A Most Majestic Fly Whisk

  Bodys Isek Kingelez's 'extrêmes maquettes' of a weird-future Kinshasa (Kin la belle!) were a major influence on the Goma of  VCS "The story of ‘conflict minerals’ serves both as a cautionary tale and a powerful call to decolonise transnational governance and peacebuilding practice. It highlights the lack of ‘situated knowledge’ and critically interrogates the white saviourism that emanates from an unholy alliance that brings together (neo-)colonial frames, digital capitalism, neoliberal interventionism and humanitarianism."  — Christoph N. Vogel, Conflict Minerals, Inc.: War, Profit and White Saviourism in Eastern Congo "Congo is great; it requires greatness of spirit from us."   — Luc Nkulula Fucked up in the club, crying to a Tshala Muana record. I had a conversation about some of this recently and thought it might be worthwhile to put a version in a more permanent place. I haven't done a Congopost in a while, which is weird for this blog; it...

  ayoh kré Duchâtelet, Ornaments and Crimes Wanted to do a last post before the twin scourges of term papers and grading take me out of commission - a couple folks have expressed interest in my NooFutra campaign set in the Eastern DR Congo, so I thought it would be cool to write up a quick survey of some stuff I read (still reading in some cases) to prepare for this game.  Housekeeping A new friend, UnFuturism/Rachel, asked me if I plan to make  Volcano City Soukous into a setting guide or the like when the campaign is done. I honestly don't know. Not fully comfortable trying to codify stuff for this game. It's easy to read a bunch of books in prep; the real trick is being able to encode all that background reading + general knowledge in a text meant to be played. I'm also unsure of the boundaries : my position has long been that Afrodiasporic people don't have carte blanche to speak about the Continent without putting in work just by virtue of having another shared e...

  A Hunting Scene , from Sammy Baloji's Hunting and Collecting Working on both my " A Dance -" readalong and a post about three related books on Malagasy cultures that I think make a compelling basis for a setting, but I've been having an INTRUSIVE (gaming) THOUGHT. I recently read some good advice from the maestro Nick Whelan on how to banish these from their hiding places in your brain: So that's what I'm doing.  Currently at a crossroads for a thing: I've been running a NooFutra game set in the current day DR Congo. This was another setting that grew out of a triad of books - Rainforest Capitalism: Power and Masculinity in a Congolese Timber Concession by Thomas Hendriks, The Eyes of the World: Mining the Digital Age in the Eastern DR Congo by James Smith, and Health in a Fragile State: Science, Sorcery, and Spirit in the Lower Congo by John Janzen - and it's been so much fun. The main draw of Noofutra imo besides the general traits of Mothers...