Daughter’s WhatsApp dispatch from NOLA (a travelogue): “Nation of Islam brother selling newspapers ✊🏽”

Daughter’s WhatsApp dispatch from NOLA (a travelogue)

Daughter’s WhatsApp dispatch from NOLA (a travelogue): “Band singing in French”

Daughter’s WhatsApp dispatch from NOLA (a travelogue): “Toilet seat for sale with Nicolas Cage from Raising Arizona 😂”

Daughter’s WhatsApp dispatch from NOLA (a travelogue): “Sign in Louis Armstrong park . The graffiti says “then provide affordable housing” 😂”

Daughter’s WhatsApp dispatch from “Congo Square” (of all places)

Daughter’s WhatsApp dispatch from NOLA (a visit with ancestral specters): “Nightmare-fueled mask from the Hemba people of DRC at the New Orleans Museum of Art”

Daughter sends another WhatsApp dispatch from NOLA, where music never dies: “Guy was playing to a mostly empty bar on bourbon street and he was incredible”

Dispatch from daughter: “I’m in New Orleans right now on Bourbon street this is a memorial to the people who died 🥲”

What the hell?!! My Washington post “Newsprint” shows Africa missing from my “Top places.” Wait… this doesn’t say anything about me, but everything about the WAPO!

Daughter snapped this at LAX while awaiting departure on a DELTA/AEROMEXICO flight to Mexico City.

Daughter was at Tedd Mann Theater in The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.

“La Voiture c’est l’Aventure” is a 1987 comic strip drawn by artist Barly Baruti. I wrote the script as “Yuma Jumaïni” based on Barly’s original idea. The album is being re-released in March 2025 in a limited collectors edition (500 numbered and signed copies).

2) I like Louis Armstrong’s gravelly opening up the short vid of the individualized but mass-formatted digital event (the sound track is removed in this shared version). Theorizing lol… Top New Year Resolution: henceforth take seriously the adage, “music has charms to soothe the savage beast.”

1) My Apple Music “Replay’24” tells me that I’m anchored by Congolese rumba (Franco); that French electronic music (J-M Jarre) is my staple; and “Il est libre Max” reprised by Kym Thiriot is my “anthem.” Terrifying statistics: out of the year’s 52,600 hrs, I listened to music for only 2,278 hours l!

4/ With artist Barly Baruti, Professor Didier Gondola is now co-writing the script of the graphic novel based on his biography of André Matswa. A trilogy to be published in Brussels, the capital of the Francophone graphic novel. The 1st volume comes out in SEPTEMBER 2025.

3/ Soon enough, Matswa became France’s public enemy. Arrested in Paris, tried in Brazzaville, jailed in Chad, he’d escape and return to Paris. He’d end up being caught and sent to Brazzaville where he’d die in captivity. (Historian Didier Gondola has written a biography of André Matswa).

2/ The scheme was simple: to claim actual French citizenship for African colonial subjects on the basis of the Republic’s motto of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” similar to the Edict of Caracalla of AD 212 granting full Roman citizenship to all free men in the Roman Empire!

1/ André Matswa aka André Grenard Matchouand (1899-1942), a native of French Equatorial Africa’s territory of “Moyen-Congo” (today’s Congo-Brazzaville), came up with a scheme to subvert the French colonial empire from within its very capital of Paris in the 1920s.