Rodriguez' Brooklyn Concert (Bob Dylan, You Need to Revisit Highway Sixto One)

When the crowd in the arena rose, whistling, cheering and applauding at the appearance of this legend of our youths, it seemed like an historic moment in the making. Barely able to see, Sixto Rodriguez was lead onto the stage by his daughter and an assistant, put on a top hat and began to sing in a remarkably young, robust voice.

Rodriguez at the Barclay Center 
[Courtesy: Brooklyn Vegan]

This voice of our youth, might have needed a little help getting there but contrary to the rumors was not frail at all. He played the songs we love, Sugarman, I Wonder, Inner City Blues, Crucify Your Mind and we all thank him for that. But the moments were more mystery than history: if you came to understand the magic of Rodriguez and recapture the strange mixture of dread and rebellion that his music stood for South Africans during apartheid - you didn’t get it there.

On the other hand, if you read on, you just might get it here.

It turns out that Rodriguez is a very sweet natured man – think Paarl Perlé on a breezy night – and while he played his obligatory hits from his first albums and acknowledged the many South Africans in the audience, this was no South African show. He never discussed the songs, there was no commentary, no lingering with choruses or any attempt to engage the audience. We didn’t get to revisit the strange rebelliousness he represented for white South Africans in the 70’s and 80’s - the world they comfortably hated and knew to be wrong but whose alternative was just too hard to confront.

He just sang them so he could gt them out of the way to sing what he really wanted. It turns out, the old prophet of destruction yearned to be a classic, early sixties blues rock crooner and his greatest joy was playing songs like Lucille and A Whole Lotta Shaking Going On. His younger back up band reveled in those standards and despite needed to huddle between songs, played those old rock licks like they grew up with them. This could be the top group at any State Fair. As Sixto said in his wisecracking patter, he didn’t want to be a great legend, “just an ordinary legend.”

As heartbreaking as his story goes, that’s what he was: an ordinary guy. Then, just as you beaming at the resurrection of this once lost soul, he breaks out his Mickey Mouse joke that I first heard in Junior High. The one about the judge refusing to grant Mickey a divorce from Minnie on the grounds of her being stupid. “I didn’t say she was stupid,” Mickey says, “I said she was f*** Goofy.” Yep you heard it from Sixto who, by the way, is passionate about protecting women against domestic violence. Just not bad jokes.

So what is about the Rodriguez we all fell for? A consultant from the Obama Administration recently asked me to explain. All I could say is that he was a kind of anomaly at the time when Dylan was just too revolutionary for us (“Times are a changing?” No bloody way.) and our local version of protest was him, all we would have had was David Marks, the former mine engineer who sang “It’s a strange, strange world we live in, Master Jack.” It wasn’t the words exactly – no one yet has explained what those words actually meant to South Africans, since he wasn’t signing about us and had no idea we even existed. It was about the tone, and the words were a kind of abstract poetry that let us take in new ideas at our own pace. For the most part, we just projected our deepest thoughts and he was a screen, the tabula rasa we laid it upon. And yes, he opened us up to some new concepts we hadn’t really encountered like alienation, dread and rebellion along with serious drug dealers and teen sex.

He was, in short, our own personal Dylan. As for me, I thought he was a great Dylan copycat hailing from Lourenço Marques in Moçambique where his songs were regularly played on their pirate broadcast.

The oddest part and arguably, most revealing part of the concert were the numerous opening acts - a collection of reinventors and offbeats that made you think this event really stood for something. One of the openers was a poet who reminded many of an angry George Carlin, had he tried singing. Given the lack of audience response you get why he might be angry. But he was also a kind of crossover 60’s proto-Rapper and that made him intersting. The outstanding act was Susan Cowsill, famous for a family singing group act in the 60’s who began with their hit song, “Hair” an upbeat chorale and then broke out into a truly kicking rock ‘n roll set. Was she another missing talent, holding out for the chance to be the next Bonnie Raitt?

