OjuOponIfa

WORDSLAM Words are for the sage Of old but now on page We publish its message. WOW! Fantastic, Fabulous, Mindblowing... were some of the adjectives deployed by members of the distinguished audience of the old and the young -- that congregated satrurday July 5 in the Goethe Institut garden in Victoria Island-- to capture their impression of the proceedings at the first edition of the newly-birthed WORDSLAM. Under the misting cloud, they sat stubbornly and stuck with the artistes, defying the troublesome rains that kept disorganising the technical set-up (and eventually annihilated opportunity for a technical rehersal for the eventl) to flow with the flow of melody and rhythm of the poetic performances dished out by 10 specially selected artistes; and a score of unbilled budding and aspiring poets that featured in the programme. It was such a splendid evening of celebrating the essence of the WORD in the life of man; particularly, the very essentials of WORD expressed in poetic colours t...

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 Contemplating Sudan, praying for Ochalla and Kwoto Every time i think of the tragic song that Sudan has become, my mind goes to my dear friend, Stephen Ochalla, artistic director of Kwoto Dance Institut in Khartoum, who to escape the ethnic cleansing going on at home against the 'black' Sudanese had decided to spend time learning and teaching dance in Amsterdam. A deep ideologue, Ochalla and his institut had been active on the political stage, using his theatre to mount campaign against the decimation of Sudanese of his hue by an obvious 'arabite' political elite led by soon-to-be-fugitivised President Omar. When the scene was becoming too volatile and discomforting for his kind of activism -- recall what happened to Ngugi Wa Thiong'o and his theatre comrades in Kenya of the Jomo Kenyatta and later Arap Moi time -- Stephen Ochalla was lucky to be helped out by the Dutch government through The Netherlands embassy in Khartoum to go cool off in a...