Tag: Africas

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Entertainment

Angélique Kidjo Connects With Africa’s Subsequent Musical Technology

Angélique Kidjo Connects With Africa’s Next Musical Generation

Angélique Kidjo, the singer from Benin who has been forging pan-African and transcontinental hybrids for three decades, actually didn’t need another Grammy.

In 2020 she received the award for the best world music album for the fourth time with “Celia”, her homage to the Afro-Cuban salsa dynamo Celia Cruz. True to its form, Grammy voters chose well-known names and snubbed the world music phenomenon of the year: Nigerian songwriter Burna Boy’s ambitious, thoughtful album that attracted hundreds of millions of streams and made it an international sensation. (“African Giant” also featured a guest appearance by Kidjo.)

In her acceptance speech, Kidjo was friendly, but pointedly looked ahead. “The new generations of artists coming from Africa will take you by storm,” she said, “and the time has come.”

Kidjo, 60, follows this declaration with her new album “Mother Nature”, which is full of collaborations with aspiring African songwriters and producers: Burna Boy, Mr Eazi and Yemi Alade from Nigeria as well as the Zambian rapper and singer Sampa the Great, who American songwriter Shungudzo and singer Zeynab, who was born in Ivory Coast and lives in Benin. Throughout the album, their guests do everything they can to keep up with Kidjo’s leather fervor.

“This young generation has the same concern that I have had throughout my career – they tried to convey a very positive image of my continent Africa,” said Kidjo via video from Paris. “I also wanted to hear from them about climate change and its impact on their lives and how they want to deal with it. With climate change, we will pay the highest price for it in Africa, especially the youth. It will be up to the future generation not to ask questions, but to act. Because time is running out for questions. “

The songs on “Mother Nature” offer snappy programmed Afrobeats, lively Congolese soukous, lavish Nigerian juju and a dramatic orchestral chanson. Irresistible beats carry serious messages about the preservation of the environment, about human rights, about African unity and about the power of music and love.

Kidjo recorded “Dignity” – a song that got excited when protesters against police brutality in Nigeria were shot – with Alade, 32, a major Nigerian pop star she had worked with earlier in 2019. Like Kidjo, Alade has worked with musicians from all over Africa and beyond (including Beyoncé on the soundtrack of “Black Is King”).

“I grew up with their music,” Alade said in an interview from Lagos. “She is one of the few role models I have. The only thing that definitely drew me to Angélique is her uncompromising Africanity no matter where she goes. As for Africa, she is definitely our Angélique, our songbird – anytime, any day. It’s always heartwarming to see how she does what she does and how she does it, even though she’s been doing it for so long. I look at them and I am encouraged to just keep doing what I am doing. “

Like most of Kidjo’s music over the years, the new album is multilingual – mostly English, but also French and West African languages ​​like Fon and Nago – and it blends new sounds and technologies with Africa’s past. In “One Africa” Kidjo celebrates the year she was born – 1960 – because it was a turning point in African history when several countries gained their independence. (She was planning a Carnegie Hall concert in March 2020 around the milestone, which was canceled when New York closed due to the pandemic.) She based the music on “Indépendance Cha Cha,” which was made in 1960 by Joseph Kabasele’s group L’African Jazz was released.

For “Africa, One of a Kind” Mr. Eazi built the track around a sample of the song “Africa” by Malian singer Salif Keita from 1995, but Kidjo increased the stakes: She persuaded Keita, now 71, to come out of retirement to sing it again. The video of the song shows a dance, Gogbahoun, from Kidjo’s home village in Benin, Ouidah.

“Gogbahoun means the rhythm that breaks glass,” she said. It’s a beat, she explained, originally tapped on an empty bottle with a piece of metal: a ring, a spoon, a coin. “And if the bottle is broken, the party’s over,” she said.

The reception of “Mother Nature” was shaped by the pandemic. “We had time and had nowhere to go,” said Kidjo. Her two previous albums were re-Africanized tributes to music from America: “Celia” and before that, a transformative remake of Talking Heads’ album “Remain in Light”. But Kidjo and her husband and long-time musical partner, keyboardist and programmer Jean Hébrail, wrote their own songs in 2019, the year in which they also released and toured for “Celia”.