Maybe that was the real message of the traveling Rodriguez show: a place for lost souls who just may get that one last break. His humility and his gentleness are disarming but, but what was it musically? Critics are not big fans of his, perhaps because they feel his success is a repudiation of their profession, which has always ignored him. They may be right if they say his songwriting or his storytelling hasn’t grown but they are wrong if they think he never really was that talented. They could also be missing out on what could yet come.

Last year, at around this time I saw Bob Dylan perform in the Barclay Center. He was good for two songs and then his voice exited the building and something like a Harvey Fierstein rasp took its place. These dudes may be the same age, but Dylan is old while Rodriguez sounds like he is just getting started, as if his vocal chords were preserved in aspic. He easily sounds like Dylan’s golden voiced years of Blood on the Tracks and Lay Lady Lay, right after he quit smoking. Only better.

The remarkable thing, according to Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, is that Jobs met Dylan who was his idol, and asked him about his iconic songs and how came to wrote them. Dylan replied that he just didn’t know what came over him and that he could no longer write those kings of songs. But, he said, I can still sing them. While that might have been true in the early 2000’s it is not so any more. Rodriguez can’t write them either but he can definitely sing them. I say Bob Dylan should hire him, I’ll bet the two of them would even write some interesting new songs together – perhaps about young love or just two old guys living it up forever. So what about a Bobbie D mashup with Rodriguez: call it Highway Sixto Revisited. That would be a real show. Something old and fresh and new that could still blow our minds. 

© Alan Brody 2013

Playlist (courtesy setlist.fm)

1.       Climb Up On My Music 


2.       Only Good For Conversation 


3.       Crucify Your Mind 


4.       I Only Have Eyes for You 
(The Flamingos cover)

5.      This Is Not a Song, It's an Outburst: Or, The Establishment Blues 


6.       I Wonder 


7.       Fever 
(Little Willie John cover)

8.       Sugar Man 


9.       Inner City Blues 


10.   Lucille 
(Little Richard cover)

11.   Rich Folks Hoax 


12.   Street Boy 


13.   Forget It 


   

Encore:

14.   Rock Around the Clock 


15.  Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On 
(Big Maybelle cover)

Update: This review is now available on the official Rodriguez.org website.

Trayvon WIlliams - George Zimmerman: The Attitude Gap?

We see the same facts but vastly different perceptions. 

This graphic from Visual Daily shows how to visualize the two opposing perspectives.

Visual Daily

Mandela & Obama: A Comparison of Icons

Time to compare these two world leaders and ask: what's next?

Trevor Noah's New York Area Debut - July 14, 2012

Review: Trevor Noah’s Comedy Central Taping in Tarrytown, NY July 14, 2012

by Alan Brody

Trevor Noah won over a suburban Westchester, NY audience that had never heard of him before. He enchanted them with his clean-cut looks, a plummy accent and tales from an Africa they had never imagined. Trevor began by using much of his foundation material from his debut on the Jay Leno show: his mixed parenthood and his illegal status growing up under apartheid. His mother liked white men and his father being Swiss, you know, liked chocolate and in public he was like a bag of weed no wanted to own. This is a magic formula sold them on a personality they had never met before – an African they could relate to and a kind of comedic bridge between Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela. For the rest of the hour, except for a misstep at the end, he had the audience in the palm of his hand.

The material peaked when Trevor talked about Oprah’s Girls School in Johannesburg. Here is someone every American knows and a story she has made very public. But Americans have never heard what people in South African think of her or the school. The story about Oprah’s expectations vs the African teachers she hired was hilarious. She told them not to spank the girls and they agreed. What any South African knows is that teachers back there don’t spank – they whip or beat. Ah, the old days…..!

