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Thread: Shaolin's African Disciples

  1. #31
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    The African Who Wanted to Fly

    Festival has new name, broader mission


    Tuscaloosa Africana Film Festival’s main feature will be the movie “The African Who Wanted to Fly,” about Luc Bendza, who as a boy in Central Africa saw his first kung-fu movie and came to believe Chinese people could fly. [Courtesy photo]

    By Mark Hughes Cobb / Tusk Editor
    Posted Feb 1, 2018 at 11:00 AM
    Updated Feb 1, 2018 at 11:13 PM

    For its sixth year, Saturday’s slate of movies has been re-named the Tuscaloosa Africana Film Festival — formerly African Film Festival — to reflect its inclusion of works from the African diaspora, in addition to those works created on the continent.

    For 2018, it comes at the culmination of the Tuscaloosa Heritage Festival, a weekend of cultural activities hosted by the West Alabama Multicultural Alliance.

    Here’s some of the weekend’s rundown:

    • Thursday at 7 p.m., filmmaker Tyrik Washington will lead a workshop titled “Arts in Activism,” Room 159 in Russell Hall on the University of Alabama campus. The Emmy-award-winner will discuss film’s role in social change, and present the film “Under the Heavens,” which he wrote, directed, composed the score for, and co-starred in.

    • At 7 p.m. Friday, “A Showcase of Film, Dance & Music” will be held at the Tuscaloosa Career and Technology Academy, 2800 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. There’ll be performances by Stillman College and University of Alabama choirs and dancers, Thomas Davis Jr., Blessed By Four, Dancers 4 Life and Dancing Stars Dance Studio, with a Step-Tease by local students. Admission is $5.

    • For more on today’s and Friday’s events, see www.westalabamamulticult.com.

    • Saturday’s Sixth Tuscaloosa Africana Film Festival will be held at the Bama Theatre, with children’s dance and movie activities beginning at 3 p.m. The film is “Liyana,” part documentary, part animated quest tale, from 2016, directed by Amanda and Aaron Kopp, with animation by Sofela Coker. It’s set in Swaziland, stemming from the imaginations of five orphaned children: A girl takes on the dangerous task of rescuing her younger twin brothers.

    • Evening films include short films and one feature, beginning at 6:30 p.m. and running until 10:30.

    • Among the shorts will be Tuscaloosan Santo Moss’s “Moving Forward,” and “90 Days,” billed as a story of “love, integrity and compassion,” as a couple examines a life-altering decision made after 90 days dating. It’s written by Nathan Hale Williams, and directed by Williams and Jennia Fredrique Aponte. Stars include Teyonah Parris and Nic Few. The opening short will be the winner of the Tuscaloosa Career and Technology Academy’s film competition, to be announced.

    • The evening’s feature film will be 2016′s “The African Who Wanted to Fly,” about Luc Bendza, who as a 9-year-old boy in Gabon, Central Africa, saw his first kung-fu movie, and came to believe Chinese people could fly. Bendz became obsessed with joining them, and learning their secrets. He became the first African to enter the Shaolin Monastery, at age 14, and has lived and studied there for more than 30 years, mastering wushu and acting in martial arts movies.

    • The film, part documentary and part biography, was directed and written by Samantha Biffot, who though born in Paris, grew up in Asia and Africa, and after studying cinema in Paris, retured to Gabon in 2010 to develop TV series, documentaries and other movies.

    • The Tuscaloosa Africana Film Festival is being presented by the Edward A. Ulzen Memorial Foundation and Afram South Inc., nonprofit organizations supporting education and public health initiatives in Ghana, West Africa and West Alabama respectively. Co-sponsors include the College of Community Health Sciences at UA and Tuscaloosa Sister Cities International. Tuscaloosa has a sister-cities relationship with the adjacent pairing of Sunyani and Techiman in Ghana.

    • Tickets for the Tuscaloosa Africana Film Festival are $15 general, $10 for seniors, and $8 for students. They’re available at www.brownpapertickets.com/event/3223711, or at the Bama box office on Saturday only.

    • For more, email eaumfoundation@gmail.com, or call Bill Foster at 334-322-0824, or Thad Ulzen at 205-552-6078.

    Luc Bendza needs his own thread now, independent of Shaolin's African Disciples
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
    Author of Shaolin Trips
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  2. #32
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    2018 Shaolin Martial Arts General Assembly

    I copied the two posts above from the Beginnings of Shaolin Boxing - history thread to this Shaolin Temple World Martial Arts Assembly because it sits more appropriately here. Also copying this to our Shaolin's African Disciples because I love those cross-links. I suspect the flag raising ceremony might have been connected to this Assembly too, but I'm not going to add that because it might have just been about National Day.

