Chãƒâ©rie Rivers Ndaliko Necessary Noise Art Music and Charitable Imperialism in the East of Congo

March seventh, 2019

Chérie Rivers Ndaliko stands behind the music stand she uses for a podium, her hands clasped, and looks out over her class.

"I'm going to stand up here, and I want you to tell me what you see," she says. While she has completed this do with classes in South Africa, Brazil, and across the United States, the answers are e'er different.

One student tentatively raises his hand. "Woman," he says.

A few others, slightly less hesitant: Blackness. Intellectual. Confident.

"This isn't a game of compliments, guys!" she laughs.

These descriptions say something about her, she says — and they too say something about the students in her class and the subconscious assumptions people brand about others. Why do they run across her every bit an intellectual? As confident? She launches into her exposé about human perception and how colonial photographers, in what is now the Democratic Commonwealth of Congo, took advantage of this to portray the Congolese equally primitive in the early 1900s.

"What exercise you think of the framing in this photograph?" she asks the form, gesturing to a sepia-tinted print of three Congolese women on the screen. Iii easily shoot up. Ndaliko dances through the discussion with practiced ease.

An assistant professor in the UNC Department of Music, Ndaliko studies the role of pic, text, images, and music on social justice in African war zones. Her work focuses on how African nations, specially Congo, can utilise creative processes to fight confronting the disruption of war on a cultural forepart.

"It'due south very important to me that, when we expect at situations of disharmonize and crunch, we also await at creativity," she says. "There is, institutionally, a history of divorcing i from the other and assigning the inquiry that deals with resolving conflict to a sure set of disciplines. And those that wait at inventiveness are typically not consulted."

A different path

Ndaliko was born in northern California, merely calls many places home. Ghana, Senegal, Denmark, Congo — her family unit was eclectic, she shares, and wanted her to have connections to places that were of import to them. She has been interested in social justice for as long as she tin can remember.

"I grew upwardly in a world that said that half of my family unit is not every bit of import every bit the other half. In a earth where, when my parents got married, it was not recognized in a number of states," she says.

Ndaliko'southward mother is white and her begetter is black, and information technology became clear to her at an early on age that there were structural inequalities in the world that she could non tolerate. A trained composer and pianist, Ndaliko turned to the arts as a way to work toward conflict resolution. She felt they were being overlooked in favor of routes that focused on the hard sciences — routes that she sees as not wholly constructive.

"We all know that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results," she says. "We're addressing issues of inequity largely with the same strategies. I was curious to meet where people are responding differently and what results they're having."

"Ability in the guise of art"

Ndaliko has conducted research in Senegal, Mali, Kenya, South Africa, and somewhen Congo, a place that she became fascinated with while studying organizations that fought institutional inequities. She moved there in 2008 and continues to alive in Goma, a city near the Rwandan border, for most of the year.

The urban center and much of eastern Congo has been a center of social and political upheaval since the outset of two ceremonious wars broke out in in 1996. The expanse is rich in mineral resources such equally coltan, an of import component of many electronics, and industrial exploitation of the state past other countries such every bit the United States accept fueled and funded the conflict.

Although the second state of war officially concluded in 2003, cycles of violence and power struggles take kept the cardinal African nation in a state of blistering unrest. While estimates vary greatly, Ndaliko says that roughly 8 one thousand thousand people accept died as a consequence of the fighting. Millions more than have been displaced and impoverished.

"It is the deadliest humanitarian conflict since the second Earth War," Ndaliko says.

The instability that comes from decades of strife has made an enduring marker on the land'due south political and social climate. Many young people, for case, lack stable admission to didactics, which limits their opportunities.

Ndaliko and her husband, Petna Ndaliko Katondolo, run Yole!Africa, which provides a space for youth in eastern Congo to thrive despite the region's mortiferous disharmonize. (photograph by Steve Exum)

Out of this demand came Yole!Africa, a Goma-based organisation focused on promoting the arts in Congo. Founded in 2000 by acclaimed filmmaker Petna Ndaliko Katondolo, Yole!Africa was a major motivator for why Ndaliko decided to stay in Goma. She eventually married Ndaliko Katondolo.

"I was driven past a deep desire to acquire to understand what is going on," Ndaliko says. "And the more than I learned about the unique history on Congo, the more than committed I was to partnering with the people who were already doing such an extraordinary matter."

In many East African languages, the discussion yolé means "come together." It is used by cattle drivers, goat herders, and shepherds to telephone call flocks together when danger is itinerant. Similar those shepherds, Yole!Africa provides a place for Congolese youth to come together abroad from violence.

Yole!Africa encourages people to tell their stories in their own ways. The processes and skills that come up from studying pic, music, literature, and other fine art forms help young Congolese adults find a voice to tell stories about their land in ways that reflect their experiences. The center works to provide them space, skills, and education that may assist them thrive in the war-torn region.

Ndaliko is the director of research and education at Yole!Africa for now — the arrangement is working to move away from hierarchical labels — and helps provide creative classes, workshops, and public events to 17,000 people of eastern Congo each twelvemonth.

Through the nonprofit, Ndaliko advocates for a shift in the way the earth handles humanitarian and charitable aid in Africa. The arrangement has struggled to find funding that doesn't focus on the trauma that people accept potentially endured, just rather on their successes.