The flow began to ebb after Trevor's bit about the fly on the starving Africans in the UNICEF commercials. Even though it was funny it went on a bit too long, especially since many African American comics have taken a crack at this one. Trevor’s spin may have been the best but it is where the performance began to lose a little of its edge. Considering our guilt-ridden attitudes and the amount of time he spent with this he was obliged to go somewhere with story. After all, this is just the kind of audiences that responds to those ads and as far we know, people really are starving in Africa so where do you go with this? 

The funniest line I have heard in this vein is about the care package charitable Indians might send to Americans after a disaster that included something like canned vindaloo curry, frozen briyani, dried chillies and ghee with an emergency Sari wrap. He might have had fun with something similar - say a commercial imploring Africans to send their mopane worms to Americans devastated by a hurricane!


Without a good segue, he closed his essential theme which is biracial African comes to America to “become black.” Since he was never really accepted by blacks or whites in South Africa, when he hears that in America he would definitely be considered black, he has to come over. Better yet, there is a new formula: you actually succeed by “going for the black” with Tiger Woods and the ultimate winner, Barack Obama, another biracial African, who are now considered black and no longer biracial. That is a great vantage point to make a lot of jokes about blacks, whites and their misperceptions and sorry relationship with Africa and themselves. South Africans who know his Nelson Mandela sendups or his impersonations of South African premier Jacob Zuma’s attempts to Facebook his supporters, his refusal to pay back the IMF or Julius Malembe’s cries of “that’s racist!” may be disappointed that none of this appeared in American guise. 

Could these be adapted for an American audience? We’ll never know. But after the fly joke the story line petered out and what emerged was the Trevor-the-linguist jokes. This line of amusing jokes about misspellings and American’s unusual uses of words and pronunciations are an amusing subtheme and significant part of his "African in the land of non-African blacks" jokes. The funniest are his “knowadimean” and perhaps event the transformation of the Ku Klux Klan to a more truthful Ku Fascist Club  or KFC - which may have killed more black people than the KKK ever did! However, once it separated from that context, it lost its thematic resonance. Since the show ended with Trevor talking about his knowledge of Japanese and the amusing interaction with a Japanese speaker at an airport it lost some of its oomph. He is a great impressionist, a gifted and seasoned performer and all his pieces are marvelously enacted but once he strayed from his theme the big laughs declined and the show closed on a relatively lower note. What he really needed was to build on his cross-cultural misperception schtick in order to close on a crescendo.

Nevertheless, this show will be edited down for TV - apparently a Comedy Central special - and presumably, his management will craft the final product to fit the audience expectations. For South Africans, however, there is a lot to be learned here. Trevor made South Africa seem incredibly interesting and, with deft management, he could be a major crossover performer – a big star and an ambassador for a new Africa. (And yes, anyone who know the scuttlebutt realizes that controversies will be sure to follow.) As for the audience, they were a sociologist’s goldmine of unexpected juxtapositions: a comibination of older local suburbanites who were comped because they are theater members or their guests. They had no idea what to expect and were pleasantly surprised. Others, mostly white South Africans, made the trip to the ‘burbs paid the modest $15 door charge to support a star from the old country. Finally, there was a back-up group of “fans” mostly African Americans who filled the unreserved seats and roared with appreciation. The net result was a happy audience and a very interesting puzzle in terms of how Trevor, Africa, race relations, diverse expectations and even political affiliations come together over a single performer. 

Trevor Noah in the US - South Africa's Comedian Connects

Vulindlela - A South African Voice on TV

For the first time, a South African stand up comic appeared on Leno. On Jan. 6, Trevor Noah, a young comedian from Jozi. Come to think of it, he may be the only South African comic to be on any major talk show.

TREVOR NOAH on LENO

Is he what Zulus once called Pal Simon when his Graceland with Ladysmith Black Mombaza broke through musically: vulindlela - opener of the gate?

Noah may be the only comedian in the world who can really make fun of Mandela in front on a American audience, then take on African Americans ("not really African - but we'll play along with that") and then flawlessly switch in and out of their accents.

  

He dresses like a young stockbroker and speaks with a plummy accent that sounds almost midatlantic - vaguely American, vaguely British and occasionally South Efrican.

