In this issue, we offer a review of Calabash, with video clips highlighting some of the powerful performances of the festival. Our Storyteller of the Month, Calabash festival co-organizer Kwame Dawes is profiled in this edition, and we also showcase some of his poetry in our new section, Poetry Corner.

Staceyann Chin, energetic and engaging spoken word poet is also profiled in our Author Blog section. Check out our stunning clips from her performance at Calabash, and a link to her on line blog where you can read Staceyann, “in her own words”.

Around the Fire, the section of our newsletter aimed at highlighting "Tales from the African Diaspora" brings you a review of Afrofest, Toronto's African cultural festival. Editor Tumelo Phali also introduces filmmaker and professor, Manthia Diawara, who was also in attendance at the Calabash festival.

We hope you enjoy our latest newsletter! We are always looking for your thoughts, so please do share them in our instant comment feature!

Manthia Diawara

This month we honour, rather, we are honoured to write about one of Africa’s greatest sons, filmmaker, scholar, worldly thinker and literary activist Professor Manthia Diawara.
A native of Mali (Bamako), West Africa, Prof Diawara left home on a self-imposed exile and relocated to Paris, France, upon finishing high school in 1972. In France he enrolled as part-time student at the Université de Vincennes where he received his academic education.
A chance encounter, while attending a performance at Paris's Shakespeare and Co., with African American Beat poet Ted Joans changed the course of his life. At the end of his reading session, the popular poet selected the young Diawara amongst the crowded audience and anointed him as the only one who really had a sense for poetry.
It was Joans who advised Prof. Diawara to leave France and go to America, fearing that Diwara could end up frustrated and on the streets – a fate which faced many of his African contemporaries in France in the sixties.
Heeding the life-changing advice, Prof. Diawara landed in Washington, D.C in 1974 and had to work illegally in restaurants and as a street vendor peddling African artifacts to survive. Here too he had to deal with the daily fear of a deportation and witnessed many of his compatriots being hunted down and sent back home by immigration officials.
Being from a French background, Prof. Diawara had to begin elementary studies in the English language at a community college and his academic brilliance eventually got him a scholarship to study at the American University.
From there he enrolled at the University of Indiana, earning a Ph.D. in comp lit and film. His thesis on the politics and aesthetics of African cinema formed the basis for African Cinema, published in 1985 by Indiana University Press.
By the same year he got the title of Professor and he later married a fellow foreigner who was from Zaire with whom they have two children. They have since separated and Prof. Diawara later got married to a law professor from the University of Pennsylvania.
A man who has always had his heart very close to his motherland, he is presently chair of the Africana Studies Department at New York University, where he is also editor-in-chief of Black Renaissance Noire, a journal of arts, culture and politics, as well as an author and filmmaker whose areas of specialization include Africa, the United States, and the Black Diaspora in Europe.

As well as the vast journals published under his name, Prof. Diawara has edited a volume called Black American Cinema, which was a publication by Routledge in 1993.
He has also been a lecturer at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Pennsylvania.
Prof. Diawara is also engaged in “Black Cultural Studies” a project pioneered in Britain by figures like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy in the early 80’s. Although mostly dedicated to the subject of materialism amongst Blacks in the Americas, Diawara’s name has always been mentioned alongside prominent thinkers like Greg Tate, Houston Baker, Arthur Jafa, Paul Gilroy, Tricia Rose and others who have written profusely on Black nationalism and issues of Black Intelligence.
He is linked to the Cornel West-Henry Louis Gates wing of black studies, which advocated a change in America through black art, literature and film which is in philosophical conflict with the Afrocentric wing known for intense studies of hermetic languages and for delving in African mysticism.
“Black Studies/Cultural Studies: Performance Acts”, his well-known critique on Black cultural studies, offers a direction in the re-structuring of such studies in the ever evolving societal structures.

Known mostly for his inexhaustible writings on black film like Black-American Cinema: Aesthetics and Spectatorship (1993), African Cinema: Politics and Culture (1992), In Search Of Africa (1998), Prof. Diawara is a prolific writer on the topic of film and literature of the Black Diaspora and has a number of films to his credit – films like Bamako Sigi Kan (2002), Diaspora Conversation (2000), In Search of Africa (1997), Rouch in Reverse, a German produced documentary film he directed in 1995.
He also played a pivotal role in the making of the documentary: Sembene Ousmane: The Making of the African Cinema done in collaboration with Kenyan famous literary activist, Ngûgî wa Thiong’o in 1993, as co-director.

His well-read memoir, “We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World (Basic/Civitas)” an angry yet nostalgic narrative on his bitter-sweet life in the free and racist West, articulates his angst about the treatment of fellow Blacks who are in the same state of affairs he used to be over twenty-five years ago when conditions pushed him to leave Mali - this in the face of global paranoia sparked by terrorist attacks that have resulted in tougher and sometimes unfair immigration legislation enforced on people of certain ethnic groups, including Africans seeking better life overseas.

