Race and sophistication simmer within the pressure cooker of an immigrant's life in America within the fiery hot-button comedy “Jaja's African Hair Braiding.”

Welcome to a busy Harlem hair salon in Jocelyn Bioh's bittersweet 90-minute romp directed by Whitney White in its riveting West Coast premiere on the Berkeley Repertory Theater through December 15.

Gossip and intuition flow like wine when the cheeky Bea (Awa Sal Secka) and the relaxed Aminata (Tiffany Renee Johnson) chat, however the long-simmering subtext is at all times there. Amidst the complaints about various shady men in her life and the jostling over who stole from whose customers, there’s at all times the fear of the world outside the salon.

In among the play's funniest moments, the melodramatic Bea incessantly throws sharp attacks on the vivacious newcomer Ndidi (the deft Aisha Sougou) over desirable clients. Bioh, best known for “School Girls, or; “The African Mean Girls Play” gently mixes hilarity with a touch of doubt and foreboding. The never-ending stream of dubious customers, skillfully played by Melanie Brezill and Leovina Charles, adds to the fun on this Tony-nominated play.

For all their wisdom and wisdom, these women are all too aware that they’re outsiders in a rustic that doesn't at all times welcome immigrants. That tingling feeling of fear, the constant reading of tea leaves as a matter of survival, is just a part of the ecosystem, identical to the sweltering summer heat.

All of those women immigrated from a special a part of West Africa, but all had the identical dream of a greater life. Gentle Miriam's (a radiant Bisserat Tseggai) heartbreaking story of separation from a lousy husband and the necessity to go away her little girl behind to pursue a brand new life cuts to the core.

These resilient women don't mind working until their hands blister and bleed if it means sooner or later getting their papers and becoming an actual American who doesn't must hide from ICE raids.

Despite the never-ending onslaught of hellish customers and the constant financial crisis, the salon is sort of a refuge, a secure place. Until it isn't anymore.

Marie (a sensitive turn from Jordan Rice), JaJa's smart daughter, is the closest to grabbing the brass ring. She even became her highschool's valedictorian by posing as her cousin Kelly and registering for classes using borrowed documents. Entrepreneurial Jaja (a regal Victoire Charles) could also be a tricky guy, but she knows her progress in New York will probably be limited. It's as much as Marie to make amends for all of them.

While White's production needs to choose up the pace and tempo a bit, there's no denying the depth and urgency of the play's themes, not to say the wry delights of the text, Bioh's wealthy gift for the peculiarities of language and dialect, the exuberant musicality of speech . Dede Ayite's costumes add to the cheeky atmosphere.

To be honest, whether we would like braids in our hair or not, all of us secretly long to develop into regulars at Jaja's, a full of life hangout filled with charm, spunk and courage.

“JAJA’S AFRICAN HAIR BRAIDING”

By Jocelyn Bioh, presented by Berkeley Repertory Theater

Through: Dec 15

Where: Berkeley Rep's Peet's Theater, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley

Duration: 90 minutes, no break

Tickets: $25-$134; 510-647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org

Originally published: November 15, 2024 at 8:48am PST

The immigration of black Africans to the USA has exploded in recent a long timeToday there are about 2 million black African immigrants – in comparison with 184,000 in 1990. Black African immigrants now make 42% of the country’s foreign-born black populationjust behind immigrants from the Caribbean.

While large metropolitan areas typically have the most important proportion of African immigrants, the population can also be growing in rural areas. In Iowa, for instance, 17% of foreign-born residents in 2022 were born in Africain comparison with just below 3% in 1990.

As a doctoral student within the Department of Educational Policy and Leadership Studies on the University of Iowa, Mavis Gyesi researches the tutorial experiences of African immigrants in U.S. high schools and their transition to school.

In a working paper, Gyesi interviewed 13 African immigrant students in Iowa high schools who come from different cultures and speak different languages. She found that a lot of them take advanced courses in highschool and aspire to attend a four-year college, which the research describes as Stereotypes about African students as academically unmotivated or doomed to failure.

In this Q&A, Gyesi reviews research on the tutorial experiences and achievements of African immigrants and identifies major gaps._

What myths are there about African immigrants and their educational level?

Research shows that African immigrant children sometimes experience negative stereotyping and exclusion in K-12 schools. Some students say they imagine most Americans view them as Underachievers and primitivesbased on their accent, ethnicity, nationality and skin color. These low expectations of their teachers often follow black immigrants in collegeHowever, studies also indicate that these children resilient and learn to seek out their way around school which differ culturally and linguistically from the faculties of their countries of origin.

There is a spot in the info on the performance of African immigrants in K-12 schools, mainly because most data sets They belong to the identical population group as all black studentsimmigrants and non-immigrants alike. My research goals to separate these groups and learn the way their needs and performance levels may differ.