  

When he does Julius Malema - his Africanisms are uncanny. When he pays Jacob Zuma telling the World Bank that he doesn't have the $150bn he owes them you'll die laughing. "Did you put that money in my hand, no!" When he can't get the IMF off his back ask his assistant for "mashini wami." You might have to explain that to an American friend but somehow they'll be laughing anyway.

  

Noah's story is that his mother is Xhosa and his father Swiss ("you know the Swiss, they like chocolate"). He grew up at the tail end of apartheid where he was technically an outlaw. He is bi-racial but not culturally what South Africans would call "colored."

  

That buys him a lot of license to take on just about anyone - which does with great intelligence and rare mimicry. It also makes him a kind of insider-outsider - rather like Obama who shares a similar characteristic of being bi-racial but not of the traditional African-American community.

  

All this makes Noah the first of his a kind - a biracial African comic that Americans of all races can get their heads around.

  

The question is - will his insight open the lid on South African culture generally? This really is the new Africa and one that American of all races can relate to.

  

I'm guessing that sooner or later his managers will put him in a Mandela shirt or at least stick some type of kente cloth in his breast pocket. But he's the new Africa, so who knows?

  

What I do know is that he is a talent worth watching and he will certainly make American want to know more about the amazing cultures and stories underlying the new South Africa.

Review: Robert Mugabe....What Happened?

The Trillion Dollar Man as the Scar of Africa

by Alan Brody 

   

Mugabe

               

Scar from the Lion King

If you're one of those people with a $100 Trillion Zimbabwe banknote you will definitely wonder what to make of the NY movie premiere of "Mugabe - What Happened?


"So many people flocked to the NY Institute of Technology theater that they had to open a second screening room. The audience response to the panel interview with director, Simon Bright and distinguished Zimbabweans might even have made your head spin.

$100 gone wrong

This documentary chronicled Mugabe's rise from obscurity to his position today with his signature trail of violence, economy-trashing and fine locution in clear, non-judgmental detail with the kind of archival footing only a genuine insider could get.

Bright is a white Zimbabwean film director with impeccable credits as an anti-Rhodesian government activist in pre-independence days and a former official of the Zimbabwean Ministry of Agriculture. He adds current-day interviews with people who grew up or worked with Mugabe to this footage, painting a straight-forward picture of a very smart, determined man who rose to the top of his liberation group, wowing the Western powers as he overthrew Ian Smith's white rule. 

Let's Dance: Thatcher-Kaunda Style

This is an Horatio Alger tale of an impoverished Jesuit-trained Shona boy with a single mother who is educated in Britain as economist and becomes a lecturer in Ghana where he witnesses black Africa's first post-colonial independence. Then it is on to Zambia where their independence means we are treated to the supremely awkward Margaret Thatcher-Kenneth Kaunda waltz (worthy of its own documentary, I would say!). Mugabe gives up academia for the pursuit of self-determination in Rhodesia. First he joins Joshua Nkomo and the Matabele-led party only to drop them for the majority Shona tribe's ZANU Party, which he soon takes over and leads to victory.


So, "what happened?" The young Mugabe comes off as hyperarticulate and forthright in a way that captains of industry once were before lawsuits, PR and TV consultants taught them to act humble. Once in power, Mugabe reaches out to the whites offering them "love." That's when you notice his resemblance to Scar, the evil, throne-stealing uncle from the Lion King. His trademark landing strip version of the Hitler mustache is still an ominous shadow while his deeply furrowed philtrum seems the embodiment of the new Africa's stiff upper lip. His accent and his manner resonate with a dapper Britishness, buttressed by Saville Row suits and a locution that lets him transcend his very un-British rat-pack gatherings with the likes of North Korea's Kim Il Sung, Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat.

