Chris Smith’s blog

The World Cup has finally begun (read my new South Africa piece here, starting at pg. 71), and in honor of the globe’s most popular game, I’ve compiled a quick portfolio of soccer-related photos from Africa and the Middle East. You can see most of these images, in larger form, on Flickr.

Pimville, Soweto, South Africa, 2009.

Midan Hussein, Cairo, Egypt, 2000. I took this photo of an impromptu midnight game during Ramadan.

Maputo, Mozambique, 2002.

Colesberg, Northern Cape, South Africa, 2002. Note the color differential between players and coaches. It's the same with many of Africa's national teams today.

Gaza City, Gaza, 2001. I took this photograph in Beach Refugee camp, close to the Mediterranean but locked away from the world. Things were bad then, during the second Intifada. Things are worse now.

Atar, Mauritania, 2007. Mauritania is an insular place, and most people don't go out of their way to make you feel welcome. These kids were the exception.

Soccer field, Jabulani, Soweto, South Africa, 2006.

Note for note, Sudan produces some of the most infectiously happy-sounding music I’ve ever heard. Maybe it’s the country’s position at the fulcrum of Africa, its mixing of North and South, East and West, Arab and sub-Saharan Africa. All of these influences–the pentatonic scales, the brass and strings, the crisp percussion and soaring, crooning vocals–are on display in this clip by the legendary Mohammed Wardi, recorded during a concert he played in Addis Ababa in the 1990s. Wardi, who was a teacher until Sudanese state radio plucked him out of obscurity in the 1950s, has seen more than his share of hardship–he spent years in prison, then went into exile for pissing off the thugs who pass themselves off as Sudan’s legitimate government–but you wouldn’t know it from this clip.

I’ve never seen Wardi play live, but I have seen another Sudanese legend, a guitarist and singer named Sharhabeel Ahmed (naturally, he has a Facebook page), when I was working in Cairo about ten years ago. He played a free show somewhere in Gezira, I think, to an open-air courtyard stuffed front to back with Sudanese. Cairo, of course, has a huge population of Sudanese–workers, refugees, exiles of all sorts–and it seemed like they all came out on this hot July night. Ahmed wore a galabeyah, his guitar slung over his shoulder, something of the wise old man about him. His band was tight, the sound sugary and kind of liquid in the heat. The guys around me were losing their minds. Near the end of the show, he played one of his signature songs (if memory serves, it’s El Leil El Hady) and the place went nuts. After he finished the song, the crowd continued to chant the chorus, a wave rolling across the courtyard.

Then Ahmed did something I’ve never seen a musician do, before or since: He played the song again, note for note. And the crowd went crazy all over again.

So check it out for yourself: This stuff positively buzzes with joy.

The May/June issue of Afar magazine is out, and it’s running my feature on South Africa’s “Born-Frees,” the first generation to come of age after apartheid’s end. [Turn to page 71.] I tell the story through the life of my friend Thami Nkosi, a 29-year-old Soweto activist and inveterate shit-stirrer, and the group of guys he grew up with.

In many ways, Born-Frees like Thami represent South Africa’s future, and their lives tell us a lot about the country today, and the ways in which both Soweto and South Africa have changed since 1994’s “democratic miracle.” So many things have improved–there’s a large and growing middle class, for instance, and Soweto is booming, bristling with new condos and malls and parks. But it is an unfinished revolution. Decades ago, the older generation marched in the streets, firebombed buildings, and at great cost won political freedom. Unlike their fathers and grandfathers, whose lives were largely defined by the anti-apartheid struggle, the Born Frees have always been able to vote for whomever they like and say what they please. Political freedom, however, hasn’t fully translated to economic freedom. In essence, the Born-Frees’ struggle boils down to a single question, repeated daily in a variety of ways: How to make it in today’s South Africa?

A sample from the piece:

At a friend’s house in Dobsonville, we hunker down for a barbecue, or braai, as South Africans call it, with beer, sausage, and big communal handfuls of pap, a grits-like staple. Thami holds forth under a tent in the driveway, energetically opining on the media, American rappers, and South Africa’s woeful political order. “I see these Jaguars with Jacob Zuma stickers, and I wonder what that means,” he says. “There’s so much crap happening in this country.”

