Gospel music spotlight: Ohemaa Mercy

Sorry for being out of circulation. Been a little under the weather.

So now, a little praise to lift your spirits and mine:

Ghana obviously has one of the most bustling gospel music scenes in West Africa. Their gospel music stars, I have been informed are in some cases as popular as their secular musicians. Today, I am profiling one of my very favorite Ghanaian gospel musicians - Ohemaa Mercy. I just like that her Odin Jesus song. I don't even know what it means so if anyone can put up a translation, it would be most appreciated.

A little more about her found here

No more yakking. Enjoy some uplifting praise from Ghana.


My absolute favorite song from her:













Where can you find her stuff? I have no idea. NONE! I have looked everywhere. Where do you get Ghanaian music online - legit!- in the States? I would like to know too. If anyone has any idea, please let me know and I will spread the information. In the meantime, enjoy her on youtube.

See ya!

Too nice a husband?

This has been making the rounds on the internet, so I decided to put it up. This woman left her husband because he is too caring! Yup, das rite. Na real wah!!






It's a strange world ain't it?

LOL!

A little more about Serena Williams

In the past few days, I have come across a plethora of opinions about Serena Williams regarding the US open incident. Some have used it as an opportunity to spew some ugly racism, while others defend her blindly.

This is the best article I have seen on the subject - fair, balanced, objective and facing the issues:


Serena's outburst common among athletes -- but not women

I've seen too much in sports to be outraged by Serena Williams' outburst at the U.S. Open last weekend. I've seen world class athletes head-butt opponents, spit in the face of umpires, fire lethal serves at linespeople, tackle aging bench coaches.

I've seen it all. But rarely from a woman.

Which is why I can't help but think that the outrage unleashed toward Williams in the past two days has something to do with her gender. She's playing the sport of frilly underpants and dangly earrings, yet she came off last weekend as unhinged as Mike Tyson.

Athletes lose it sometimes. They act foolish. They don't apologize when we want them too. It happens all the time.

But rarely with a woman.

Williams has broken the mold for female athletes, with her muscles and power and unapologetic self-promotion. Now she's done it in another arena: proving that women, too, can have moments of egregious unsportspersonlike conduct.

On Monday Williams apologized. She'd already made a post-meltdown statement, but this was the first time she directly apologized to the linesperson that she berated. Then she went out and won the doubles title with her sister Venus in straight sets, earning $420,000, which she'll split with Venus but will more than help cover the $10,000 she was fined for her outburst on Saturday night (she was also docked an additional $500 for throwing her racquet).

The small mid-Monday crowd cheered supportively. And when Patrick McEnroe persisted in questioning Williams about her eventful weekend, it was McEnroe who was booed. Not Williams.

Maybe the crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium was sniffing out a double standard: that the brother of the most famous tantrum-thrower in the history of the sport was tsk-tsking Williams. But more than likely the crowd was just doing what fans do: forgiving the transgressions of an athlete that they enjoy watching. An athlete that they were robbed of seeing complete her singles run on Saturday night.

An athlete who just happens to be a woman.

We'll see if the tennis establishment will be as forgiving. They don't much like Williams, never really have. The muckety-mucks don't think she's properly respectful of the sport. The tennis media thinks she's a phony and condescending. In the reaction to Saturday, there's definitely a whiff of "Finally, Serena's getting what she deserves." A suspension is still under consideration.

Make no mistake, what Williams did was outrageous. Rude. Crude. Embarrassing. Just like the behavior we've seen from so many male athletes over the years. But the situation never should have gotten to that point. The foot-fault call itself was a ticky-tacky questionable call made by a tone-deaf official -- a call that should never have been called at that point in a Grand Slam semifinal.

When Williams made her first move toward the linesperson, the chair umpire should have intervened. Instead, the umpire let the situation unravel out of control.