Amazingly, peace holds, the old Rhodesian whites settle down and go about their way of living as if nothing had happened. They run their massive tobacco and wheat farms and rest assured that, as the backbone of the economy and employer of a half million Zims, their way of life is secure. Black Zimbabweans see an improvement in their lives, particularly in the form of education and all is seemingly well for 15 years or so.

That should have been the story of Africa's first Mandela and it just may be that the ensuing panel pandemonium took place because so many people want to think of Zimbabwe that way - no matter what. The reality is a little different. The first sign is that right after Mugabe took power in a coalition government with the Matabele, he got wind that his political partners had a cache of weapons. He sicked his ruthless, North Korean trained 5th Brigade unit on them resulting in the brutal ethnic cleansing that took the lives of around 20,000 tribesmen. This campaign even had its own catchy name Gukurahundi, a kind of cleansing 

Since the Matabele are a breakaway from the South African Zulu tribe, they are without support anywhere - neither loved by the Zulus nor the Shona they displaced - and so this genocide was conveniently overlooked by all the powers that be. Do you know a Matabele, anyone?

This brings us back to the night's panel (im)moderated by Douglas Rogers, author of the poignant but hilarious book about his family' survival in Zim, The Last Resort. Just as theywere going back and forth discussing the fine points of the documentary - how did Bright get the footage, was it film or digital, did he get permission to shoot (really?), where will it be playing and so on - the audience began to rumble. They had far more pressing questions in mind as in: "what can we do about it?"

Even that wasn't simple because many non-Zimbabweans, like Mugabe's partymembers, would rather see him as a hero than confront the damage he has caused. Within Zimbabwe, Mugabe isn't exactly a lonely dictator - he has a big party following with plenty of high-fiving military and political cronies, decked in outfits that could have looted from a Gilbert & Sullivan opera. The capital, Harare, is full of Mercs & Beamers that have flowed to insiders and savvy white and Asian businesspeople. It is only the dispossessed in the slums and countryside along with his hapless MDC opponents who experience his wrath and devastation.

The panelists who knew him say he never changed. This is who is always was and the 1980s massacres were an early warning - Mugabe may wear European suites but he plays by old African rules and pity the fools who didn't get that. He may even be the embodiment of an old joke told in emerging-country circles about two smart third world guys who go to the Harvard Business School and promise to reunite after 10 years with whoever's richest being the host. The South Asian guy is the first, inviting his African college pal to his new palatial estate. He is stunned and asks "How did you get so rich?" The Indian guy tells his friend to look at the new superhighway passing in the back. "I raised the money from the IMF and I got a 10% commission." A few years later the African guy sends out his invite. Only this time the palace looks like Versailles with Neuschwanstein thrown in. "How did you get this?" his Indian friend asks. "I raised money for a superhighway too," the African guy says, "look around you." The Indian guy says that he can't see anything. "There's no highway - nothing at all. "Exactly," says the African "and so I got 100%."

With Mugabe, the 100% came not from the IMF but from the War Veterans Benefit fund and may have been for his cronies and not necessarily for him. Once the veterans found out he had a real crisis on his hands if he wanted to stay in power. In any case, unlike the IMF, those guys don't make prissy speeches and cut off your credit cards while you go running to Bono for relief. They know how to fight with guns and bombs and they know exactly where you live. To get them off his back he invited them - with the assistance of his police - to invade the white peoples' farm. Think of Scar from the Lion King - beaming as marvels at this solution.

It may be possible that Britain could have underwritten that loss but Tony Blair had already dropped their land redistribution payments, apparently because he thought it was being looted. The White Farmers could have paid off the veterans or for that matter, Mugabe. But neither of these options came up and one has to conclude from the dazed interviews and the "I built this place" kind of tone, that the white farmers don't normally think that way and just forgot where they really were. Payoffs would not have been very proper and it's adubious whether Mugabe could have been trusted. But, when in Rome.