When bans were imposed in 2020, Kidjo set out to complete the songs with new, far-flung staff working remotely. There was one perk on an album that dealt with global warming: “a minimal carbon footprint,” noted Kidjo.

She gathered the album’s staff through connections and chance. Kidjo happened upon Sampa the Great, 27, a rapper and singer who was born in Zambia and built her career in Australia, at an NPR Tiny Desk Concert and contacted her through direct messages on Instagram. In fact, they had met years earlier at a fan encounter when Kidjo signed a t-shirt for Sampa at WOMADelaide, a world music festival in Australia.

Their joint song “Free & Equal” is based on the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and the United States’ Declaration of Independence. “We have been fighting since I could speak,” raps Sampa and then praises “Angélique / Connecting through the generations, power of musique”.

“She was the person I saw, who looked like me, who was from the continent, spoke in her own language and made a huge impact outside of the continent,” Sampa said in an interview from Botswana.

“She knows how much reach African music has today – the continent is simply connected to the world,” she continued. “The beauty of this album is having legends who are able to nod to young people to acknowledge that we are continuing what people like Salif Keita and Angélique Kidjo started. She said, “I want you to express yourself. That’s why I’m turning to you. ‘”

Kidjo didn’t just invite songwriters and rappers to add vocals. She also gave skeleton tracks to some of the electronics savvy producers like Kel-P from Nigeria, who spread Afrobeats and other African rhythms around the world. “I said you found a way to make this a global rhythm,” said Kidjo. “Anyone in any part of the world can claim Afrobeats and do it their own way because their own culture fits it perfectly. The puzzle is just perfect. All the music that comes from Africa is based on our tradition and always has an integrative way of doing things. “

Some of Kidjo’s vocals are given a computerized twist in “Do Yourself,” a duet with Burna Boy that calls for Africa to become self-employed. “I asked Burna Boy, I asked his engineers and producers, ‘What did you do with my voice?'” She said. “He sent me a snapshot of the board and I don’t understand anything about it. It looks like something from space! ”She laughed. “But it’s okay, I’ll take it. I don’t have to understand to love it.

“Any collaboration is about preserving people’s freedom,” she added. “I would say I send you the song and you let the song lead you to what you want to do. I said, ‘Just do it.’ What this album taught me is that we develop beautiful things when we really take the time to talk to each other. “

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World News

Africa’s Vaccine Drive Is Threatened by India’s Provide Halt

Africa's Vaccine Drive Is Threatened by India's Supply Halt

NAIROBI, Kenya – The rapidly escalating coronavirus crisis in India is not only forcing hospitals to ration oxygen, it is sending families to find open beds for infected relatives. It is also wreaking havoc on vaccination efforts around the world.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Africa.

Most nations relied on vaccines made in the Serum Institute factory in India. However, the Indian government’s decision to restrict can exports as it deals with its own outbreak means that Africa’s already slow vaccination campaign could soon come to a standstill.

Before India stopped exporting, more than 70 nations received vaccines it had made with a total of more than 60 million doses. Many went to low and middle income countries as part of the Covax program, the global initiative to ensure equitable access to vaccines.

To date, Covax has dispensed 43.4 million doses in 119 countries, but that’s only about 2 percent of the two billion doses expected to be dispensed this year, according to Andrea Taylor, associate director at Duke Global Health Innovation Center.

“Export controls from India are the main limitation on Covax’s current offering,” she wrote in an email.

