Benin Mwangi from the Cheetah Index asked:

I had a technical question for you.  I am going to be doing a podcast next week and wanted to ask you if you know of any simple ways to create a jingle…Otherwise, I hope all is well.  Keep up the good work!

My Answer:

Hey Benin. I will walk you through how I got the sound clips for the opening section of the Displaced African podcast and give you some additional ideas about where and how to get theme music for your upcoming podcast

1) I got the opening sound clip from a website known as Sound Rangers: You go there, choose a track, pay $20 and you own the copyright to that track forever. I then downloaded the free open sources sound editing software Audacity and combined the two to create the opening and closing section of every podcast.

Any other questions. Do not hesitate to ask.

Nakeel whose from the blog Nakeel asks:

1. Does Mwangi like Children or do children like Mwangi?
2. Whats the best thing that you have ever done in your life.
3. Given an opportunity to share a meal in your house with five guests who will they be?

My Answers:

1) Children are kinda like their adult counterparts, there are some who absolutely love me and some who find me as likeable as salt in cordial/juice (which btw, not good). So it really does depend on the child.

2) Hmmm, since I am writing on this blog, I can easily make the case that this is the best thing I have ever done for so many reasons:

a) First time I have committed myself to doing something day after day after day for so long.

b) I have built up a name and brand for myself at a very young age.

c) I have committed to something in spite of the taunting and discouragement.

d) I’ve met some cool cats, have been and will continue to be on the radio.

e) I have learnt a lot of things in a lot of areas including how to start a business in Melbourne Australia, how to start an online business, how immigrants think, positive projects like Ushahidi, met Kirk Nugent and Derrick Ashong.

Just for the Sake of Contrast

On the other side of the moral spectrum, the best thing I did was the first time I took a trip to Sydney. I was broke, had no plans but I got my cousin and his girlfriend in a car and we drove to Sydney where we spent the weekend partying. I loved it because it was a truly, spontaneous, uninhibited decision and the fact that I was in “the flow” and spontaneous the whole trip.

The first time I ever got on stage and acted.

There’s a few of them………

3) The reason I have chosen these folk is not only because of my love for them, but also because of how difficult it would be for me to actually meet with them.

Anthony Robbins: This guy is a true Renaissance man. His level of understanding of how to work within and manipulate the human psychology and achieve peak state on a continuous basis among many many many other things……YES, please, I want to learn that. He is also the best speaker I have ever seen with my own 2 eyes – he not only held my attention but had me for 8 hours a day for 2 days straight……I love his speaking ability.

ii) Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson: This guy is the best performer I have ever seen perform in front of a crowd. I have never seen anyone who has such command and control of an audience. I would love to know how he does that and copy that. Don’t believe me, tell me you have ever seen better crowd control than this

Also in that list, I would love to meet Erwin Mcmanus and Barrack Obama for their speaking ability.

iii) Whoever controls the world economy: There is probably someone or some organization somewhere in the States that pretty much “holds everything together” and is in control of the world economy, I would love to meet the head of it. If its a loose knit group of organizations that work together to hold the American Century together, I would love to meet the heads of this company. I want to move in this world with full understanding of how it runs.

iv) Jay Abraham: I want to become a marketing consultant like he does. His ability to see “money connections” where other people don’t is just simply amazing. Again, I would love to pick his brain and do what he does.

v) Jesus Christ and the Guy In charge of putting together the Bible: I know for sure we are not being told the entire truth about the man called Jesus from Nazareth. I would love to know what the reality was and what realities were shall we say…..”not included” in the official text.

v) JabbaWockeez: I am a mediocre-at-best dancer, I want to learn to move like these guys move.

vi) Malcolm X: I love and respect this man so much.

Other people I would love to meet: Timothy Ferriss, Yaro Starak, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, the president of Botswana.

Update on 13th August 2008: After watching a few videos of his interviews on Youtube, I MUST add to the list: Will Smith

1) Pursuit of Happyness and John Q

I loved both these movies for exactly the same reason. I kept thinking,

“What would I have done if that was my child?”

And both times, I agreed with what the main characters did. A couple of tears were shed over these two movies. Wonderful protagonists

2) Soul Flicks

Anything that involves:

Beautiful, black women and;

Confident, respectable and so-smooth-it’s-ridiculous African American men and I’m there.

The only movie I would add here that is a bit out place would be Guess Whose Coming to Dinner. That movie may be decades old but Sydney Portier’s portrayal of a black man caught up in the prejudices of a mixed race engagement had an excess of class and maturity.

3) Good Will Hunting

Movies such as Good Will Hunting are basically excuses for men to get emotional. I just loved the fact that Matt Damon could jump from being a crude rebel to an absolute genius at the drop of a hat: paradoxes and contradictions like that always make me happy.

Robin Williams is also an absolutely phenomenal actor and human being. Great story.

4) Moolaade

A movie that took me way way back. Though it’s set in modern times, it’s set in a rural West African village that still has old school superstitions and customs, including female circumcision. The movie hooked me in with the story and was quite easy to understand in spite of how foreign the customs were.

The ending struck me as ‘pandering to Western sensibilities’ but still…….great movie. The West and Southern Africans are definitely kicking butt in regards to making great African films.

5) Make it Plain

I have already spoken about how much I am a fan of Malcolm X. This documentary, which you can also watch for free here, delves into his life, his past and his psychology. If you are sitting on the fence in regards to Malcolm X right now, after watching this movie you’ll definitely have an opinion on him.