    African Nations Pull Up in Force to Shaolin Kung Fu General Assembly
    by Adan Kohnhorst | Aug 30, 2018



    The Shaolin Temple just closed out its 2018 Shaolin Martial Arts General Assembly, and well ****, African nations came through.

    Twenty-two trainees from seven African countries — Cameroon, Chad, Niger, Burundi, Mali, Djibouti, and the Central African Republic — spent three months at the temple as participants in the Ministry of Culture’s sixth African student exchange program. The class studied empty-handed Shaolin kung fu, plus sword and staff techniques. At the end of the training period students performed what they’d learned for the temple’s abbot, and received certificates of completion.



    Full disclosure, this writer happened to be at the temple while the African exchange unit was there training, and can confirm, they were doing some serious stuff. Tourists from across China watched with confusion and pleasant surprise .

    “We came empty-handed but finished full of enthusiasm,” one participant said. “We’re really excited to be ambassadors of Chinese culture, and to share what we learned at the temple with people back home.”

    The abbot Shi Yongxin, international media’s notorious “CEO monk”, had a more put-together statement to make:

    The Shaolin Temple is committed to supporting China-Africa ties, cultivating the friendship between Chinese and African people, and pushing forward on cultural exchange and cooperation between China and Africa.
    Outside of the African class, other foreigners and kung fu fans made the trip out for the occasion. People’s Daily was quick to seize a photo op on Twitter:


    View image on Twitter

    People's Daily,China

    @PDChina
    Yoga lovers practice yoga and Shaolin students perform martial arts along a cliff walkway on Songshan Mountain during the 2018 Shaolin Martial Arts General Assembly in Dengfeng city, Central China's #Henan province, on August 25

    5:07 AM - Aug 27, 2018
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    As time marches on, and the world around us changes, we can all take comfort knowing that foreigners will continue to flock to the Shaolin Temple with shocking consistency.
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
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  3. #33
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    Soft Power in Africa

    Feature: When a street kid from Yaounde discovers Kungfu
    Source: Xinhua| 2020-01-05 17:48:56|Editor: zh
    By Qiao Benxiao

    YAOUNDE, Jan. 5 (Xinhua) -- At the top of Nkol-Nyada hill, the Yaounde Conference Center was built in the 1980s as a China-aid project, and remains to this day one of the landmark buildings in Cameroon. The story of Fabrice Mba, a Shaolin disciple, started there.

    Little Mba grew up on the street. He had no dad, his mom could not take care of every child because there are so many. In 1987, at the age of eight, he left his home in the southern town of Sangmelima with his elder sister to settle in the capital. They lived not far from the Yaounde Conference Center.

    Every morning, little Mba saw a Chinese man making movements on the square of the Conference Center. He and his friends, all barefoot and T-shirts torn, looked at the foreigner and imitated him. "It was very beautiful," recalled Mba.

    One day, the Chinese called them and asked them to take a posture, with knees slightly bent as if holding a tree in the arms. "We stood facing the wall. It hurted in feet, shoulders and arms so much that my friends fled, and I was left alone," said Mba.

    This posture which is called "zhan zhuang" is in fact a basic training method of the Chinese martial arts. The man who "mistreated" little Mba was a Chinese technician assigned to Cameroon to maintain the Conference Center, and the "very beautiful" movements that the Chinese made was obviously Kungfu.

    Since then, little Mba came every morning to learn Kungfu. "He was very thin, but at the same time very strong," remembered Mba of his teacher, without being able to say his name is Zhang or Jiang.

    A year later, little Mba returned to Sangmelima. His big brother was a projectionist, little Mba often helped him sweep the movie theater. For the first time, he saw the Shaolin monks on the screen. "It spoke to me very loudly."

    After studies, Mba returned to Yaounde to make a living. Life has hurt him more than the posture of zhan zhuang. Each job did not last long, and he did not know what to do to eat. His friend, who worked as a guardian of a bakery, sometimes kept breadcrumbs for him. "I had it on my hands, face and in my nostrils."

    "I don't drink, I don't smoke, Kungfu is all I have," said Mba, who continued to practice martial arts by learning from videos. To find inner peace, he trained in the morning in front of Conference Center, as his Chinese teacher once did.

    In 2011, a professor from the Confucius Institute encountered Mba while he was playing Kungfu. After short exchanges, Mba was invited to visit this establishment for teaching the Chinese language and culture. In a very short time, he made close friends with Chinese teachers who believed in him a lot. "I finally had the feeling of becoming me."

    Four years later, after a selection of profiles by the Confucius Institute, Mba obtained a scholarship to be trained in China in martial arts and traditional Chinese medicine at the Shaolin temple.