Even before India stopped shipping, Africa saw the slowest vaccine introduction of any continent. As of April 21, African nations, with a total population of 1.3 billion, had received more than 36 million doses of vaccine, but administered only about 15 million, according to the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

What You Need To Know About The Johnson & Johnson Vaccine Break In The United States

    • On April 23, an advisory panel to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted to lift a hiatus on Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine and put a label on an extremely rare but potentially dangerous bleeding disorder.
    • Federal health officials are expected to officially recommend states lift the hiatus.
    • The vaccine was recently discontinued after reports of a rare bleeding disorder surfaced in six women who received the vaccine.
    • The overall risk of developing the disorder is extremely small. Women between the ages of 30 and 39 appear to be most at risk, with 11.8 cases per million doses. There were seven cases per million doses in women between 18 and 49 years of age.
    • Almost eight million doses of the vaccine have now been given. There was less than one case per million doses in men and women aged 50 and over.
    • Johnson & Johnson had also decided to postpone the launch of its vaccine in Europe for similar reasons, but later decided to continue its campaign after the European Union Medicines Agency announced the addition of a warning. South Africa, devastated by a contagious variant of the virus, also stopped using the vaccine, but later continued to use it.

Only six million doses were administered in all of sub-Saharan Africa – fewer than many individual US states. The prospect of a reduction in supply complicates the already enormous logistical challenge for many African nations.

Many African governments prioritized giving initial doses to more of their populations in the expectation that more doses would arrive soon. Now they are struggling with what to do when there aren’t enough vaccines to get the full two-dose regimen that provides maximum prevention.

Countries like Rwanda and Ghana, which were among the first to receive doses of Covax, are about to run out of initial supplies. In Botswana, vaccinations were temporarily suspended in some areas this month after the allotted doses ended. And Kenya, which is nearing its initial 1 million dose, said this week it would try to acquire vaccines from Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer to continue its vaccination campaign. On Saturday, due to delays, the country extended the time between first and second dose administration from eight to 12 weeks.

Overall, the 10 African countries that have had the most vaccinations have gone through more than two-thirds of their deliveries, said Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, World Health Organization Regional Director for Africa.

The African Union Vaccination Group has secured funding to purchase up to 400 million Johnson & Johnson vaccines for member states – but those doses will not arrive until the fall.

“More than a billion Africans are on the verge of this historic march to end this pandemic,” said Dr. Moeti.

A spokesman for Gavi, who heads the Covax program, said in an email that it was in close contact with the Indian government about resuming vaccine shipments, but that “we cannot confirm the timing of the next shipments at this stage . “

Even if the United States is betting on tens of millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine – the most affordable vaccine that is widely available – African nations are turning to Russia and China for doses in those countries, despite concerns about a lack of clinical data on its effectiveness pass and security.

Amid the delays, some African countries are facing new and potentially more deadly waves of the pandemic. The African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 2,155 deaths from the virus in the past week, up from 1,866 the week before.

In Nairobi, the capital of Kenya and home to one of the better health systems on the continent, officials have warned of a lack of intensive care beds and oxygen supplies. Last month, the Kenyan government ordered a new lockdown, which has fueled anger over the economic impact of the restrictions.

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World News

Wildfire Offers Onerous Blow to South Africa’s Archives

Wildfire Deals Hard Blow to South Africa’s Archives

JOHANNESBURG – Fire fighters in Cape Town on Monday battled a devastating fire that engulfed the slopes of the city’s famous Table Mountain and destroyed parts of the University of Cape Town library, a devastating blow to the archives of South African history.

Helicopters have thrown water on the area to try to contain the fire, which started Sunday and was likely caused by an abandoned fire, according to South African national park officials. But when the wind came up overnight, the fire spread to the neighborhoods at the base of the mountain, forcing some houses to evacuate on Monday. Monday night officials warned that the fire would likely rage for days.

“Hopefully we can get containment very soon, but to put out the fire, in other words to put it out completely, it will take more than a week,” Philip Prins, fire manager for Table Mountain National Park, told reporters on Monday .

The Devastating Fire is the latest in a series of devastating mountain fires that have swept across the Western Cape Province in recent years. However, the aftermath of that fire was also felt across the region after towers of orange and red flames engulfed the University of Cape Town’s special collections library – home to one of the largest collections of books, films, photographs, and other primary sources documenting Southern African history .

“We are of course devastated by the loss of our special collection in the library. They are things that we cannot replace. It hurts us, it hurts us to see what it looks like in ashes now, ”said Mamokgethi Phakeng, Vice Chancellor of the University of Cape Town, on Monday. “The resources we had there, the collections we had in the library, were not just for us, they were for the continent.”