According to at least half the audience, Mugabe wasn't necessarily to blame. One questioner said that she lived in Zimbabwe at the time and since the rules of the game were written by the IMF in Washington and London, Mugabe was not at fault. Then there were another group, African Americans mostly, who felt that West had done enough of its own mischief from colonization, slavery and the economy that it had no business criticizing Mr. Mugabe.

Mapfumo & Bright

The real fireworks occurred when Thomas Mapfumo, the legendary Zimbabwean

master of chimurenga, that slow-burn, very African style of music full of electronic thumb pianos, marimbas and percussion, who has played with Bob Marley, responded that the US and Europe "must do something." Apparently, he was thinking "Libya-style" but the crowd roared that it wanted an "African solution." Chimurenga is also the name of the liberation struggle.

Unfortunately, they already have an African solution. Zimbabwe is a landlocked country that survives at the mercy of South Africa and no one, not even Mandela - back when he could have - saw any value in taking on Mugabe.

Loser News...

Which brings us to the real message of Mugabe. I'd like whatever he's drinking. Think about it. He's killed tens of thousands, impoverished millions, turned the economy into a joke, beaten back two electoral losses - and by beaten, I mean with sticks, knives and serious guns - and here he is, in his mid-eighties riding as high as ever. Betty White has nothing on this guy! If you don't mind a little violence, he could be the poster boy for the AARP. It's hard out there for tyrant. Dictatoring is not that easy at 50 - but at 88! And he stills sounds about the same. It takes him a moment or two to warm up and the 'stache is getting a little raggedy but this one-man rule is definitely a healthy lifestyle. He laughs off the comparisons to Hitler - as he should - since Hitler, as we all know, was a loser.

The proper way to think about Mugabe is that he is the living "Secret" - Napoleon Hill meets Oprah gone bad. He willed away the great forces of the West, his political rivals, and the pesky farmers who ran the economy. He outlived all the other dictators of his era and just as you think there is no chance for the country to survive under him - he gets lucky! The last

Diamond Mining - Mugabe Style

time they were going broke again and were looking to change their notes from trillions to gazillions, they found diamonds near Mutare. It took about 2 years for all $4 billion of those diamonds to, shall we say, de-carbonize - but it was enough to buy him more years in power and attract Chinese investment. They turned out to be less generous than he hoped, but rumors abound of more diamonds and mineral wealth.

Mugabe has overcome his chief rival, Morgan Tsvangirai twice - even though he lost and the world backed his opponent. Those wacky Westerners allowed Mugabe to create a coalition government which would be something akin to putting your pet dog in cage with a pit bull and saying "nice dog." Better yet, make that a lion cage.

As for Thomas Mapfumo, who now lives in Oregon, and all those Zims, ex-pats and poor people left behind, you can only sympathize. Or not, if you choose. One member of the audience was a freshly arrived college student from Harare who expressed amazement at all these negative stories about their great hero. And she has a point. If Hitler had stuck it out, the Reich would probably seem like an admirable regime today and the 'stache might even be a fashion statement. In a bizarre way, this is almost happening within Zimbabwe.

As for American intervention, it has already happened. The $100 trillion notes have been shelved along with the Zim dollar and now the economy runs on our greenback. It could be worse - it could be the yuan. As for Mugabe, at this point, only the Lion King could take him out. Simba, where are you?

Also reviewed in Afropop.

  

Kony 2012 Tells You What’s Wrong With Americans like Jason Russell

If you ask an African why Jason Russell, Dr. Livingstone avatar and producer of the viral wonder, Kony 2012 which targets the bizarre, child-killing jungle rebel and went bezerk, you will probably get a mysterious smile. His bizarre outbreak of public nakedness and mind-numbing lewdness has been officially described as “a psychotic attack brought on by dehydration and exhaustion.” If only he packed Gatorade and Prozac.

To an African, that looks suspiciously like a witch doctor, a night dancer, traditional sorcerer, inyanga or whatever you choose to call him, put a nasty spell on him. Maybe there was also a little muti thrown into his veggie burger.