"We have fought — and continue to fight — against reducing people to experiences of victimhood," she says. "We don't ask students to identify in those terms, equally rape victims or kid soldiers. If they identify equally filmmakers, considering that'due south what they see themselves as, then we want to engage them as filmmakers, not victims."

People who take completed courses at Yole!Africa take gone on to become politicians, human rights attorneys, and journalists with media companies similar BBC and Al Jazeera.

"I'k really proud of what nosotros've done and what the students produce there," Ndaliko says.

Ndaliko has produced two books well-nigh her piece of work with Yole!Africa and the importance of cultural engagement in the confront of conflict. She wrote "Necessary Noise: Music, Film and Charitable Imperialism in the East of Congo," which won a Nketia Book Prize and an Alan Meriam Book of the Year Prize. She also co-edited and wrote chapters for "The Art of Emergency: Aesthetics and Assistance in African Crises." She has written almost a dozen articles and book chapters on Yole!Africa, assist, and artistic culture in Congo.

Ndaliko guides the technical crew and actors for the film "Matata," which takes place in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo. (photo courtesy of Alkebu Film Productions)

Now, she's working on a multimedia projection, "Commemorating Congo: Unsung Stories of Resource Wars," which shares the experiences of survivors and participants of the Congolese wars.

"Sometimes creative expression is a matter of survival," Ndaliko writes in "Necessary Dissonance." "Only sometimes it is a currency that cloaks the machinery of power in the guise of art."

From Congo to Carolina

Bringing attending to the disharmonize in Congo was a big part of Ndaliko's conclusion to bring her work to the The states.

Ndaliko returned to the U.S. in 2010 while on tour for her husband's film, "Jazz Mama," which focuses on the strength and dignity of Congolese women in the face of violence. Equally function of the picture show's introduction, she asked the crowds how many had heard of the wars in Congo. The responses were disappointing — usually less than three people raised their hands, and of those people, few knew what the conflict was about. The pair visited 33 universities and colleges and the results were the same.

"This is an economic war. It is funded by multinational corporations, most of which are rooted in this state," Ndaliko says. "Fifty-fifty if nosotros can empower every single Congolese in this generation, they have no influence over American corporate policy. And the people who do take influence over that have no idea that this is even happening."

In 2012, Ndaliko decided to come teach at Carolina.

"If we think of education as the long-term strategy of alter, who needs this data?" Ndaliko asks. Her reply? Young Americans.

As a way to forge a connection with Congo, Ndaliko has her Carolina students work on a collaborative art projection with their peers at Yole!Africa. Over Skype and Facebook, they produce music videos, songs, and photo essays.

"They get really excited," Ndaliko says. "And they brand fast friends. There are plenty of folks I tin recollect of who have maintained relationships with the people they've collaborated with."

Forging connections with Congolese students, Ndaliko believes, is a powerful mode to acquire about the conflict and advocate for change.

"Yous're not thinking about some abstract place, you lot're thinking about the family of the friends who you lot're producing a thing with, who you lot become close with on social media," she says. "In my experience of the world, that kind of homo connection will exist a far bigger motivating factor."

Active participation

Grace Garcia sits in the Stone & Leaf Buffet and scrolls through a series of artfully designed slides on her laptop. This is the draft of her "look book," a document that outlines the thoughts and discussions that she and her classmates developed in Ndaliko's course last semester. She and Ndaliko are working on this projection together.

"Then, this is kind of what I'm working on," she says as she flicks through the earth-toned graphics, photographs, and lists. "I focused on incorporating the idea of movie, specifically historical representations through film, through the actual design details of the look book."

Garcia is a first-yr student studying journalism and art history at Carolina. Last semester, she took Ndaliko's commencement-year seminar, "Arts, Activism, Africa," and is now in her class focused on media and social change in Africa. She says that she has learned a lot nearly Congo from these courses.

"The fact that I wasn't hearing these stories, the fact that a lot if it remains in the shadows, was very eye-opening for me," Garcia says. "Something that I had never consciously idea of is now something that I participate in daily. I read news articles near Congo, watch films past documentarians, and engage with musicians from the African continent, specifically in Congo."

Later this month, Garcia and Ndaliko will ship the look volume to directors and students at Yole!Africa. It volition serve equally a tool for Congolese students and help them sympathize and discuss the ways their peers in the United States navigate bug of Congolese representation, contextualization, and colonization.

"We, equally Westerners, need to recognize our ain complicity in the issues that are electric current and likewise historical," Garcia says. "We take the power to have a phonation and take action and to elevate the platforms that the Congolese have already created."

Without Ndaliko, Garcia admits, she never would accept fabricated these connections.

"She's been and then inspirational," she says. "I actually aspire to look at the world the way she does."

Chérie Rivers Ndaliko is an assistant professor in the Department of Music and an adjunct assistant professor in the Section of Communication inside the UNC Higher of Arts & Sciences. She is the director of research and educational activity at Yole!Africa, which is based in Goma, Democratic Commonwealth of Congo. Grace Garcia is a freshman studying journalism and art history within the UNC Higher of Arts & Sciences. Special thanks to the Carolina Digital Repository (CDR) for making the research articles linked within this piece accessible to the public. Within Academy Libraries, the CDR provides long-term access and safekeeping for scholarly works, datasets, inquiry materials, records, and audiovisual materials produced past the UNC community. To learn more about their work, visit cdr.lib.unc.edu.

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Source: https://endeavors.unc.edu/confronting-conflict-with-creativity/

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