Oct 5 2021
The scenarios are the companies will come in. There'll be news splashes. ‘Yeah, we've got an investor to do this and all that.’ And then now what follows is the issue of violating human rights in communities later on. And of course, government is always like, ‘We didn't know that this is not what we agreed on’. When it comes to corporates investors… international investors… coming to these communities and the government will condemn probably, but then they'll be like, ‘that is not what you agreed on’. But then unfortunately, the violations has already happened. So for the two correlations, I haven't really had them differ on this issue per se, but of course we've had a few politicians,bring up the issue and talk about it, you know?
Nelly Madegwa is co-author of The Intercept story supported by the Pulitzer Center, "Where There Is Salt: An American Company Drilled for Oil in Kenya — and Left Behind Soaring Cancer Rates", which she co-wrote with Georgia Gee.
Nelly is an award-winning journalist from Kenya whose reporting covers climate change, sustainable development, health, and human rights across Africa. She writes frequently from a gender perspective on issues ranging from public health to sexual violenceHer work has appeared in The Elephant, Minority Africa, taz, and Africa Uncensored. Her storytelling blends investigative and data-driven reporting... read more
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Oct 4 2021
Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome to the Moment of Truth, the thirst that is the drink.
Over twenty years ago, I started a project I’m still working on, documenting the life and work of an artist, Resh Shaprudhi, who used iconography around the god from the purana literature of what is now Hinduism, the god called Ganesh, or Ganapathi, or Vinayaka, or any number of other names, to explore the nature of oppression. Part of Resh Shaprudhi’s mythos is how and why Ganesh enters the events of the European genocide of WWII, often known as the Holocaust, and how through Ganesh’s intervention, the God of the Jews and the gods of the Hindus agree to bestow moksha upon the impoverished and oppressed. Moksha is the release of the soul from the cycle of metempsychosis, or reincarnation. It’s considered a good thing, to be released from that cycle.
If you’re not familiar with Ganesh, he’s the chunky god with the head of an elephant. He’s really easy to pick out of a crowd. A big part Resh Shaprudhi’s work involved syncretically assembling images, language, and symbols from Hinduism, Judaism, and the European genocide in World War II. So a lot of the art created by Shaprudhi involves Ganesh appearing in scenes of Nazi labor and death camps.
Coincidentally, about a decade-and-a-half after I started working on the Resh Shaprudhi project, an Australian play was touring the world called, “Ganesh Versus the Third Reich,” created by Back to Back theater company. The conceit was this: a theater company is in the process of putting together a stage play about Ganesh coming to Earth to recapture the swastika from the Nazis, who’d misappropriated it. I’m not sure if I was ever in a position to see this work. 2013, the year it toured, was also the year I was in India on the set of a movie, and after the shoot traveling through India, Thailand, and Laos.
Recently I decided to go back into the project, and encountered some clippings on the Back to Back play. I was barely familiar with the company’s esthetic, which is political, experimental, and purposely provocative. The theater company to which I claim membership, Theater Oobleck, boasted a similar esthetic back then. It may still, I don’t know. I know we considered art to be less interesting if it didn’t in some way transgress the everyday.
Back to Back is a company the majority of whose membership are disabled,... read more
Sep 14 2021