Chike Nwoffiah – Silicon Valley One World

African-American Entrepreneurs Drive Black Global Unity

7Nov

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Culture, Demographics

African-American Entrepreneurs Drive Black Global Unity

By Sharon Simonson MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — When you set out to change the world—or just to start a new business—it helps to have “some audacity about you,” Fiifi Deku advises. It’s true, agreed Nneka Uzoh and Uzo Amaka. “You have to have passion,” Uzoh explains, “because you are going to hear, ‘No,’ more times.” “One thing I say to myself often: it’s another human being who told me no. Unless it is impossible, I think that I can do it,” Amaka counsels. The trio, entrepreneurs with one foot in the United States and the other in Africa, dispense their hard-earned wisdom at the first annual Innovate Africa Forum. The event at the Community School of Music and Arts in Mountain View is a new addition to the six-year-old Silicon Valley African Film Festival, founded by the day's ...

African Filmmakers, Silicon Valley Bedazzle One Another

By Sharon Simonson MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Late afternoon autumn squalls lift the long red carpet in front of Mountain View’s Community School of Music and Arts, creating fun havoc in the opening moments of the Silicon Valley African Film Festival. Organizers rush to find heavy — but aesthetically pleasing! — objects to weight the sides. The rug rises again before they succeed. Everyone laughs and scrambles to pull it back into place. Really, it seems nothing can suppress the joy that the gathering exudes, the uplift from another perfect Northern California evening—soft light, warm sun, cool air—and the young African and African-diaspora filmmakers arriving from points near (Oakland) and far (Egypt, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Rwanda). Bonginhlanhla Ncube has traveled from Sout...

African Filmmakers in Silicon Valley Seek to Reframe the Continent

By Sharon Simonson A history of European colonization unites Africa, India and Mexico, continents and countries that in turn are sending residents to Silicon Valley and the United States. These diaspora communities throughout the Bay Area are expressing their complex intellectual and cultural heritages — including their American experiences — in theater, dance, music, literature and film. Growing up in Nigeria, a nation of nearly two hundred million people and a former British colony, performance was his passion from an early age, said filmmaker Chike Nwoffiah. From age 4 on, "I was in a theater and on a stage." In high school, he attended a Nigerian boarding school with a curriculum based on the traditional British model, studying Shakespeare, literature and the arts. "I love...