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Posts tagged as ““Bubbling Brown Sugar””

Ugandan Journalist Nancy Kacungira Wins BBC World News Komla Dumor Award

By goodblacknews on August 18, 2015
Nancy Kacungira (photo via sde.co.ke)
Nancy Kacungira (photo via sde.co.ke)

A Ugandan journalist with a background as an entrepreneur, radio and TV reporter and presenter has won the first BBC World News Komla Dumor Award.

Nancy Kacungira, a television anchor for Kenya’s KTN television channel, was selected from nearly 200 applicants.
She will spend three months at the BBC in London and also report from Africa for the BBC TV, radio and online.
The award was established to honour Komla Dumor, a presenter for BBC World News, who died suddenly aged 41.
Ms Kacungira said: “I am stunned, but also ecstatic upon hearing this news. I am so greatly honoured and humbled to be the winner of this award.”
“I owe it to the continent that I fiercely love and am dedicated to, to do my bit to expand the often dogmatic and skewed narratives that have beleaguered it for so long.
“To be a part of continuing Komla’s legacy is such an honour it feels almost like a dream. I will do my very best to justify the great trust that I have been awarded, and ensure that the benefit of this opportunity goes far beyond myself.”
One of the judges, BBC Africa’s current affairs editor, Vera Kwakofi, said: “Nancy is incredibly smart with a breadth and depth to her knowledge and experience that comes across instantly.”
The BBC’s Director of News and Current Affairs James Harding, said: “When Komla Dumor died, it was an enormous loss to the BBC, to Africa and to all of us personally.
“I am delighted that in Nancy we have found an extremely passionate and talented journalist, a worthy winner of the award that we established in Komla’s name.”
Nancy grew up in Uganda where she attended Makerere University in Kampala. She has more than 14 years of experience working across a range of media in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania as well as a Masters degree in communications from Leeds University.
She is currently the anchor of Prime Time Evening News on KTN where she is also the channel’s social media editor. There are two runners-up for the award: Leila Dee Dougan from South Africa and Paa Kwesi Asare from Ghana.
Komla Dumor was an exceptional Ghanaian broadcaster who in his short life made an extraordinary impact – in Ghana, in Africa and around the world.  He represented a confident, savvy and entrepreneurial side of Africa.
Through his tenacious journalism and compelling storytelling, Komla worked tirelessly to bring a more nuanced African narrative to the world.
article via bbc.com

Bettye LaVette Back With New CD and Autobiography

By goodblacknews on September 28, 2012

Bettye LaVette  (Chang W. Lee/The New York Times)

WEST ORANGE, N.J. — Bettye LaVette makes no apologies for her life. Sitting cross-legged on an Art Deco chair in her living room here, sipping wine, she was animated and gritty as she talked about the decades she spent singing in clubs and cursing her “buzzard luck,” while her contemporaries, like Aretha Franklin and Diana Ross, became superstars.

“I thought I was going to die in obscurity,” said Ms. LaVette, 66. “I’m still going to die broke but not obscure.”
It has been 50 years since Ms. LaVette, then a teenage mother from a working-class Detroit home, recorded her first single, “My Man — He’s a Lovin’ Man,” which became a hit on Atlantic Records and seemed to foretell a bright future. But she quarreled with Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records and left the label, and even though she recorded dozens of other R&B singles in the 1960s, including the minor hit “Let Me Down Easy,” her career never took off. She survived as a club performer and appeared in “Bubbling Brown Sugar” on Broadway and on tour. Her long-delayed first album in the early 1980s didn’t sell. By the late ’90s, she was popular only among European R&B enthusiasts.