She added, “It’s a big loss.”

Shortly after 9 p.m. on Sunday evening, Table Mountain residents reported seeing three people lighting small fires on the foothills as the devastating fire raged. Shortly thereafter, police arrested one of these people – a man in his thirties – in connection with the fires, according to Jean-Pierre Smith, a Cape Town councilor who sits on the mayor’s security committee. It is unclear whether the man is linked to the initial fire, added Mr Smith.

The devastating fire started at 9am on Sunday morning on the lower slopes of Devil’s Peak, one of the rugged ridges that are part of Cape Town’s legendary Table Mountain backdrop. Fanned by gusts of fire, the fire engulfed and destroyed a hillside restaurant before descending to the university campus, which is largely built on the slopes of the mountain.

Several buildings, including a historic mill and the school library, were soon on fire, and thick billows of white smoke rolled over the city. No deaths have been reported so far, but at least five firefighters have been injured, officials said.

According to Nombuso Shabalala, a spokeswoman for the university, around 4,000 students were evacuated from the dormitories on Sunday. The university announced on Sunday that it would cease operations until at least Tuesday.

Videos on social media showed dozens of students, some of whom were clutching small bags and storming out of apartment buildings as the fire engulfed the nearby hillside. Busisiwe Mtsweni, a finance and accounting student, was on the university’s upper campus around noon when “everyone panicked,” she said on a phone call.

Sparks from the mountain started small fires between buildings and billows of smoke made breathing difficult as she and her friends stormed to their apartments to retrieve their belongings, she said. Ms. Mtsweni was later evacuated by bus and spent the night in a hotel.

On Monday, evacuated students reported shortages of food and other essential supplies, and volunteers used social media and WhatsApp groups to coordinate deliveries.

According to university officials, a reading room for special collections in the university library had been destroyed by the flame by Sunday evening. The reading room housed portions of the university’s African Studies Collection, including works on Africa and South Africa printed before 1925, hard-to-find volumes in European and African languages, and other rare books, according to Niklas Zimmer, library director at the university.

A school archive curator, Pippa Skotnes, confirmed on Monday that the university’s African film collection, which includes around 3,500 archive films, had been lost in the fire. The archive was one of the largest collections in the world of films made in Africa or containing African content. The library will conduct a full loss assessment once the building is declared safe, university officials said.

While the university had recently made great efforts to digitize the school’s collections, only a “wafer-thin” portion of the archive of the special collections was transferred due to the enormous volume of material and the Ice Age pace of work, said Zimmer. Who directed this program? A single cabinet with microfilm, said Mr. Zimmer, Processing can take “a whole working life”.

University officials said they are confident that most of the archive, which is located on two basement levels below the library and is protected by a system of fire doors, may have been spared. But on Monday, as scholars and librarians waited to learn the extent of the damage, many pointed to the possibility that the basement might have been flooded during the fire fighting.

“Very unique things are probably gone,” said Sibusiso Nkomo, a doctor of history. Student who is a member of an interdisciplinary archival research unit on campus.

“We have lost valuable history that tells us where we are from,” he added, noting that the mood among his colleagues was “traumatized and devastated”.

Several other campus buildings were damaged.

For many in the Western Cape, images of the burning mountain were reminiscent of other major mountain fires that have devastated the province in recent years. In 2015, four days of fires broke out on the outskirts of Cape Town, destroying around 15,000 acres of land. Two years later, another devastating fire broke out in a coastal town in the province, Knysna, in which at least four people were killed and about 10,000 were forced to evacuate their homes.

The massive forest fires in the mountains were fed by a flammable mix of fire-prone vegetation from southern Africa – known as fynbos – and particularly flammable tree species such as gum trees and pines that colonists imported into the Western Cape and contributed to the accidental spread of fires.

In order to prevent uncontrollable forest fires, many ecologists have warned that national park officials must carry out prescribed burns more frequently. But in Cape Town, where the edges of the city have spread to the foothills of the mountain, mandatory burns are particularly difficult, and park officials have encountered resistance from residents who fear their homes may be destroyed.

