₦airaland Forum

edicolove: The only people who deny the existence of juju are atheists because they know that if they accept the existence of juju, then they cannot deny the existence of God or the supernatural. But they are only living in denial.

If you grow up in any typical African, Asian or South American country, you will be familiar with juju. They are used for all kind of things. From evil things to entertainment. If you grow up in most coastal villages, you will all sorts of strange stuff. People use knives and cutlasses and guns on themselves openly in public festivals and it doesn't have any effect on them. Its very real. Sometimes the juju fails and people get hurt, so you know they were not joking in the first place. One of the reason cultism escalated in Nigeria is because of the widespread use of charms for protection. Those who use charms for protection become extra wicked and fearless in their attacks on others.

Someone said, if its real why don't they use it for Boko Aram or why did it not protect Bola Ige and co? First, juju is like stuff from negative spirits. They are never meant to achieve good. They are always for evil stuff. That is why babalawos who do charms for people to get rich don't use it themselves. They know it comes with a lot of consequences. Secondly, these forces can fight against themselves and overpower themselves. That is why people like funsho williams and co can be harmed. I remember when a guy named taiwo fought a whole gang of boys and made the school authority to shut down my school when I was in secondary school. These boys where immune to guns and knives and the whole school was watching live tv. If you ever grow up around cities like Benin, Warri, portharcourt, Aba, Enugu, Sapele, Calabar and environs, you won't be asking this kind of question.

But like I said before, God exist and is far greater than juju. That's the beauty of life.

So True, I agree with everything you said

Black magic is real, whether you believe it or not

[quote author=tpia@]are these women from saudi, or just representing saudi.

did they shave their eyebrows or something.


front row, right, is the only one with the typical saudi features.

second row, far left, looks white, or european.[/quote]that I don't know, I would suspect they are Saudi though but you never know though because I saw another picture and it showed some females that don't have the traditional saudi features: https://educationviews.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/article-0-11C44758000005DC-919_468x327.jpg

[b]"RIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia will enter women athletes in the Olympics for the first time ever in London this summer, the Islamic kingdom's London embassy said on Sunday.

Human rights groups had called on the International Olympic Committee to bar Saudi Arabia from competing in London, citing its failure ever to send a woman athlete to a Games and its ban on sports in girls' state schools.

Powerful Muslim clerics in the ultra-conservative state have repeatedly spoken out against the participation of girls and women in sports.
In Saudi Arabia women hold a lower legal status to men, are banned from driving and need a male guardian's permission to work, travel or open a bank account.

Under King Abdullah, however, the government has pushed for them to have better education and work opportunities and allowed them to vote in future municipal elections, the only public polls held in the kingdom.

"The kingdom of Saudi Arabia is looking forward to its complete participation in the London 2012 Olympic Games through the Saudi Arabian Olympic Committee, which will oversee the participation of women athletes who can qualify for the games," said a statement published on the embassy website.

In April the head of the kingdom's General Presidency of Youth Welfare, the body that regulates sports in Saudi Arabia, said it would not prevent women from competing but that they would not have official government endorsement.

The IOC said on Monday that talks with the Saudis were "ongoing" and that "we are working to ensure the participation of Saudi women at the Games in London."
The head of the kingdom's Olympic mission, Khalid al-Dakheel, told Reuters on Sunday evening however he was unaware of any developments allowing women to participate.

Top Saudi clerics, who hold government positions and have always constituted an important support base for the ruling al-Saud royal family, have spoken against female participation in sports.

In 2009 a senior cleric said girls risked losing their virginity by tearing their hymens if they took part in energetic sport.

Perhaps the most likely woman candidate to compete under the Saudi flag in London, equestrian Dalma Malhas, represented the kingdom at the junior Olympics in Singapore in 2010, but without official support or recognition.

