Thursday, February 13, 2020

A01029 - Joseph Shabalala, Founder of Ladysmith Black Mambazo

Joseph Shabalala, founder of famed vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, dies at 78

By Randy Lewis, Los Angeles Times

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Joseph Shabalala, founder of the South African a cappella vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, whose breathtakingly complex and scintillating harmonies shot them to global fame in the 1980s when they were featured prominently on Paul Simon’s blockbuster album “Graceland,” has died in Pretoria. He was 78.

© Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images North America/TNS Paul Simon, center, Joseph Shabalala, left, and other members of Ladysmith Black Mambazo perform during the Library Of Congress Gershwin Prize For Popular Song Gala at the Warner Theater May 23, 2007 in Washington, D.C. Shabalala has died at age 78.

No cause of death was cited in an announcement posted Tuesday on the group’s social media accounts. “Bhekizizwe Joseph Shabalala, Our Founder, our Teacher and most importantly, our Father left us today for eternal peace. We celebrate and honor your kind heart and your extraordinary life. Through your music and the millions who you came in contact with, you shall live forever. From the stage after every show, you shared your heart … ’Go with Peace, with Love and with Harmony’.”

Shabalala created the ensemble that would eventually be known as Ladysmith Black Mambazo (“the black axe of Mambazo”) in 1958, focusing on the sound indigenous to the region around Durban, outside which Shabalala was born and grew up in the district of Ladysmith, Emnabithi.

The group’s multilayered sound, expressed in everything from harmonized whispers to piercing, goose-bump-inducing falsetto flutters — a distant cousin to the street-corner doo-wop sound African American singers popularized in the 1950s — caught Simon’s ear and captivated him sufficiently to invite Shabalala to contribute to the album for which he traveled to Africa in the mid-1980s to collaborate with various musicians.

With the cross-continental music that emerged in songs such as “Homeless” and “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” on Simon’s album, the group was invited to perform in the U.S., notably in high-profile spots on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” that helped turn Shabalala and his compatriots — most of whom were family members — into global superstars.

They were signed to the same U.S. major label Simon was on at the time — Warner Bros. — and released a string of albums of their own.

In the liner notes of one of those releases, “Journey of Dreams” in 1988, Shabalala wrote, “This Journey of Dreams began a long time ago on the farm and children would come to my dreams and sing to me. Now that we have made this record working with (producer) Russ Titelman and blessed by Paul Simon’s guidance, I feel the dreams are now living inside the music as never before.

“For the first time I have made the music on record exactly as my dreams would tell me and for this sound I am grateful. Because the world listens now and that means the Journey of Dreams goes on and on.”

The ensemble went on to earn 17 Grammy Award nominations and five wins for its own recordings, in addition to sharing in the spotlight from the five Grammy nominations and two wins — including album of the year — heaped on “Graceland.”

Ladysmith has continued to tour internationally without Shabalala and is scheduled to perform in June in 2020. No services have been announced.

Saturday, February 8, 2020

A01028 - Michael Hoare, Mad Mercenary

Mercenary 'Mad Mike' Hoare dies aged 100

Mike Hoare, left, with bodyguard Sergeant Donald Grant in 1964 — Image captionMike Hoare, seen here with his bodyguard in 1964, was internationally renowned until his career ended in an embarrassing anti-climax

Michael "Mad Mike" Hoare, widely considered the world's best known mercenary, has died aged 100.

Born in India to Irish parents, he led campaigns in the Congo in the 1960s that earned him fame at the time, and a controversial legacy years later.

His career reached an embarrassing end in 1981, when he was jailed for leading a failed coup in the Seychelles.

Mr Hoare's son, Chris Hoare, said in a statement that his father died in a care facility in Durban, South Africa.

"Mike Hoare lived by the philosophy that you get more out of life by living dangerously, so it is all the more remarkable that he lived more than 100 years," he said.

Accountant turned mercenary

After serving in the British Army during the Second World War and reaching the rank of major, Mr Hoare began his post-war career as an accountant, running several small businesses in South Africa.

But it was in 1961 that he was introduced to Moïse Tshombe - a Congolese politician and businessman who would go on to become prime minister of the Congo three years later.

In 1964, Mr Tshombe hired Mr Hoare to take on the communist-backed Simba rebellion.

When the campaign was completed 18 months later, Mr Hoare and his unit of mercenaries - which he nicknamed the "Wild Geese" - were internationally known.

His fervent anti-communist beliefs earned him no fans in many nations, with East German radio regularly describing him as "that mad bloodhound Hoare". This led to him being nicknamed "Mad Mike" - a moniker with which he was delighted.

In 1978, a mercenary adventure film called The Wild Geese was released. The film starred Richard Burton as Colonel Allen Faulkner, a character based heavily on Mr Hoare.

A still from The Wild Geese (1978) — Image captionActors Richard Harris, Roger Moore, Richard Burton and Hardy Krüger starred in the 1978 film The Wild Geese, based on Mike Hoare's mercenaries

But following his successful campaigns in the Congo, what came next turned him into an international laughing stock.

'The package-holiday coup'

Mr Hoare appeared to be retired from military life by the start of the 1980s - but in 1981 he launched a surprise attempt at overthrowing the government of the Seychelles.

It is believed that Mr Hoare knew the Seychelles well, and had a particular hatred of its socialist government under President Albert René.

Having gained the tacit support of the governments of South Africa and Kenya, Mr Hoare began to plot.