“If there isn’t a fire, all of the vegetation is just sitting there and it’s only a matter of time,” said Dr. Alanna Rebelo, an ecology postdoctoral fellow at Stellenbosch University in the Western Cape. “We had this huge bonfire just waiting to be passed.”

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Health

Can the World Be taught From South Africa’s Vaccine Trials?

Can the World Learn From South Africa’s Vaccine Trials?

In a year that has fluctuated between staggering profits and brutal setbacks at Covid-19, few moments have been as sobering as last month’s discovery that a variant of coronavirus in South Africa was dampening the effects of one of the most effective vaccines in the world.

That finding – from a South African trial with the Oxford-AstraZeneca shot – revealed how quickly the virus had managed to evade human antibodies, ending what some researchers have described as the worldwide honeymoon period with Covid-19 vaccines, and continuing that Hopes return to contain the pandemic.

As countries prepare for this difficult turnaround, the story of how scientists uncovered the dangers of the variant in South Africa has brought focus to the global vaccine trials that were essential in warning the world.

“Historically, people might have thought that a problem in a country like South Africa would remain in South Africa,” said Mark Feinberg, executive director of IAVI, a nonprofit scientific research group. “But we’ve seen how quickly variants pop up all over the world. Even wealthy countries need to pay a lot of attention to the developing landscape around the world. “

After the deliberations in the vaccine race, these global studies saved the world from sleepwalking into the second year of the coronavirus without knowing how the pathogen might weaken the body’s immune response, scientists said. They also provide lessons on how vaccine manufacturers can combat new variants and eliminate long-standing health inequalities this year.

The deck is often stacked against drug trials in poorer countries: drug and vaccine manufacturers attract their largest commercial markets, and often avoid the cost and uncertainty of testing products in the global south. Less than 3 percent of clinical trials are conducted in Africa.

However, the emergence of new varieties in South Africa and Brazil has shown that vaccine manufacturers cannot afford to wait years, as they have often done, before testing that shots work in poorer ones for rich countries.

“If you fail to identify and respond to what is happening on a supposedly distant continent, it has a significant impact on global health,” said Clare Cutland, a vaccine scientist at the Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg who coordinated the Oxford study. “These results have shown the world that there isn’t a single pathogen sitting there doing nothing – it is constantly mutating.”

Although the Oxford vaccine offers minimal protection against mild or moderate cases caused by the variant in South Africa, it will likely prevent these patients from becoming seriously ill, preventing an increase in hospitalizations and deaths. Laboratory studies have produced a mix of hopeful and more worrying results about how much the variant disrupts Pfizer and Moderna’s recordings.

Even so, vaccine manufacturers are trying to test updated booster vaccinations. And countries are trying to isolate cases of the variant that South African studies have shown could potentially re-infect humans as well.

In March of last year, long before scientists became angry about variants, Shabir Madhi, a veteran vaccinologist at the Witwatersrand University, began to persuade vaccine manufacturers to conduct trials.

Dr. Realizing how long Africa often waits for life-saving vaccines as it did with swine flu vaccinations a decade ago, Madhi wanted to quickly examine how Covid-19 vaccines work on the continent, even with people with HIV no excuse for the world the delay in permits or deliveries. Different socio-economic and health conditions can alter the performance of vaccines.

“I’m sure I can get money,” he emailed the Oxford team on March 31 last year, adding that “it would be important to evaluate in relation to HIV.”

Oxford agreed, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation contributed $ 7.3 million, cementing its role as the linchpin of efforts to steer vaccine trials to the global south.

Even so, the process had to contend with difficulties that larger studies with better resources in the US and Europe did not have. On the one hand, Dr. Madhi eliminate several test sites because they did not have sufficiently cold freezers or emergency power generators. This is necessary in a country where frequent power outages can put valuable doses at risk.

Even when the researchers locked down sites and relied on clinics with experience conducting HIV studies, the study was almost rolled back. The test results showed that almost half of the earliest volunteers were already infected with the virus at the time of vaccination, invalidating their results.