Physical education is banned in girls' state schools in the kingdom, but Saudi Arabia's only female deputy minister, Noura al-Fayez, has written to Human Rights Watch saying there is a plan to introduce it."[/b]
http://news.yahoo.com/saudi-arabia-enter-women-london-olympics-100953392--oly.html

[b]"Angélique Kidjo is railing against the European critics that have accused her of making "inauthentic" African music. "Who are they to tell me what is African and what isn't?" says Kidjo, her voice rising in indignation as she thumps the meeting room table of her record company's office, in a way that suggests it might well be a substitute for a music critic's head. "Did they grow up in Benin and hear the music I heard? No? Then shut up!"

While I quickly scratch out my next question about whether her music is truly African or not, Kidjo holds forth on slavery, women's rights in Benin, China's exploitation of African resources and pretty much every other socio-political issue affecting the continent today. But she never sounds more irate than when talking about critics of what has come to be known as world music. Having survived everything from abuse to political exile to racism, it seems that a bunch of white music journalists are small game for this tiny, 49-year-old woman, who is fast taking the place of the late Miriam Makeba as the great diva of African music.

We are in Paris, the city Kidjo fled to in 1983 after Benin's then-communist government made her recording career all but impossible, and she has been responding to ongoing criticism that her combination of traditional African songs and American soul dilutes an already threatened musical form.

The idea behind her latest album, Õÿö, was to represent the music she grew up with, which means covers of Curtis Mayfield's Move On Up and James Brown's Cold Sweat alongside the Togo singer Bella Bellow's signature song Zelie and the Benin lullaby Atcha Houn. Intended as a homage to her parents, Õÿö is a celebratory, joyous record. But it certainly doesn't fit in to the average westerner's idea of what constitutes African music.

"Since leaving Benin I've realised that my father was way ahead of his time," says Kidjo, as she reflects on the reality of her musical upbringing. "I took it for granted, thinking every kid in Africa grew up listening to James Brown and Otis Redding. Actually, we heard them because my father was open-minded. For example, he always said: 'You're going to school whatever happens, because otherwise you'll just be an assisted person.' This was so unusual – to want girls to have an education – that people used to call him a white man."

Kidjo's father, who worked for the post office, shared child-rearing duties with her mother, who ran a theatre troupe. "So-called friends would come over and say to him: 'How can you let your wife do this? Who wears the pants in your house?' And my dad's answer was always the same: 'Love cannot be a jail. I must give my wife freedom.' He was a very special man."

The influence of her father's attitude goes deep. Kidjo today runs the Batonga Foundation, a charity set up to give girls across Africa a secondary and higher education. And she claims that the western musicians she works with – Alicia Keys, John Legend and the inevitable Peter Gabriel are among the roll-call of past collaborators – are still frequently surprised when faced with an educated, forthright African woman. In an argument that initially sounds paranoid but gets increasingly convincing, Kidjo states that this is related to a worldwide denial of the legacy of slavery.

"I sang on a hip-hop track in Germany recently with an African-American rapper," says Kidjo, who has a tendency to combine personal recollection with political reflection. "We were doing these TV shows, and he said to me: 'How come you speak English so well?' He thought I was going to have a bone through my nose. He believed all Africans still lived in mud huts. That is the image of us they teach in American schools."

I suggest this can hardly be the case in a country with an African-American president. "Even today African-American schoolchildren will be told: 'Your people sold you. We just bought you to save your ass'," she continues, eyes flashing. "Slavery, a crime against humanity, is being denied and that is why people remain so ignorant of Africa. The Jews have rightly ensured that nobody will ever forget the Holocaust. But there has been a concerted effort to remove slavery from the minds of the people."

Kidjo's fighting spirit might well have come from her decision to be a singer in a country where that profession is ranked alongside prostitution. "When I was a little kid, everyone thought my singing was cute. Then I became a teenager and it was hell on earth," she says, looking as if she's about to burst into tears, albeit in a rather theatrical way. "One day after school I heard someone shout 'Prostitute!' A boy threw a stone at me and suddenly everyone was rubbing sand in my hair, spitting at me. I came home, shaking from head to toe. My grandmother sat me down and cleaned and braided my hair, and I told her I didn't want to sing any more. She said: 'Are you going to let stupid people tell you what to do with your life? Do what you have to do.' To this day that advice is what has kept me going, and what has guided me."