It was a startling contrast to the infamous second-round match from the 1979 U.S. Open, which CBS happened to show Friday during a rain delay. In that match between Ilie Nastase and John McEnroe, Nastase's antics brought the match to an 18-minute standstill. After the chair umpire awarded game-set-match to McEnroe and the crowd went mutinous, the umpire was replaced and a new umpire allowed the match to continue. That was the prudent decision.

McEnroe's bad behavior once got him disqualified from a match in the second round of the Australian Open, a Grand Slam tournament that McEnroe never won. But that was in 1990, when McEnroe was a past-his-prime player with a long, detailed history of official abuse.

Williams didn't have that history until Saturday. Or that reputation. In contrast, she has usually managed to control her emotions. She was the reigning champion. She could have easily been awarded a benefit of the doubt, a restraining hand. Yet it didn't happen.

Some of her critics think she was smart enough to calculate the whole thing, to be able to exit the semifinal without a loss. I guess that's a compliment, in a way. We usually think that male athletes who behave badly are simply idiots.

Tennis is going through a golden age of sportsmanship: Roger Federer is inordinately gracious -- well, except for hating on the replay system and cursing the chair umpire in his loss to Juan Martin del Potro on Monday. Rafael Nadal is usually all class. So maybe the way Williams behaved reverberates more loudly these days. Especially when she's playing as popular and lovable an opponent as Kim Clijsters.

(Though the breathless excitement over Clijsters return from having a baby is also evidence that women athletes are viewed as weird creatures. What Clijsters did is amazing -- winning a Grand Slam in her third tournament back. But the fact that having a baby didn't leave her completely incapacitated isn't a shock -- or was no one watching the Beijing Olympics when dozens of mothers were successful competitors? Clijsters is only 26. She got back in shape quickly. She stormed through a weakened bracket and looked awesome in the process. The truly amazing part will be if she can juggle life on the Tour and motherhood for more than a few weeks. And that remains to be seen).

Maybe Serena's era was really a quarter century ago, when McEnroe and Connors and Nastase were roaming the court. When tennis champions routinely acted like boorish fools.

McEnroe has gone on to make a cute little post-retirement career of his anger management issues and his vicious berating of officials. Maybe Serena will too. She gave it a shot on the MTV Video Music Awards, making a lame joke about a foot-fault (and taking a backseat to Kanye West for ungracious behavior).

If Williams goes on to turn her egregious behavior into a publicity coup it will be something we've seen before from plenty of other athletes.

But not from a woman.

Hmmmm! I found the bolded particularly galling! I watched that interview, and my blood boiled. Can you imagine, that John Mcenroe's brother, Patrick, was giving her grief while she celebrated the doubles win with her sister Venus, considering the fact that his brother was the biggest hellraiser in all of tennis!!

Nonsense! See for yourself:


Serena in her own words on CNN:



Ciao!

Oh Serena!!

So I have been watching the US open very religiously - much to the chagrin of the people I live with. They know I am gonna come home and commandeer the TV, turn it to tennis. But anyways, after long rain delays, they finally played the much anticipated women's semifinal match between Kim Clijsters and Serena Williams.

Full disclosure: I am a huge Williams sisters fan. I think they play amazing tennis.
I was expecting it to be a tough match but assumed that Serena would prevail - girlfriend had been in top form throughout the tournament.

I was surprised when Kim started to outplay her - Serena was missing easy shots, double faulting all over the place, I was like wassup girlfriend? You could also watch her become increasingly agitated over the course of the match. I think she was just ambushed by the quality of Kim's playing. When she lost the first set via an unforced error, Serena smashed her racket and destroyed it in anger. That however was NOTHING compared to what was to come.

Serena was serving to stay in the game at the end of the 2nd set, she was down 15-30, was putting in the 2nd serve when she was called for a foot fault. She was livid and went ballistic on the official.

See for yourself.


Obviously, she threatened " If I could, I would take this (expletive) ball and shove it down your (expletive) throat!"