I just love Malcolm!

6) The Other Boleyn Girl

This is in cinemas now. If you don’t know the history of the English colonial barbarians, watch this movie. If you do know it, watch it, if for no other reason to notice all of the inaccuracies and still be in for a helluva ride. It has more twists and turns than a game of twister with a contortionist.

It’s story line is so convoluted and full of outlandish deception and deceit that it was actually appropriate for me to scream in the middle of the movie, “Don’t do it!” A movie that was definitely a pleasant surprise.

7) Shrek

I think I will forever stop reading movie reviews and just go to the cinema and see what happens. Just like the Boleyn girl, I knew nothing about Shrek when I went to watch it in the cinema many years ago. I laughed and I was completely hooked by the movie’s blend of childish fantasy with adult contemporary humor.

Moral of the story: Don’t watch trailers or read reviews, let the movies speak for themselves.

So what movies have had an impact on your world? Leave a comment and let me know and maybe you can pick up a couple of the above movies this weekend and tell me what you think.

May the Magic of Movies Come Alive in Your Life,

Mwangi

Part 6 of the 10 things I wish I knew before I left Africa

1) Erwin Mcmanus

2) Kirk Franklin

3) Eric Wainaina

I think in this, the 21st century, when we as black people can see so much negative within our community and find so much going wrong about us, we sometimes forget that the last century was almost entirely defined by our great forefathers. If you look through lists of the greatest people of the last century, there are almost always great black people such as Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, Tom Mboya, Steve Biko, Nelson Mandela, Coretta Scott King and Malcolm X.

Whereas my admiration is equally divided amongst so many of the great black people of the last 20th century, very few people have captivated my heart in the manner that Steve Biko and Malcolm X had. This is because:

1) Their Sincere Love for their Race: When I first encountered the works of these great men, it was when I was going through a stage of being really ashamed of my race. When I read Biko and his ideas of the Black Consciousness Movement, I almost cried in jubilation, ” I matter! I am special! This being black thing makes me special!” My exposure to Biko’s work is at most very superficial but all I really needed was quotes such as the one below to become a major fan:

“Black Consciousness is an attitude of the mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time. Its essence is the realisation by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression – the blackness of their skin – and to operate as a group to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude.”

“So as a prelude whites must be made to realise that they are only human, not superior. Same with Blacks. They must be made to realise that they are also human, not inferior.”

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

Malcolm X was an entirely different case. In terms of Malcolm I was first exposed to his speeches (such as the Field Negroe/House Negroe speech) and by the time I watched the biopic Make it Plain, I had no doubt in my mind that though I may not have agreed with a lot of his ideas when he was in the Nation of Islam, deep in the core of his heart, he cared and existed to improve the lives of black people worldwide. That is why when he visited Africa in the middle of the century, he was given the name “Omowale”, meaning “the son returns home” in the Yoruba language.

2) They Made Us Take Responsibility: Biko and Malcolm didn’t just want to make us feel special and leave us feeling good, they wanted us to take responsibility for our psychology, our education, our communities and our lives. That’s why Malcolm spoke about the African Americans separating from the rest of American society so that they could take absolute responsibility for how their communities were run.

Biko was also committed to freeing South Africa from the shackles of Apartheid, so much so that he was not only placed under house arrest but died at the hands of Apartheid’s barbaric foot soldiers.

3) They Were Men of Substance: These men always carried themselves with dignity and respect and were men who you would never be ashamed to tell your kids to look up to. With all due respect to Dr. King, he strayed from home quite a few times, and it amazes me that Malcolm, with his criminal background,never did the same. Educated, intelligent, classy brothers who had compassion in their heart and carried themselves with courage and conviction. Yup!

4) They Had COURAGE: I intend to write about this in future. In my opinion, Africa does not lack intellect or skill or even resources. One of the main thing that Africa lacks in my humble opinion is commitment and courage. Malcolm and Steve managed to effect major change over their societies at a time when freedom for black people was a myth told to children. They were both assassinated. But this wasn’t before the death threats and attempts on their lives while living in a society where police brutality was a way of life. I love the fact that courage such as theirs, especially in a day like today when we are much more free and doing much less with it, will forever remain in the history books to remind us that some people did it much tougher than we will ever have to.

5) They Recorded their Ideas: If the great African thinkers of the 20th century never recorded their ideas we would never have had exposure to Black consciousness movement or Afrocentric thinking or Pan-African ideas or dives into the intellects of Garvey, Frantz Fannon, Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere. Can you imagine how much hopeless life would be for a lot of Africans if this were so.

6) They Worked Together Across National Boundaries: A Pan-African state seemed like a very probable idea in the middle of the century. This is because the Bikos, the Malcolms, the Dr. Kings, the Nkrumah’s and the Nyerere’s had all recognized our shared struggle as people of colour worldwide and agreed that it only made sense for us to come up with a solution together. Though I don’t think the possibility of a Pan-African state or Pan-African identity is dead, these guys looked like they were about to make it happen.

7) They Gave Me Hope: Ultimately these guys gave a very lost teen some hope and helped restore some of the dignity that he had lost. They also excited me because through them I got the idea ingrained deeper into my head that one man’s actions can actually make a difference.

Please check out some of the work by some of these seminal thinkers and have that fire lit under your butt so you can go out there and make this world magnificent.

Be blessed and bless others,

Mwangi X

PS: I would love to know people’s thoughts on this email I received regarding Biofuels and food security. So leave a comment or get in touch with me and let me know your thoughts.