DA505 main
52
26/7/05
7:04 pm
Page 52
Drum: ENTERPRISE
South African born Sello Maake
ka Ncube, played the lead role in
Othello at the Royal Shakespeare
Company and is soon to be in
Who Killed Mr Drum?
Djribil Cissé is of Senegalese
descent, born in France in 1981.
Cissé is a striker for Liverpool and
France, and is noted for his speed
and his dyed blonde hair.
No small part of the Afropolitan consciousness is
a rejection of the (colonial) anthropological lens,
which casts all African cultural products as
ethnographic artifacts. The Hayward Gallery’s
current Africa Remix champions a different view:
presenting the work of African sculptors,
photographers, painters on the basis of creative
quality, not historical comment. For British-Nigerian
novelist Diran Adebayo, Africa Remix is long
overdue. One of the many London luminaries at the
exhibition’s opening, Adebayo exulted. Africa Remix
places our art not in some musty, ethnographic light
but allows for exploration, a sense of surprise:
installations, found art, camp imagery, the avant
Nigerian born musician, vocalist
and lyricist, Keziah Jones moved
to Gloucestershire in 1977. Keziah
is an underground cult in London
and a star in Europe and Japan.
garde. One of my biggest frustrations as a Diasporic
African is that Africa is rarely seen as ‘cool’. Most of
black cool pertains to black America and the
Caribbean, and I’m always keen on people and
things that place Africa in a cool rather than a
‘worthy’ context.”
From writing fiction to beading bags, Afropolitans
are (re)defining African Cool. The compulsion is as
personal as political. For us, being African must
mean something. The media’s portrayals (war,
hunger) won’t do. Neither will the New World
image of bumbling, blue-black doctor. Most of us
grew up aware of ‘being from’ a blighted place, of