While I understand her frustration, because there is no way to challenge a foot call, you just have to take the official's word for it, and it appears the call could have been wrong, she still went a little too far in berating the judge, particularly at that level of play. That decision cost her the match, as she was penalized on match point for unsportsmanlike behavior.

Her press conference after the fact:




Now there are rumors that they may force her to forfeit her scheduled doubles match set for Monday as they are "reviewing her conduct" - see here

The drama continues to unfold.
What do I say as a fan? Oh Serena!

Edit to add: She was fined $10,500. And John McEnroe, notorious for his temper back in the day, had this to say:

``I don't know why I'm getting so many calls. Obviously, as I said last night, you cant defend the indefensible. There's no doubt about it: she lost it after getting that foot-fault call.
`At same time, in my opinion, you can't call a foot fault there. Out of the question. It wasn't as if it was an obvious foot fault. At the very least, it was minuscule. I have seen Serena come back from that spot a dozen times before, against top-flight opponents. It wasn't over. It's something you have to live with for the rest of your life.''

In related news, Del Potro beat Nadal today!!

Dang! I was hoping for a Rafa - Fed final!

I still love tennis though!

Ciao.

Poor Caster!!!

So the verdict is in. Caster is officially a woman - and a man. Who? This post provides background. You must be totally out of the loop if you have not heard by now. The news that the south African track star is a hermaphrodite has been splashed on every major network around the world. And to add insult to injury her medals may be taken away. Read all about it here.

And right after she got this makeover too:





I can imagine that this whole thing is a real, real nightmare for Caster and family. You find out - on international TV, that you are not really a woman, or a man - but some kind of ambiguous in between.

I hope there is some investigation into the manner in which the International Athletic Federation handled what should have been a private matter. They need to find and discipline the source of all these leaks. They have humiliated a young 18year old whose only crime has been to be excellent at her craft. It is also very irresponsible of the South African Federation to have thrown her to the wolves without carrying out the necessary tests and making sure she was eligible to compete in the events that she was entered for.

Caster, please keep your chin up. You will get through this nightmare.
Poor Caster!

The light up Nigeria movement.

I spoke to a close relative in Nigeria just yesterday. She told me she was watching the news. I was surprised. I said, "you have light?" "Nope", she replied. "I am using the generator".
That story defines the Nigerian experience for the past decade, actually, for the past 30 years. Erratic electricity supply. I have been told, by those who feel the pinch - i.e. Nigerians who live in Nigeria - that power supply has become so erratic that it is a surprise when you have electricity for more than 5 hours straight. We won't even get into the social and economic costs of erratic supply of electricity - they are way too many to be enumerated.

Instead, I will focus on a movement that deserves our complete support - as Nigerians in particular and Africans in general. Because trust me - load shedding, its coming to a country near you! If South Africa, basically the most developed country in Africa, can experience it, then I don't think any other country is exempt.

A group of Nigerians have put together a movement to hold our leaders accountable and ask, nay DEMAND for electricity. This is 2009 - people are planning how to go to Mars, and our students still study by candlelight? What kind of useless leadership do we have sef?

The movement has a website and a large and growing facebook group.

Here is the group's founder in his own words:



The musicians are weighing in too:
In addition to Eldee's call for you to join the revolution;



There is also some kind of album/musical collaboration by various artistes in the works. You can listen to some of the music here and here.

Next year, Nigeria will be 50, and our useless showboating leaders will spend our money on a vain, empty, senseless and visionless celebration. Let us make our voices heard. We don't want a purposeless celebration for our 50th. We want electricity. Join the movement - Let us light up Nigeria.

Ben Okri, Helen Ukpabio and witch children.