(TMZ just published an interview with an African who claims that Kony is a voodoo witch doctor.)

So if you want to call it psychiatry, go ahead. Either way, it worked and Africa finally has a world class technology it can call its own.

So isn’t it about time we let the subcontinent do things their way, because whatever we have done, really hasn’t helped.

84 million people watched the Kony 2012 video on YouTube. Most were appalled and wanted to do something about it. Most were not African or even African American.

In fact, the government of Uganda was so offended it put out its own video criticizing Kony2012. The Africans street either shrugged it off as old news or saw it as an indirect insult. Hence the witch doctor attack.

We may never be able to prove this, of course but witch doctors pervade their consciousness anyway. Traditional healers – the “board certified” version of this kind of profession – are everywhere in Africa. South Africa, arguably the most westernized, has over 65,000 registered traditional healers and many, many are unregistered.

What does it mean when 84 million people think they were doing God’s work while most Ugandans were simply offended? Should it be up to George Clooney to represent the poor people of nearby Darfur and get arrested along with his smiling dad - or should that be Denzell Washington along with Will Smith?

Why is Nick Kristoff touring the battle fields of the Congo decrying the killing of 6 million Africans when Henry Louis Gates would rather talk African Encyclopeadias and disrespectful cops in Massachussetts?

The child killings, rape and torture of Joseph Kony are unquestionably a crime against mankind but there won't be too many African American march about it. On the other hand, a single teenager in the wrong place in Florida who is killed in a controversial killing with a guard will bring on mass demonstrations.

While all this is going on we are losing the true African opportunity of a lifetime – the subcontinent is is getting richer and we really are not part of that.

Since 2000, Chinese interests have poured billions into Africa locking up most of their freshly available resources. They have built no churches, hospitals, clinics or do-gooder foundations of any kind. Their version of Bill Gates would sooner take their money to the gaming tables of Macao than hand it over to starving villagers of Mocambique. The same is true of Middle Eastern money – it flows from Saudi and Dubai.

The effects are rarely reported in the US media but they have altered the landscape in many ways. When civil wars break out both sides are well armed. When a mine is found or a dam is built - usually to power a mining area - China finances it and makes sure the benefits flow mostl to Beijing and to a few lucky politicians.

By way of thank you, when the continent holds its much vaunted conference on racism in the Zulu town of Durban, the Dalai Lama is banned thanks to pressure from China. When the most famous Zulu performers are invited to play in Israel, they join the Palestinian anti-Israel propaganda campaign. The fact that they were discovered and still partly managed by Jews hardly matters.

The net result is we own the guild-ridden poverty stricken part of Africa that we pull in a direction they don’t care about, wasting millions along the way. The East, on the other hand locks in all the resources and taps the emerging middle class billions. You could argue that they are paying off dictators and so on but there is another truth that we have overlooked in our ridiculously moral and guilt-ridden charity dance: they are feeding the desire of the emerging middle class while we are fanning the outrage of the dispossesed.

It is time to let Africa be Africa and let our own African and African-Americans do business the way Africans want us to. Let Al Sharpton do the marching on Africa and if George Clooney wants to get arrested, let him do it in Florida.

This is not mere polemic – it is sound psychology. Every non-profit knows that people either give or avoid giving by virtue of their psychological association with what the charity represents. By putting white people in charge of African charities they accentuate dependence, racial guilt, resentment and very little in the way of self-reliance. At the very least, they should be driven by African Americans.

When you look at the Asian Tigers you see how the revolutions occurred from within. What they needed from Bill Gates at the early days of the computer industry was his business not his charity. They used the home electronics market to launch vast industries with capital and expertise from home and their own diaspora.

African needs to help Africa. Anyone else - including celebrities not genealogically connected to Africa - need to help them by getting out of the limelight.

Advice to George, you want to march in Florida and give your frequent flier miles to Jesse Jackson. Let him take on Darfur. Kony too.

We all stand to gain when that happens.