In “We wont barge”, whose title is taken from Malian popular afro pop musician, Salif Keita’s song "Nous Pas Bouger, Prof Diawara declares that in spite of America playing the privileged arrogant brother, he does not, however, see an end in sight in the connection between America and Africa since the bond was created centuries ago when Americans shipped Africans in chains across the Pacific.

Prof. Diawara returned to the place of his “cultural awakening” in Africa in 2003 - after four decades - for the filming of ‘Conakry Kas”, a documentary engaging the lives of local luminaries and ordinary people on the streets of Conakry, Guinea in the face of globalization and recent political tides.

However, as he found out in Conakry Kas, even at home the “real” Africa continues to elude him.

As in the previous years the vibrant event - held at Treasure Beach, St. Elizabeth in Jamaica - offered a sumptuous line-up of live readings, stage performances and other special activities – very much in line with the promise made by the festival organizers to make the event grow “better and better over time”.

You can read more about the festival in "Calabash Special" in the caribbeantales.ca's section of this issue. Plus there is audio visual material for you to get a good glimpse of what went down at the event in Jamaica.

The first week of July provided us with one of Toronto’s summer highlights – the 17th Annual Afrofest festival held in Queens Park, Toronto. Always a memorable event and the best in the category, we would like to thank Music Africa and everyone involved for once again cracking it and proving that it’s not the money but the brains that produce miracles! Read more about the event in the events section of Around the Fire.

And finally, in our writer profile section ATF has the honour of bringing you a profile of one of Africa’s greatest sons - filmmaker, scholar, worldly thinker and literary activist Professor Manthia Diawara who was one of the guests at the Calabash 2005 Festival.

We hope you savour what we have harvested for you this month and look forward to seeing you soon in our next issue.

Hold on to the roots,

Editor

Created in 1989 as a commercial venture under Highlife World to showcase music from Ghana and Nigeria, the annual “sounds from Africa” event is still going strong with steady growth each year. After Music Africa took it under its wings and flew it to greater heights a year after its inception, Afrofest is now Music Africa’s highest ranking and most loved annual event boasting over 20 000 attendants!

Opened by Dr. Modesto Amegago, director of the Southern Volta Association Cultural Group, a multitude of Africans from all walks of life gathered and mingled in the intimate setting of a special village in Queens Park, where African cultures were celebrated through energetic song and stunning dance performances on the main stage.

Southern Volta Association Cultural Group, a music group made up largely of academics and artists, launched the first performance of the day and thrilled crowds with Ewe culture dance themes. Nouvel Expose’ took over the stage afterwards dishing out a ‘cocktail’ dance routine which was a mixture of Ethiopian, Egyptian, West African, Congolese and Hip-hop dances.

There were equally brilliant performances by Moto, Congolese comedian-cum-singer from Kapia du Congo, who wowed the audience with his amazing tricks with a bicycle wheel; Nigerian star Sir Shina Peters, he of the “Shinamania” a unique mix of Fuji and thumping Afro beat in the early 1990’s, hopped on to the already lively stage with Nigerian-Canadian Yinka Farinde and their band, an enchantment for the audience who relished the collective’s form of Afro-juju music and moves.

Off the stage the scene was equally colourful as ‘Africanism’ was commemorated through crafts, music CD’s, African cuisine, jewelry, clothing, drums, sculptures, crafts including vivid beadwork, masks and various forms of inventive art laid out for everybody’s enjoyment and purchase at the African Marketplace while the drum never stopped beating at the Olantunji Drum Stage created for drummers. Children’s Village offered a perfect all-day fun-filled distraction for the little ones, who enjoyed face painting, parades and listening to stories at the park.

Togolese King Mensah, an impressive two-time Best Traditional African Artist Kora Award winner and the musical messenger of world peace and hope, rang down the curtains on the show with his usual splendor. Known as “The Golden Voice of Togo”, Mensah lived up to his majestic title, captivating the audience with spellbinding voice ranges and calculated dance poses that had the audience clamoring for more as some were invited to share the stage and blend into an abstract song and dance picture - a perfect way to end the first show – in good Music Africa style!

On Sunday the perfect weather was an auspicious sign of good things to come the way of enthusiasts in African music and culture - another day to sample the sounds and tastes of Africa.

The Sunday line-up highlights were Campoeira, (a spectacular Brasilian art-form that combines martial arts with acrobatics, music and dance and a powerful liberating art form during slavery in Southern America.) Allokomi, a family group from Montreal, boasted the budding talent of a young drummer in his early teens. There was Faduma Nkrumah from Somalia, Rwandan Mighty Popo and of course, Zimbabwean guitar maestro, Oliver Mtukudzi who serenaded the crowds with his evocative “tuku” tunes.

The festival closed around ten, with the unquenchable revelers calling for more – but one thing is for sure, this year’s 17th Afrofest celebration provided them yet another fun and memorable event whose return they can’t wait for.