…

That evening, we drive up to a walled compound at the top of a hill. Sifiso lives in a small apartment here with his fiancée and daughter. The security guard opens the gate, and we park beside a line of late-model cars, all buffed to a high sheen. Young, turned-out Sowetans mingle while a DJ spins local house music; a friend points out the son of Aggrey Klaaste, a famous black journalist from the struggle years. Looking around the party, it’s easy to feel good about the future. “Soweto is coming up,” Sifiso says.

The magazine’s on newsstands now, and I’ve just found a low-res web version [Turn to page 71.]. Check it out.

The new issue of the travel magazine Afar has a small piece of mine on Newtown, Jozi’s cultural hub. [Turn to page 18.] I’ve spent a lot of time in this former industrial neighborhood on my visits to Jo’burg, and I’ve seen it change. Back in 2002, my fixer and I almost got jumped while shooting in a shady bar near the old taxi depot cum trash-pit that once dominated Newtown’s landscape. The red-eyed drunks in the bar allowed me to take a few shots then thought better of it. Switching from English to tsotsitaal, they asked my fixer why he was protecting me. That was when we decided it was time to go.

That bar is gone now, replaced by a mixed-use condo project. It’s all part of a huge redevelopment push by the city fathers, aided by a welter of security cameras and an unwillingness to let all of downtown Johannesburg go to hell (indeed, similar efforts are underway in other parts of the city). But Newtown, with its mix of museums, restaurants, and nightspots, is the farthest along.

My last visit coincided with a music festival, where I ran into the venerable Pops Mohamed, a South African world-music icon who nevertheless rides the bus all over town. As the sun set over the city, we talked about Indian food, and the best bars in the inner suburbs. It was a decidedly unglamorous conversation to have with a pop star, but that’s the kind of place Newtown is: buzzy, but down-to-earth.

Afar’s content isn’t online but you can find it, as they say, at better newsstands everywhere. (Update, 4.11.10: I’ve just discovered an online cache, and edited this post accordingly.)

(You can see more of my South African photography here.)

A plug: Just got word from my buddy Bamoye, a travel guide from Timbuktu, that he’s bought his own 4×4 (key for both sand-track drives and desert-elephant searches). That’s him to the right, posing like a proud papa with his new ride. So if you’re planning on heading to Mali’s Festival in the Desert come January, drop him a line:

bamoye [underscore] dicko [at] yahoo.fr

I shot these photos last month while reporting a story on the ways in which Soweto–and, more generally, South Africa–has changed since the end of apartheid. The piece will come later, but for now there are photos.

Out this month in California magazine, my piece on Mauritania (.pdf), possibly the single strangest place I’ve ever visited.

Outside our windows the desert is silent, malevolently hot, and virtually empty. Every so often, though, we see things: knots of camels grazing the scrubland; hulks of cars left for dead by the roadside, their skeletons filling with sand; wraithlike men engaged in the Sisyphean task of sweeping the blowing sands off the blacktop.

…

The man driving the Land Cruiser has seen it all before. Our guide is a whippetlike man of indeterminate age. His face is deeply lined; a meticulously cared for goatee frames his mouth. Like everyone else we’ve met in Mauritania, Sidi Al Moktar is taciturn to the point of caricature. He is a font of knowledge about camels–how long they can go without drinking, how far they can walk without resting. About almost everything else, he’s mum.

You can read the whole thing here, and here’s a link to some of my Mauritanian photography.

Last week, Mother Jones ran an old photo of mine, one I made in 2002 of a Zimbabwean immigrant (or economic refugee, if you prefer) in his apartment in downtown Johannesburg.

As their nation slipped into chaos under the rule of longtime dictator Robert Mugabe, millions of Zimbabweans flooded into neighboring South Africa in search of work. Many ended up in Johannesburg, Southern Africa’s de facto capital, scratching out a living on the streets and sharing rooms in decaying apartment blocks in the city’s rundown core.

I made this photo in 2002, and things have only gone downhill since then, the years marked by spiraling inflation, stolen elections, and state-sponsored thuggery against the democratic opposition. Even if current power-sharing negotiations manage to loosen Mugabe’s grip on the country, Zimbabwe will need to be rebuilt, more or less, from the ground up.