John Edwin Mason: Documentary, Motorsports, Photo History

"Africa Let's Go Crazy": Coke's Other Africa

No one is crazier than Africans, because it's crazy to be kind.

That's the premise behind Africa Let's Go Crazy, Coke's new advertising campaign across most of the continent.  It's geared, Coke says, "towards inspiring and celebrating individuals who spread happiness on the continent by performing random acts of kindness in their daily lives."

The video below, which features the Ugandan pop star Maurice Kirya, is part of the campaign.  Oddly enough, I like it.

 

 

Africa Let's Go Crazy.

Yes, I know.  I should be ashamed of myself.  After all, Coke makes most of its billions in profits from selling health-destroying sugary soft drinks and environmentally harmful bottled waters.

And, as allAfrica points out, the campaign's goals are to entrench Coke's connection with its customers across the continent and tighten its stranglehold on the market.

But I still like it.  I like it for the way that it shows ordinary people doing a wide variety of perfectly ordinary things.  I like it because is shows happy people being kind to one another.  I like it for its celebration of unsung heroes.

I also like it because of what it doesn't show -- hatred, war, famine, disease, brokenness, and incompetence...  That is, it doesn't show the stereotypes that still shape the ways that westerners and other non-Africans view the continent as a whole.

 

 

Coca-Cola Crazy for Good:  South Africa.

Sure, Coke romanticizes the everyday.  (And the inclusion of the Peugeot pickup truck in the first video is pure nostalgia.)  But Coke's Africa is also an Africa that works, an Africa that isn't on its knees begging for help.  It's an Africa that represents the daily lives of the majority of its people much more closely than the tired old stereotypes that were invoked during, for instance, Invisible Children's Kony 2012 campaign.  I'll bet that, as an ad campaign, it will be a huge success.

As far as I know, these ads won't be seen broadcast in the US or anywhere else outside of Africa.  That's too bad.  They would be part of a growing effort to give Americans and non-Africans generally a more complex and challenging vision of the continent.  While the people behind, for instance, blogs like Another Africa and Everyday Africa, and websites such as The Other Africa, are out to confront stereotypes and misunderstandings, they would never deny that Africa has its problems.  They would insist, however, Africa's story needs a multitude of voices and visions to tell it.

The effort to create a more honest understanding of Africa goes on at least as much within popular culture as it does in the classroom.  It's there that Coke's campaign, for all of its contradictions, can play a positive role.

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Many thanks to Independent Global Citizen for the heads-up about the campaign.

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Stanley Greene: Remembering Chechnya

The suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, have been identified as ethnic Chechens with ties to that region of Russian.  At this point, no one other than the two young men can say what motivated them.  Their acts (if, in fact, they are guilty) may have nothing to do with Chechnya's troubled history.  But that seems unlikely.  (See, however, the updates at the bottom of this post.)

The Tsarnaev's connection with Chechnya makes this a good moment to listen to photographer Stanley Greene talk about the region and about his extended photo-essay, Open Wound, an examination of the violence that engulfed it between 1994 and 2003.

Greene's photos hit like a sledgehammer.  He himself is both mesmerizing and sobering.  But he offers no easy answers.  Listen to the three-part interview below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Update, 19 April 2013:  Many media sources are reporting that the Tsarnaev brothers had lived in the United States long enough to have become thoroughly Americanized and that Dzhokhar became a naturalized American citizen in 2012.

Update 2, 19 April 2013:  The president of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, has issued a statement, expressing his condolences to the American people.  He added, however, that any "attempts to link Chechnya and the Tsarnaevs, if indeed they are guilty, are futile.  They grew up in the USA, their viewpoints and beliefs were formed there.  You must look for the roots of [their] evil in America.  Terrorism must be fought everywhere."

Update 3, 19 April 2013:  An article on Foreign Policy's website sheds light on the events that are likely to have driven the Tsarnaev family out of Chechnya.  It's worth a look:  "Displaced:  What Happend to the People Who Fled the Terror in Chechnya."

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Bunny Burkett and the 48th Annual Easter Sunday Funny Car Show, Eastside Speedway

For the last decade or so -- the amount of time that I've been documenting the quirkier ins and outs of American car culture -- Easter Sundays have found me impaled on the horns of a dilemma.  (Ouch! is right.)  Do I go to church to praise the Risen Lord and then have dinner with my mother?  Or do I head over to Eastside Speedway for the annual Funny Car show?

As much as I'd like to say that mom and Jesus have always won out, that's not the case.  Usually I've tried to do it all -- church, mom, drag racing.  And usually it hasn't worked out all that well.

 

Bunny Burkett and her Funny Car.  Eastside Speedway, 7 April 2013.  [Copyright John Edwin Mason, 2013.  Click on the image for a much larger version.]

This Easter was different.  It rained, and the race was postponed.  That allowed me to devote myself to the Empty Tomb and mom, a couple of weeks ago, and to Funny Cars and the legendary, pioneering female drag racer Bunny Burkett, last week.  You can read all about it and see a bunch of cool photos, here.

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ChumpCar World Series at VIR, 30 March 2013

I spent a warm, sunny Saturday photographing the ChumpCar World Series at Virginia International Raceway [VIR].

It was a lot of fun.  VIR is beautiful.  The people were friendly.  And ChumpCar is a hoot -- racers have to build fast, safe, durable machines that can be worth no more than 500 bucks (safety equipment excluded).  Doing well in ChumpCar requires passion, tremendous mechanical skills and creativity, and an appreciation of the absurd.

In the spirt of ChumpCar, I made a bunch of photos -- racing photos -- with my iPhone.  It was stupid, but a hell of a lot of fun.  You can read all about it and see a bunch of photos over on my racing blog, here.

 

ChumpCar at VIR, 30 March 2013.  [Click on the image to see a larger version.]

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Chinua Achebe, 1930-2013

I was very sad to hear that Chinua Achebe died yesterday.  I had never met him, but it was a bit like losing a friend.

Achebe was one of my favorite novelists.  Re-reading his books is always a pleasure.  It's something I do at least once a year because I assign one or another of them in my introductory African history classes.  Their seeming simplicity masks a depth and complexity that makes them wonderful to teach with.  And wonderful to go back to time and again.

 

Carlo Bavagnoli/Life:  Chinua Achebe, 1966.

You can read the New York Times' obituary of Achebe, here.  And the young Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has a wonderful appreciation of the man, here.

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