talk half-asleep,
it is in that unutterable way you look at me when no one is around,
it is in the sweetly serious way you say we should
talk a lot so that we don’t float past each other like space men
but rather grow together entwined.
i like it when we talk and your delightful mind
sparkles in conversation and your short white teeth
reveal a sweet, rare smile behind full, dark lips because simply put,
when we are together, notin’ do u.
...you are now pressing hard against me.
and in your face i see
a fineness raw, exciting yet gentle.
all in one deliciously dark, square-jawed face...

...for there’s a fluid storm rising and billowing like harmattan
behind your pair of marble eyes.

Sunday, April 8, 2012

THE BEADS AROUND MY WAIST

I fell and faltered,
and they fled my side.
I accepted the bitter, biting destiny
that we had outgrown each other -
family and I.
in solemn, solitary silences I watched wisps of clouds
scatter, and the clear, blue sky stand firmly behind the sun;
I marveled when dusk fanned the smoldering coals in
the horizon and darkness planted itself in the path of the sun:
I came up with you.
…birds in giddy colors flew with wild abandon and trees swayed
carelessly with a new air of sureness – I was told
that fulfilling your plan meant to desist from my own plan for myself.
it was then no wonder that they fled my side
when you entered my life, and I outgrew their name.
visibly, the loves in which I was invested because of blood were not
aligned with your will. and so they quickly unraveled
under the touch of your mighty breath.
when I saw that tiny, garish tanager flap its wings and take to a rough and awkward flight, almost tumbling,
I knew that I would not spend all my life crying behind a painted face.
And so I write this poem now, watching the smiling sun
part the clouds and break the unsuspecting dawn,
commanding the earth to rouse, to do, to pray. I scribble this now,
and give a calming thought to how the gracious light you proclaim remains,
and blinds me to all evil for it daily gives me the heady, hopeful thought
of time without a season…
…of a seamless love that leaps and jumps
beyond blood and last names, beyond the tarnished beads
around my waist, above beginnings and endings.

Monday, March 12, 2012

Telling Uneasy Stories #2

I continue where we left off last week with the story of El Negro, a Motlhaping man who was eviscerated and stuffed like a trophy animal and exhibited in Spain for the entertainment of Europeans. To first recap, we established a freak as “a person or animal on exhibition as an example of a strange deviation from nature.”
El Negro was exhibited as a tactile example of the Other. Along the same vein, this Other was not introduced in an egalitarian fashion: a power dynamic was also determined between Spain and Africa. Spatially, El Negro was exhibited in the same room as tree-trunks and crocodile-skin. But while the crocodile skin had captions underneath them of how certain species crocodiles growled and some snapped when the naturalists attempted to capture them, El Negro’s caption simply said, “El Negro,”which
translates to “The Black Man.”
Effectively, the narrative his remains and manner of exhibition tell here is one devoid of agency, behavior and humanity. We can see here how the tone was established that the African is inferior to the European because his exhibition was not intended to be in conversation with the viewer. It was just to be seen without it being able to return the curious ga

ze not even in a simple caption denoting behavior. In actuality, thiscollective Other that El Negro represented by being called “The [Deﬁnitive] Black Man,” would have been just be as curious about the Verraux brothers when they settled in that dusty village between the Vaal and Molopo rivers in 1829. The Batlhaping would have spilled sorghum-beer on the ground to ask the ancestors for answers about these “albinos” who befriended the ailing king and spoke gibberish through their noses. But as the saying goes,until the lion can speak the tale will always glorify the hunter. That is the tone of inequality that was struck. Perhaps this is the sort of inequality that Dr. Kwame Nkrumah had in mind when exactly today in 1957 he declared that we need “a new African in the world” who “can fight his battles.” Permit me to digress here and wish the Republic of Ghana a happy 55th independence anniversary.
Back to El Negro, of course in the Banyoles context El Negro was the ultimate freak. Standing stark in the middle of a Banyoles museum with unnaturally dark skin (the Verraux brothers darkened it with chemicals for dramatic effect), clad in animal-skin loincloth and bearing a frozen stare through the glass marbles that were installed in place of his eyes, El Negro was the deﬁnitive black ethnographic freak. More interestingly, his high entertainment value as a freak derived
from his perceived hybrid nature: he was partly human and partly animal. Author Rachel Adams once wrote that, “It is an important historical lesson to recognize that freaks were not always understood as the ﬂip side of normality; at one time, their bodies were read as ﬁgures of absolute difference who came from elsewhere…” It is this “elsewhere”(this Africa, incomprehensible continent of jungles and darkness) afﬁrmed by his props that despite his physiologically human form, El Negro possessed the mystical animal quality in the fascinated European imagination.
Therefore, due to the white-supremacist 19th century deﬁnition of “human,”another long-lived narrative was constructed: the black African is a less evolved species of man that never entered human-ness. Or as President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said in Senegal in 2007, “The tragedy of Africa is that the African man has never really entered [human] history.The African peasant has known only the eternal renewal of time via the endless repetition of the same actions and the same words [like an animal]. In this mentality, where everything always starts over again, there is no place for human adventure nor for any idea of progress.”
I bring up President Sarkozy’s speech not because of his impressive imagination but rather to underscore the perdurability of the 19th century savage-African narrative as constructed by such storytelling tools as El Negro’s exhibition.
I look forward to next week, to further discuss the stories/narratives that El Negro was used to create. And indeed enforce. May we all continue to have the courage to excavate our painful histories and re-humanize ourselves. It is time for a “new African in the world.”