Kidjo is now a huge star in Benin. But she claims that the country's perception of musicians as layabouts and ne'er-do-wells is still there. "The problem we have in Africa is that unless you are a traditional musician telling the stories of your people through songs, you have no respect in society," she claims. "Being in a band is not considered a job. As soon as you hit the stage, if you're a boy, you're a junkie and if you're a girl, you're a prostitute. And it's worse now that everyone has access to television and the internet. How do you convince a mother to let her girl sing when she sees videos of pop stars almost naked, mimicking the sexual act?"

At Kidjo's first major concert, staged in Togo and funded in part by her father's retirement pay, she got into trouble for refusing to sing songs praising Benin's communist party. She continued to refuse to toe the line, and her decision to leave Africa came after appearing at a concert staged for government officials. "It was so bad," she says, holding her head in her hands. "These men, the age of my father, were looking at me like I was a piece of meat. After that I decided that I would either get out of the country or commit suicide." Banned from touring, she fled to Paris under the pretence of attending a cousin's wedding. "I was only allowed to leave because the customs officer at the airport was a fan of my music," she remembers. "For the next six years I couldn't speak to my parents because their phone was tapped. It was hell."

She survived by cleaning, babysitting, and working in a hair salon. "I did every job under the sun apart from selling drugs and being a prostitute," she says. "I worked as a backing singer and used the money to pay for music lessons at a jazz school. On the first day, two white girls said to me: 'You're African, right? Jazz is not for African people.' But that's where I met my husband, and that's where my career really started."

As the interview winds to a close, I suggest that, given everything she has been through, Kidjo has got to a point in her career where she can dictate the terms by which she does things. She disagrees. "My whole career has been dictated by the songs I love," she says, concluding the subject of conversation by folding her arms. "Will I collaborate with someone famous if it means doing a song I don't like? Hell, no! That has not made my life easy. But that's the way it is, and that is the way I am."[/b]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/apr/29/angelique-kidjo-oyo

Yoruba or English movie industry

[b]"We understand that Rob is tired of wearing glittery makeup and those uncomfortable ‘Breaking Dawn’ contacts, but is he being a little too honest?

Robert Pattinson isn’t holding back! The 24-year-old appeared on the Today Show to talk about his new film Water For Elephants on April 17 and he was beaming as he talked about wrapping Breaking Dawn!

“It finished yesterday morning,” Rob tells host Matt Lauer. “It was a long process … eight months. It was a relief to get the contacts out of my eyes. I was about to kill someone.”

This isn’t the first or second time Rob has expressed his dislike of the franchise that turned him into an international phenomenon.

“When movies become these franchises and big machines people can’t really see them as movies anymore it’s so difficult for people to understand it,” Rob has said. “It seems to happen to every big franchise now, and people tend to think of the cultural relevance of it than the actually movie. So it’s nice to do this [Water For Elephants]. Things that are made purely to be a movie. They are not going to be in any fast-food restaurants.”

Rob also appeared on Live with Regis & Kelly – where he echoed the same feelings about Twilight!

“It’s all done, it was a bit of an anti-climax,” Rob says. “I finished on a night shoot and flew straight here and did the premiere for [Water For Elephants] yesterday. In a way it feels like school is over. It was a very long shoot, eight months, and it was hard by the end of it. I think everyone was like ‘get me out!’ I still haven’t really understood what it’s like to not do Twilight movies every three months.”

Clearly Rob hopes his future roles won’t involve fangs. But even though Twilight is over Rob and Kristen Stewart are still going strong! They attended the NYC premiere of his new flick and they seemed very much in love!"[/b]
http://www.hollywoodlife.com/2011/04/18/robert-pattinson-water-for-elephants-premiere-nyc-breaking-dawn/

[img]http://www.popartuk.com/g/l/lgpp31687+robert-pattinson-is-edward-twilight-poster.jpg[/img]