Cardi B in Lagos
Cardi B in recent photo
I don’t presume to know any music by Cardi B or to know why she is so famous. But I’ve heard the name, and recognize she is an international star. So I was interested to read that she’d been in Lagos recently. She also made a stop in Accra, Ghana.
Our son Sam is here and just filled me in. Cardi B is a rapper from the Bronx. She’s hugely popular. Do you know about her?
Saratu Abiola who wrote the article in Quartz Africa said some artists who visit African countries go home to give false, at worst, or incomplete, at best, reports of what they experienced. The response of young Africans online is a “collective eye-roll . . . to misrepresentations in the media on everything from gratuitous imagery of poor people to inaccurate international media coverage on their countries’ politics.”
Cardi B’s visit was different. According to the article, “The real novelty of her visit was her treating these places as she would have done anywhere else: besides just performing, she took time to relax and have fun, and then put it all on Instagram stories. She made the places she visited look like fun places to be.”
She visited an orphanage and posted pictures with the staff, “while sparing us all photos of poor black children,” Abiola said.
Social media, especially Instagram, can be a powerful tool for showing the real, everyday Africa. With so many people of African descent in the diaspora, artists among them, telling more multifaceted stories, “the more human Africans — and by extension — where they live — will be in the western cultural imagination,” the writer says.
A Special Treat for You
This video came today from our Senior Minister at The Unitarian Church in Westport! He said, “The kid in the red is my grandson Ashur.” Wow!
Holiday Break
I was planning to write about racism in banking in the US, based on a recent article in The New York Times. There was also a recent story in Ambassador’s Campbell’s blog about an attack on a foreign businessman in Lagos. But these stories, though important, can wait for the New Year.
Instead I wish you happy holidays, whether you’re celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, none or a combination!
My blog will be on a break until January 2020. If you’d like to send pictures of your holidays, I’d be pleased to post them to share. Be sure to tell me who’s in the pictures, and what’s happening.