However, there’s some data that disproves the parable that African immigrant children cannot or won’t achieve high goals of their education. Research shows that African immigrant students see college as a crucial stepping stone to achieving their profession goals and have a better quality of life. In my study, 12 of the 13 students surveyed said they were taking Advanced Placement courses. Some planned to take part in dual enrollment programs to get college credit. “I thought AP courses were the hardest thing there was, but if you pay attention, they're not that hard,” one student told me.

African immigrants are also highly educated overall. According to the Migration Policy Institute, adult immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa within the United States higher level of education than the foreign-born population usuallyIn 2019, 42% of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa ages 25 and older had a bachelor's degree or higher, compared with 33% of all foreign-born and U.S.-born adults combined.

What educational values ​​do African immigrants bring to U.S. institutions?

Families and community networks play a vital role in the tutorial success of African immigrants. The involvement of many adults has been shown to play a big role in students' college readiness.

In my research, based on an Iowa school district, I used the Ubuntu and Harambee philosophies to look at the college-attending decisions of kids of African immigrants, including those born within the United States.

The philosophies of Ubuntu and Harambee emphasize the Unity, community, interdependence and support networks that exist in African communities. “Ubuntu” comes from the South African languages ​​Zulu and Xhola and “Harambee” is Swahili.

One student shared how her family encouraged her to do her best in class and to pursue greater than just a school degree. One relative particularly told the coed that he “believes that the hard work will pay off in the end.”

What is a crucial results of your study?

The majority of African immigrant students I interviewed were pursuing four-year degrees at a university, and so they were specifically all in favour of Ivy League institutions. However, most students said they needed more information in regards to the college application process.

Teachers and counselors can be certain that African immigrant students are informed early in regards to the college application process, including informing them about the fee of school and scholarship opportunities.

What's in a reputation? People use unique names to handle one another, but we're one among only a handful of animal species known to do that, including bottlenose dolphins. By finding more animals with names and studying how they use them, we may help scientists higher understand other animals and ourselves.

As an elephant researcher I even have spent years observing wild elephants, and my colleagues and I study wild elephants as individuals and provide you with names for them to assist us remember who’s who. The elephants in query live entirely within the wild and are in fact unaware of the nicknames we give them.

But in a single latest study published in Nature Ecology and Evolutionwe found evidence that elephants have their very own names with which they address one another. This research places elephants under the very small variety of species Many individuals are known to handle one another in this fashion, and it has implications for scientists' understanding of animal intelligence and the evolutionary origins of language.

Finding evidence for name-like calls

My colleagues and I had long suspected that elephants could address one another using name-like calls, but no researcher had tested this concept. To investigate this query, we followed elephants across the Kenyan savannah, recording their vocalizations and, when possible, noting who made each call and to whom the decision was directed.

When most individuals consider elephant calls, they imagine loud trumpets. But in point of fact, most elephant calls are deep, booming noises referred to as rumbling a few of that are below the range of human hearing. We thought that if elephants have names, they almost definitely say them in growls, so we focused our evaluation on these calls.

We thought that if rumbles contain something like a reputation, then we must always have the ability to inform who a call is for based on the characteristics of the decision alone. To discover if so, we trained a machine learning model to discover the recipient of every call.

We fed the model a series of numbers describing the sound characteristics of every call and told it which elephant each call was directed at. Based on this information, the model attempted to learn patterns within the calls that were related to the identity of the recipient. We then asked the model to predict the recipient for a separate sample of calls. We used a complete of 437 calls from 99 individual callers to coach the model.

One reason we had to make use of machine learning for this evaluation is that rumble Multiple messages directly, including the caller's identity, age and gender, emotional state, and behavioral context. Names are likely only a small component of those calls. A pc algorithm is commonly higher than the human ear at recognizing such complex and subtle patterns.

We didn’t assume that elephants use names in every call, but we had no way of knowing upfront which calls might contain a reputation, so we included on this evaluation all rumbles that we thought might use names at the least sometimes.

The model successful identified the recipient for 27.5% of those calls – significantly higher than what it might have achieved by random guessing. This result suggested that some rumbles contained information that allowed the model to discover the intended recipient of the decision.

However, this result alone was not enough to conclude that the sounds contained names. For example, the model could have recognized the caller's unique voice patterns and guessed the recipient based on who the caller addressed most frequently.

In our next evaluation, we found that calls from the identical caller to the identical recipient significantly more similaron average, than calls from the identical caller to different recipients. This meant that the calls were actually specific to individual recipients, like a reputation.

Next, we wanted to seek out out whether elephants can recognize and reply to their names. To discover, we played 17 elephants a recording of a call originally directed at them, which we assumed contained their name. Then, on a special day, we played them a recording of the identical call directed at a special person.