In October 1981 he had a cache of weapons delivered to his suburban bungalow in South Africa, which he hid in his cellar. He recruited 46 men, and with them he planned to enter the Seychelles disguised as a charitable drinking club of former rugby players.

Almost all of the men managed to get through customs at Mahe airport. However, one of their group joined the wrong queue, got into an argument with a customs officer, and ended up having his bag searched.

When officers found a dismantled AK-47, the man panicked and revealed that there were more weapons outside.

At this point the entire plan unravelled, and amid the ensuing conflict at the airport the mercenaries commandeered an Air India plane and flew it back to South Africa.

When they arrived the mercenaries were jailed for six days, and Mr Hoare and his plans - dubbed "the package-holiday coup" - were ridiculed in the global press.

A year later they were tried for hijacking the Air India plane. Mr Hoare was sentenced to 20 years, with 10 years suspended. He was released after 33 months.

Mr Hoare spent his final years in South Africa, and published several memoirs - including Mercenary, The Road to Kalamata, and The Seychelles Affair.

Wednesday, February 5, 2020

A01027 - Leila Janah, Entrepreneur Who Hired the Poor

Leila Janah, a social entrepreneur who employed thousands of desperately poor people in Kenya, Uganda and India in the fervent belief that jobs, not handouts, offered the best escape from poverty, died Jan. 24 in Manhattan. She was 37.

Samasource, one of her companies, said the cause was epithelioid sarcoma, a rare soft-tissue cancer.

A child of Indian immigrants, Ms. Janah traveled to Mumbai in the mid-2000s as a management consultant to help take an outsourcing company public. Riding through the city by auto rickshaw, she passed an enormous slum. But after arriving at the outsourcing center, she found a staff of educated middle-class workers. Few, if any, of the nearby poor were employed there.

“Couldn’t the people from the slums do some of this work?” she recalled thinking, in an interview with Wired magazine in 2015.

It proved to be a galvanizing moment for Ms. Janah, who called the intellect of the poorest people in the world “the biggest untapped resource” in the global economy.

She went on to start Samasource in Nairobi in 2008 — “sama” means “equal” in Sanskrit — with the aim of employing poor people, for a living wage, in digital jobs like photo tagging and image annotation at what she called delivery centers in Kenya, Uganda, and India. The workers generate data that is used for projects as diverse as self-driving cars, video game technology, and software that helps park rangers in sub-Saharan Africa prevent elephant poaching.

At least half the people hired by Samasource are women, the company says.

“Leila had a vision about bringing the dignity of work and the promise of a living wage to the world’s most vulnerable,” Kennedy Odede, the founder and chief executive of Shining Hope for Communities, a grass-roots organization in Kenya that has worked with Samasource, said by e-mail. Through her work, he added, “Young people began to see different possibilities for their futures.”

Samasource’s employees have worked under contracts with companies including Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Walmart, Getty Images, Glassdoor, and Vulcan Capital, a holding company formed by Paul G. Allen, a founder of Microsoft.

The company has helped an estimated 50,000 people — 11,000 workers and their dependents — and regularly evaluates whether it is meeting living-wage requirements, Wendy Gonzalez, Samasource’s interim chief executive, said in a phone interview.

Another venture developed by Ms. Janah is LXMI, a luxury cosmetics line that has the same mission as Samasource: to hire marginalized people and give them a decent wage. Begun in 2015, it employs hundreds of poor women along the Nile River Valley, largely in Uganda, to harvest Nilotica nuts and turn them into a butter that is exported to the United States for use in the production of its skin-care products. More people have been hired in other African countries and in India to harvest other ingredients.

The idea for LXMI came to Ms. Janah during a visit to Benin, in West Africa, where she saw local people growing shea nuts, from which a butter is extracted, in their yards.

“I said, ‘Let’s build an export industry but only for poor women,’” she told Fast Company magazine in 2016. “We can solve poverty while also making our skin better.”

Leila Chirayath was born Oct. 9, 1982, in Lewiston, N.Y., near Niagara Falls. Her father, Sahadev Chirayath, is a structural engineer; her mother, Martine Janah, held various jobs, including chopping onions at a Wendy’s restaurant, after immigrating to the United States. Leila began using her mother’s surname professionally about 10 years ago.

The family moved to Arizona before settling in the San Pedro neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Leila’s desire to help improve the world gained traction when she was in middle school and joined the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. During high school, she went to a rural area of Ghana as part of an international student exchange program to teach blind children; she learned Braille while she was there.

“I had never experienced anything like the poverty I saw there,” she said in an interview with Hearts on Fire, an organization devoted to social change. “It helped me to understand how poverty oppresses people.”

After graduating from Harvard in 2004 with a bachelor’s degree in development studies, Ms. Janah worked for Katzenbach Partners, a management consulting company in New York. She was later a founding director of Incentives for Global Health, which develops market-based financial solutions to meet health problems, and worked for the World Bank’s development research group.

Ms. Janah said the work done at Samasource underscored her faith in providing decent jobs to poor people. While most of the company’s employees hold entry-level positions, some have moved into managerial jobs and others have started their own small businesses.

Dean Karlan, a professor of economics and finance at Northwestern University and a founder of ImpactMatters, which measures the effectiveness of nonprofit groups, said Samasource had achieved its mission.

“It was laser-focused on creating work for the poorest,” he said in an e-mail, and its results “were backed by sophisticated data systems that showed they got results.”

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