Good guys, bad guys
Out and about in the African headlines … I will be pouring out a forty for Daniel Davies aka "Scatter", who copped it in a shootout between gangsters and vigilantes near a hideout called "Baghdad" in the Red Light district of Monrovia, Liberia. Looking at the attached story, it appears that Scatter was quite the antisocial influence, in that his mates terrorised the district with petrol bombs for an afternoon in revenge. Not one for the eponym sidebar I think.
And via the PEN-L mailing list, it appears that the University of KwaZulu-Natal has been trying to close down its Centre for Civil Society. All I really know about the CCS is that it is home to Patrick Bond, but Patrick Bond is a terrific development economist and certainly a right guy to be supporting against any politically-motivated witch hunts (the CCS is a top quality and very left wing academic think tank; it's also very anti-Mugabe for the best of reasons, and Patrick himself is one of the most outspoken critics of the World Bank and IMF, all of which positions have the potential to be politically inconvenient). At present it looks like the battle to save CCS is on a knife-edge, so if any of my readers have colleagues who have influence in the development field and might not have heard of the problems at CCS, you could do a little good in the world by telling them.
It's great that Monrovia has a district whose real official name is "Red Light".
ReplyDelete...pouring out a forty...
ReplyDeleteInto what, a teacup?
Is that how you roll in the high finance 'hood these days?
Real men drink from the bottle, always. You wouldn't last five seconds on the mean streets of Morningside!
I'm keeping it real. As my sidebar shows, there are Daniel Davieses in all walks of life, from facilities management to Liberian crime (actually not Liberian gangs any more but you get the point). We're a hardy race.
ReplyDeleteI had to look up what a "forty" was on the internet, and was pleased to discover I'd been drinking them all my life. Did you know they call Special Brew "malt liquor" in America?
Is that really what it is?
ReplyDeleteYes, and they call Buckfast "Low End Fortified Wine"
ReplyDeleteThe Scottish Office tried to get the monks of Buckfast Abbey to stop making Buckfast, but they refused: "If the drunks didn't buy their booze from us, they'd only buy it from someone else," the monks argued, proving that the separation between Bernard of Clairvaux and Viktor Bout is a lot smaller than you might have thought.
ReplyDelete...they call Buckfast "Low End Fortified Wine"
ReplyDeleteThey've hit the nail on the head there. Apparently Buckfast sells £30m worth a year, more than 10% of it in Lanarkshire alone.
"Wreck the hoose juice" is the best nickname I've heard for it...
You pour out a forty onto the ground for your homies who can't be there. It's a sad day for the UK when you make me look like I've got street cred.
ReplyDeleteAhhh, I see, it all seems to obvious now.
ReplyDeleteYou pour out a forty onto the ground for your homies who can't be there. It's a sad day for the UK when you make me look like I've got street cred.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny because old Africans pour palm wine onto the ground for ancestors..
I think (in all seriousness) that the malt-liquor pouring tradition was more or less explicitly modelled on the African one; I wish I knew more about Afrocentric hip-hop so I could do a proper post about it, but there have always been quite a lot of sociology and anthropology professors hanging around on the fringes of the more political end of rap culture.
ReplyDelete"near a hideout called "Baghdad" in the Red Light district of Monrovia"
ReplyDeleteIn my grandma's village the only bar in town, which is officially called something like "Friendly Polish Bar", used to be called, by the locals, "Chechnya", then "Bosnia", then "Chechnya" again and lately "Bagdad". Not a place I would recommend to anyone, local village Poles included (though the only place I've ever had both a chair and a pint glass thrown at me in a midsts of a pub brawl was in London. It interupted my reading of a Patrick O'Brian novel which really pissed me off at the time.)
"You pour out a forty onto the ground for your homies who can't be there"
"It's funny because old Africans pour palm wine onto the ground for ancestors.."
"I think (in all seriousness) that the malt-liquor pouring tradition was more or less explicitly modelled on the African one"
Well, you don't POUR OUT a forty. You pour out some of it. You leave yourself enough of it to catch a buzz (as your dead hommies would very much like you too had they been alive). And it may be African. But the Rroma (at least some of them) also got the same tradition where you let the dead take the first shot of vodka at funerals and on All Saints's Day. A bit of that in Slavic cultures too. It's kind of a thing that is/was probably pretty universal in cultures which appreciate the drink.
In my grandma's village the only bar in town, which is officially called something like "Friendly Polish Bar", used to be called, by the locals, "Chechnya", then "Bosnia", then "Chechnya" again and lately "Bagdad".
ReplyDeleteAhahaha..
Some neighbourghoods in Chicago were nicknamed "Beyrut" at some point.
A street was nicknamed in Sarajevo in Brazzaville in the 90's.
I heard people calling a gang Chechens there too.
And a gang/fraternity in Nigeria is called KKK.
The kind of things watching the news make people do..
I think (in all seriousness) that the malt-liquor pouring tradition was more or less explicitly modelled on the African one
Nah.
May be retention but not modelling. The afrocentrist branch of hip-hop is also the most removed from the "streets".
And as NotSneaky points out, the pouring some drink (or putting some food aside) for ancestors/spirits/dead homies thing may have been quite universal at some point.
Some neighbourghoods in Chicago were nicknamed "Beyrut" at some point.
ReplyDeleteA street was nicknamed in Sarajevo in Brazzaville in the 90's.
I heard people calling a gang Chechens there too.
And a gang/fraternity in Nigeria is called KKK.
Oh, and the Fenham district of Newcastle is commonly known as "'Nam"...