Telling Uneasy Stories #1

Over the next several weeks, I will be analyzing the phenomenon of human exhibition that was the trend of the day in 19th century Europe. I will do this with specific interest in the exhibition of the African body, and even more specifically the body of a Motlhaping man who came to be known as El Negro. Here begins my story with this story. There was a mild drought in Botswana that year. I also remember that there was also a flood and Gaborone City had just suffered a minor earth tremor – and that all these unusual happenings were (according to the superstitious among my compatriots) clear signs that El Negro could not wait to come home and receive a proper burial. I recall October, 2000. I was a 15-year old high school student in Gaborone. The news reports on Botswana Television repeated themselves like commercials about a southern African man whose body had been stolen from a grave almost two hundred years earlier. Ostensibly, the man had been a king of his Batlhaping nation or as Western media like to condescend: “chief” of the Batlhaping “tribe.”
I also remember political pundits on Radio Botswana speaking in subdued tones about how after the said king’s traditional burial in 1830, his body had been exhumed and stuffed by two French taxidermists in exactly the same way that trophy animals were stuffed, and taken to Europe to entertain the public who had never seen a black African. He had become known as “El Negro.” Before 2000, Batswana themselves had not heard of “El Negro.” As history would have it though, the African Union – Botswana included – had decided that his remains be repatriated from Banyoles, Spain to Africa. What better place to re-territorialize his remains then than the internationally obscure Botswana in lieu of the rightful South Africa to circumvent international media? In consequence, on October 4, 200o El Negro’s remains touched down at Sir Seretse Khama International Airport in Gaborone and his physical reterritorialization slotted him into Botswana’s narrative. We even created myths around him to justify our climate.
In this series of weekly posts on Black Looks I will:
i)discuss the narrative about Africa that El Negro served during his exhibition in Banyoles, and
ii) examine the narrative about Banyoles and perhaps Spanish society that he told at the same
time.
Let me leave you with the idea of a “social freak” since that will be the first category I look at and the ways in which El Negro was made to be one and how that ripples across centuries to today in how the African body is consumed by spectators. A freak is defined as “a person or animal on exhibition as an example of a strange deviation from nature.”1That cool night when Jules Verraux, a French taxidermist, and his brother exhumed El Negro’s body their objective was to show Europe body deviant from the European norm. El Negro’s corpse would be consumed as entertainment; a freak would be created. For the Banyoles museum-goers who had never come across a hue this dark or hair this tightly-coiled, the startling exhibition of El Negro immediately established a more tactile notion of the African, the Other. Looking forward to discussing more with you all next week.

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Seretse Khama: The drama of a royal romance in Botswana

24 November 2011 Last updated at 09:34 ET Help

A play about Botswana's first President, Seretse Khama, whose marriage to a white English woman while he was still a student caused a political storm in the UK and Africa, has been shown off Broadway in New York .
Prince Seretse Khama met Ruth William while he was attending law school in London and she was working as a clerk.
Both the UK and South Africa exerted pressure to have his tribal titles removed, and they eventually managed to do so, but when Botswana gained independence in 1966 he became the new country's president and she the first lady.
The BBC's Leslie Goffe went along to see the play, Blue, Black and White, and to talk to its writer and star, Botswana's Donald Molosi, about this and his other works.
For more African news from the BBC download the Africa Today podcast.