Elephants were more more likely to vocalize and approach the sound source when the decision was originally directed at them. On average, they approached the speaker 128 seconds earlier, vocalized 87 seconds earlier, and responded 2.3 times more often to a call directed at them. This result showed us that elephants can determine whether a call was directed at them just by hearing the decision without context.

Names without imitation

Elephants usually are not the one animals with name-like calls. porpoise And some parrots Address other individuals by imitating the addressee's distinctive call, a singular “call sign” that dolphins and parrots typically use to announce their very own identity.

This system of Naming by imitation is a bit of different from how names and other words normally work in human language. While we occasionally name things by imitating the sounds they make, like “cuckoo” and “zipper,” most of our words are arbitrary. They don’t have any inherent acoustic connection to what they seek advice from.

Any words are a part of what enables us to discuss such a big selection of topics, including objects and concepts that don't make sounds.

Interestingly, we found that elephant calls directed at a selected receiver were no more much like the receiver's calls than to the calls of other animals. This result suggests that elephants, like humans but unlike other animals, can address one another without simply imitating the receiver's calls.

What's next

We're still unsure exactly where elephant names appear in a call or the best way to distinguish them from all the opposite information a growl conveys.

Next, we would like to determine the best way to isolate the names of specific individuals. If we are able to do this, we are able to answer numerous other questions, comparable to whether different callers use the identical name to handle the identical recipient, how elephants get their names, and whether or not they ever discuss others after they usually are not around.

Name-like calls in elephants could potentially tell researchers something concerning the evolution of human language.

Most mammals, including our closest primate relatives, produce only a set variety of vocalizations, that are essentially pre-programmed into their brains at birth. But language is determined by the power to learning latest words.

Before our ancestors could develop a full language, that they had to develop the power to learn latest sounds. Dolphins, parrots and Elephants have all independently developed this ability and use it to handle one another by name.

Perhaps our ancestors originally developed the power to learn latest sounds to recollect one another's names and later used this ability to learn a wider range of words.

Our results also highlight how incredibly complex elephants are. Using arbitrary sounds to call other individuals requires a capability to think abstractly, because it involves using a sound as an emblem to represent one other elephant.

The indisputable fact that elephants have to provide one another names underlines the importance of their many various social ties.

Learning concerning the elephant spirit and its similarities to ours may increase people’s appreciation for elephants at a time when Conflict with people is one among the best threats to the survival of untamed elephants.

JOHANNESBURG – Former South African President Jacob Zuma lamented high levels of poverty amongst black South Africans on Saturday and vowed to create jobs and fight crime as he unveiled his recent political party's manifesto ahead of the country's highly anticipated elections.

He told 1000’s of supporters gathered at Orlando Stadium in Johannesburg that his party would construct factories that will employ large numbers of individuals and supply free education to the country's youth.

“We want our children to learn for free, especially those from poor households, because the poverty we have is not our cause. It was created by settlers who took everything, including our land. We will take all these things back, make money and give our children an education,” he said.

He has also pledged to amend the country's structure to offer more powers back to traditional leaders, saying their role in society has been diminished by giving more powers to judges and civil servants.

Zuma's uMkhonto weSizwe party, referred to as the MK Party, has emerged as a serious player in South Africa's upcoming elections after its formation in December last 12 months.

He is currently involved in a single Legal dispute with the country's electoral authority, the Independent Electoral Commission. He has appealed against a court ruling which prevented him from collaborating within the election as a consequence of his criminal record.

Zuma was sentenced to fifteen months in prison for defying a court order to seem before a judicial commission of inquiry investigating allegations of corruption in state-owned and state-owned corporations during his term as president from 2009 to 2018.

In 2018 he was Forced to resign He was appointed president of the country after widespread corruption allegations, but he has returned politically and is now searching for to develop into the country's president again.

“When they talk about unemployment, they talk about us, there is no one else. When they talk about people who go away in shacks, that is us, then there is no one other than us who lives in shacks,” Zuma told his supporters, many of whom had traveled from other provinces such as Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal, where he still enjoys it and has significant support.

According to the former president, black poverty is the reason for South Africa's high crime rate.

“Our hunger and our poverty create the impression that we are criminals, that we have no brains, that we have nothing. That time is over because we are good people who give, but some people push us into crime,” he said.

Recent polls and analysts suggest the ruling African National Congress could get lower than 50% of the vote and would want to form a coalition with smaller parties to remain in power.

South Africans will go to the polls on May twenty ninth.

When I first got an internship as an archive technician on the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House – National Historic Site — the D.C. home of the lady who founded Bethune-Cookman University — I didn’t see a robust connection between the faculty founder’s life and the remainder of the African diaspora.