Updated

March 13, 2021, 6:24 p.m. ET

“We had a limited amount of funding and a limited number of vaccines,” said Dr. Cutland. “We were very concerned that the process had completely derailed.”

At another test site, all three pharmacists have signed Covid-19 and have withdrawn the only people who are allowed to prepare shots. Nurses in the study lost siblings and parents to the disease. The staff was so overwhelmed that the phones sometimes rang when vaccine managers called from abroad.

The magnitude of the pandemic in South Africa – 51,000 people have died and up to half the population may be infected – nearly overturned the process. But that was also part of what attracted vaccine makers: More cases mean faster results.

Dr. Madhi’s team weathered the storm, working 12-hour days and adding last-minute swabs to make sure the volunteers weren’t already infected. By May, he had asked Novavax, then a little-known American company with the support of the Trump administration, to conduct a lawsuit there too. Novavax agreed, and the Gates Foundation raised $ 15 million. However, the process was not registered until a few months later.

Novavax said the process took some time. However, the delay also reflected what scientists have called pressure on American-backed vaccine manufacturers to focus their efforts on the United States. Studies there are the best way to unlock coveted approvals from the Food and Drug Administration, the world’s gold standard drug agency.

And vaccine manufacturers tend to know their largest markets best.

“Companies have the greatest experience of clinical trials in parts of the world that represent their commercial markets,” said Dr. Feinberg.

For vaccine manufacturers who have made supplying the world a core part of their strategies, the trials have been a boon. Novavax showed that the effectiveness of the vaccine was only moderately weakened by the variant in South Africa. Johnson & Johnson, who also conducted a South African study, showed that their vaccine was protected from hospitalization and death there.

What you need to know about the vaccine rollout

“You have your fishing line in the water – and by the time we were there the virus developed,” said Dr. Gregory Glenn, President of Research and Development at Novavax. “This is invaluable data for us and the world.”

In a recent laboratory study, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine protected hamsters exposed to the variant from disease, even when the animals’ immune responses were slightly weaker. The human study in South Africa was too small to be able to say definitively whether the vaccine prevents serious diseases. Finding that it offers minimal protection from milder cases was itself daunting, as the shot remains the backbone of the introduction of many poorer countries.

In South Africa, the results failed because of plans to give the Oxford vaccine to health workers. Despite the implementation of trials, the country was unable to use them for early purchase agreements and delayed deliveries. Only a fifth of 1 percent of the people there have been vaccinated, raising fears of another wave of deaths and further mutations.

If HIV research laid the groundwork for vaccine trials in South Africa, some scientists hope that an explosion in global studies on the pandemic will show drug companies that other countries have the infrastructure to conduct larger studies.

To this end, the Gates-supported Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations offers companies incentives to conduct further Covid-19 vaccine trials in poorer countries.

“People tend to go for what they know,” said Melanie Saville, the coalition’s director of vaccine research and development. “However, in low- and middle-income countries, capacity is increasing and we need to encourage developers to use it.”

Large numbers of South Africans volunteered for the trials. Most mornings, Dr. Anthonet Koen, who operated a location in Johannesburg for the Oxford and Novavax processes, opened their doors at 6 a.m. At this point, the participants had already been outside for two hours.

On December 11th, Dr. Koen that the pandemic was increasing: After weeks without a case, two people in the study tested positive. Then more and more every day. Health officials announced the discovery of the variant a week later. The random placement of the studies gave the scientists what they almost never had: an open-air laboratory where they could watch in real time how a vaccine and a variant stood in front of them.

Since the Oxford results were announced last month, volunteers have tried to comfort them, said Dr. Koen: “I get a lot of condolences and ‘I’m sorry’,” she said.

As long as this vaccine prevents and other serious diseases, the world can live with the virus even in cases of the variant, scientists said. However, the trial in South Africa underscored the need to eradicate the virus before it mutates further. Without them, scientists said, the world could have been blind to what was to come.

“We would assume that these variants are not the end of the story,” said Andrew Pollard, the Oxford scientist responsible for his experiments. “For the virus to survive, it must continue to mutate once the populations have good immunity to the current variants.”