I was picking up a few books at the library a number of weeks of ago, and I happened to walk past Ben Okri's book "The famished road". The book is rather old (published in 1991), and I had heard so much about it (the book won the Booker prize for 1991) but never read it. So I added it to my stack, and I finally finished reading it today. My thoughts? Strange book! On the one hand, the book is focused on deep poverty and the exploitation associated with it. On the other hand, it explores these themes through the eyes of Azaro, a spirit child (aka Abiku in yoruba) who lives in the physical world, but has spiritual eyes, and whose brethren in the great beyond are always trying to get him to cross over to the other side. Thus, there were a lot of really strange apparitions and creatures described in the book, as Azaro got into one hyperspiritual situation after the other. Very well written, if rather bizarre book. Some of the oyinbo reviewers seemed to think of it as some sort of whimsical village fairy tale. I kinda found it disturbing actually. I am not begrudging the author's right to use his imagination anyhow he chooses, but I was disturbed by the fact that there are actually people (too many people) on our great African continent, who still view the world through a very spiritual, though perverted and darkened lens, as vividly described in this piece of literature.

A couple of months ago, the news broke about the horrible treatment meted out to so called "witch children" of Akwa Ibom. The BBC (or some other British channel) did a documentary on the phenomenon. Its all on youtube, but unfortunately, if you live in the US, you cannot watch some parts of it because of copyright issues. You can watch parts 3 and 6 though, and though incomplete, its pretty powerful, heartwrenching stuff!.

Part 3

Part 6

And here is another piece of it-I found it floating around on youtube:



If you just want a quick recap,you can read all about it here


A couple of months later, ABC did some investigative reporting on Witch Children in Congo. Its pretty similar to the Nigerian case, and just as disheartening:






Alright, its unfortunate that the segment of the Nigerian documentary on Helen Ukpabio is not available due to copyright issues as she is the individual I really want to focus on in this post. For those not in the know, Mrs Ukpabio is an evangelist and filmmaker whose main ministry emphasis is exposing witchcraft and eradicating it from our society. A cursory perusal of her website will soon show you her witchcraft obsession. I am sure you know where I am going with this. This "lovely christian lady" is at the vanguard of the campaign against witches in general and child witches in particular in the state of Akwa Ibom in Nigeria.

I have mentioned that she is a filmmaker. I am an avid watcher of Nigerian movies, and I had heard a lot about one of her movies "The maid" which was actress Mercy Johnson's first vehicle in Nollywood. Mercy was supposed to be spectacular in the role, and so I tripped over myself to get a copy. GOOD HEAVENS!! You can clearly see Mrs Ukpabio's worldview in this movie. The househelp got infested with a spirit of witchcraft, recruited the kids, who recruited their classmates, who started killing members of their families. Very, very, very disturbing philosophy! Bothered the heck out of me.

You can watch the trailer here or if you have time on your hands, watch the entire movie :



Note: I don't usually encourage people to watch movies online, but I will make an exception in this case. I would NEVER EVER encourage anyone to buy this disturbing movie. EVER!!

Anyways, I put up the movie to show you Mrs Akpabio's worldview, and just how deranged it is. There have been several organizations (non christian by the way!) who have fought back, provided homes for these kids, and seeking ways to enlighten people as to the error of their ways. Some of these organizations organized a conference to discuss the issue in Calabar about a month ago. Here is what happened:



IN THE NAME OF JESUS OOOOOOO!! AMEN!!

So, how do we even begin to solve this kind of problem ehn? How do you convince people that what a child needs is love, care, protection, mercy, food, shelter and education, and not the stigma of witchcraft? That children who cry are perhaps sick or hungry, and are not witches? That troublesome children are perhaps hyperactive and are not witches?

And here is what bothers me the most: I have not seen the churches in Nigeria get involved in this matter. There is a Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN). I have not heard an official statement o. When they wanted to criminalize homosexuality, we heard from them, but far as I know, they have been silent on this matter. A lot of NGOs are doing stuff, but not the churches. Hmmm! What manner of Christianity do we practice?

GOD help us o.


Final note: Just wanted to clarify that I am not hating on Ben Okri's book. Its very well written with vivid imagery. It just reminded me of Mrs Ukpabio and her worldview is all.

Ciao.