Many of the requests I received from researchers were for records of Bethune's work in FDR's so-called “Black Cabinet.” unofficial black advisory group This has helped raise awareness of issues affecting Black America. Or her role as Founder of the National Council of Negro Women. Or her general involvement in Washington, DC as a resident of Logan Circle, where she welcomed people from world wide to the NCNW headquarters.

But as I preserved the notes and retrieved them for researchers, I soon learned to see Bethune in a unique light.

As I read her letters, diary entries, and notes from various meetings, I noticed that Bethune received awards in Haiti and Liberia. I made a decision to take a better take a look at her work abroad for my dissertation and located that she was more connected to the diaspora than I and plenty of others had thought.

This experience ultimately laid the muse for my book, which was published in 2023: “Mary McLeod Bethune The Pan-Africanist.”

Pan-Africanism, based on Nigerian historian P. Olisanwuche Esedebeis a “political and cultural phenomenon that views Africa, Africans and African descendants abroad as a single entity.”

“It aims to regenerate and unite Africa and promote a sense of unity among the people of the African world,” Esedebe wrote. “It glorifies the African past and inspires pride in African values.”

Bethune embodied the ideals of Pan-Africanism throughout her life.

A worldwide view

This is clear from a speech she gave as president of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs in 1926 on the organization's annual meeting. In this speech, she challenged black women to unite with people of African descent world wide.

Specifically, she stated:

We must make this national association of coloured women not only a national influence, but a major link between peoples of color world wide._

African identity

Bethune's story begins in Mayesville, South Carolinawhere she was born to formerly enslaved parents.

Her family taught her that her roots were in Africa. All her life she talked about how her mother was descended from one royal matriarchy.

She lived in South Carolina until she attended Scotia Seminary – now often called Barber-Scotia College – and graduated in 1893. She then attended the Moody Bible Institute and graduated in 1895. your education she prepared to change into a missionary.

Mary McLeod Bethune rose to change into one of the influential black women of the twentieth century. In 1904 she founded a small girls' school in Daytona Beach, Florida. This school became later Bethune Cookman University.

She worked with them while in Washington, D.C., where she moved to work for the Roosevelt administration and the National Council of Negro Women Carter G. Woodsonthe founding father of the so-called Black History Month, during her time as president of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.

In 1935 Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Womenan “organization of organizations” to unite African American women’s organizations under one large umbrella.

The Mary McLeod Bethune Council House-National Historic Site was the organization's first headquarters. It was bought by the National Park Service in 1994.

The “First Lady of Negro America”

As I dug into the archives, I learned of Bethune's role as the primary African-American woman to move a federal agency, which she did Director of the Department of Negro Affairs with the state youth administration. I learned the way to secure herself Jobs and important education funding for African Americans in the course of the Great Depression.

She also worked closely with Eleanor Roosevelt to fight for it Inclusion of African American Women During World War II.

It quickly became clear why Ebony Magazine declared her “First Lady of Negro America” in 1949.

Haiti's highest honor

When she traveled to Haiti in 1949 – where she was awarded it Haitian Medal of Honor and MeritHaiti's highest honor on the time – she visited orphanages, churches and historical sites to know the needs of the people and the richness of the culture.

Bethune often proudly wore her Haitian medal. She wrote about her travels in The Chicago Defender, a national black newspaper.

She called for support for Haitian women's suffrage. She also called on members of the National Council of Negro Women to achieve this help construct orphanages within the country and actively collected money for it.

As I researched further into the archives, I discovered that Bethune had worked for much of her life to create solidarity between people of African descent. She traveled to places—including Cuba in 1930, Bermuda in 1931, Canada in 1945 and 1954, and the Bahamas in 1953—and forged relationships throughout the African diaspora.

As a daughter of Africa

In her writings, Bethune referred to Africa as her home. She saw herself as a daughter of the continent. Be it on the founding of the United Nations in 1945, where it called for an end colonizationor within the White House, where she campaigned for the abolition of poll taxes for African Americans, the goal of freedom was at all times on the forefront of her mind.

In 1952 she received the Star of Africa during their trip to Liberia. Created in 1920, the star was certainly one of Liberia's highest honors and was given to individuals who had made outstanding contributions to the country or Africa as a complete. It was an important honor and one she didn’t take flippantly. During the trip, she met women's groups and visited local schools. She also attended the inauguration ceremony of President William VS Tubman.

The trip was particularly meaningful for Bethune, especially since she had attempted to travel to Africa as a missionary on the age of 20 and was told by the missionary society that she couldn’t achieve this because she was black.

At the age of 76, her dream finally got here true. In her review of the trip, she said specified: “I was thrilled to set foot on this African soil that I had dreamed of for so long – of returning to my homeland.”

Bethune's understanding of her personal connection to the continent and its people inspired her to challenge others to do the identical. Although she was recognized because the “First Lady of Negro America,” perhaps it’s time to also recognize her because the “First Lady of the African Diaspora.”