    "It was just like what I saw in the movies," said Mba, only this time he was on the other side of the screen. "The great masters of Shaolin really edified and enlightened me."

    Between 2015 and 2019, Mba went to Shaolin temple three times for training. Back to Yaounde, he became a physiotherapist, and gradually, he has constant income. When he is not busy with his patients, he teaches for free Kungfu fundamentals at the Confucius Institute and in several schools in Yaounde.

    For many Africans, Kungfu is presented only as a combat system, however, "by embracing the Chinese martial arts, I discovered their virtue," he said.

    "What Kungfu basically teaches is the production of a man of morality. When a man is rich in moral values, it is easier for him to be surrounded by people who love him and to have advancements in life," said Mba.

    He managed to convey this message to young Kungfu enthusiasts. "He teaches us to be a man of integrity, hardworking and respectful. If you have a problem with your friend, you have to keep cool and take a step back," said Emmanuel Ze, a student of Mba.

    In his collection of poems published in 2017 entitled "Breach in a stone wall", Mba saw his difficult years as a wall of despair. If he was finally able to break a breach, it is due to China.

    "I come with a story, which is more and more similar to that of a million Africans, to whom China opens its doors, to whom China changes (their) destiny," he wrote in this autobiographical anthology.

    Growing up on the street, Mba knows that many young Africans need help to break a hole in the wall of their lives. He is currently preparing a program to offer short-term training in physiotherapy and others to disadvantaged young people free of charge so that they can find work.

    "Be your own boss" is the slogan of his program named "Lotus and Water Lily", because "these are the only flowers that are able to grow in a polluted environment, and succeed in producing white flowers," he explained.

    "I was a street kid, destined to be a bandit or a robber, but I discovered Kungfu which teaches me to become a man of moral excellence even if I had no money", he said.

    "All these children who are in difficulty like once I was, who are destined for a bad life, can become lotuses and water lilies if they are given the opportunities."
    THREADS
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    Gene Ching
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  4. #34
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    Slightly OT

    Shaolin Temple in Zambia hosts first-ever African Kung Fu games
    Xinhua, June 27, 2023


    A participant demonstrates Kung Fu during the 2023 African Shaolin Kungfu Games held at the Shaolin Cultural center in Lusaka, Zambia, June 25, 2023. The Shaolin Temple in Zambia has organized the first-ever African Shaolin Kung Fu Games and other activities aimed at promoting the sport on the African continent and promoting cultural exchanges. The six-day event, which started on June 21 and ends on June 26 at the Shaolin Cultural Center in Zambia, has attracted over 150 contestants from 23 African countries and regions. (Xinhua/Yang Zhen)

    The Shaolin Temple in Zambia has organized the first-ever African Shaolin Kung Fu Games and other activities aimed at promoting the sport on the African continent and promoting cultural exchanges.

    The six-day event, which started on June 21 and ends on June 26 at the Shaolin Cultural Center in Zambia, has attracted over 150 contestants from 23 African countries and regions, while Abbot of the Shaolin Temple in China, Grand Monk Shi Yongxin, has come with a monk group to carry out cultural exchange activities.

    The activities began with the first-ever Shaolin Kung Fu ranking system and test training class and was followed by lectures on the Shaolin phenomenon, as well as a grading awarding ceremony.

    This was followed by Shaolin Kung Fu competition in which competitors from African countries showcased their skills.

    Konate Yaya, a 30-year-old from Cote d'Ivoire, commended the organizers, saying the event will go a long way in promoting Kung Fu in Africa.

    "This tournament is very good because it is the first one and also the temple is the first one in Africa. We are honored that there is a country in Africa with a temple," said Yaya, who started Kung Fu training seven years ago.

    Yaya, who started Kung Fu in order to keep fit, added that he has learned that Kung Fu is not just about fighting, but also getting lessons on life, family, how to treat other people and how to be self-disciplined.

    Stanley Banda, a 20-year-old from Zambia, said he was inspired to start Kung Fu after watching Chinese movies, and said participating in the games will build his confidence and help the sport gain popularity in other parts of Africa.

    He further said the sport has helped him in building his mental capacity, fitness and self-confidence.

    Gahungu Serges from Burundi said he was happy to have been given an opportunity to participate in the games, saying he learned a lot from senior competitors.

    The 31-year-old, who got the inspiration to learn Kung Fu from a young age after watching Chinese movies, expressed happiness that his dream of stepping into a Shaolin Temple has become a reality.

    Lacmagou Fregis Arnaud from Cameroon encouraged people from different parts of Africa to start learning Kung Fu, and commended the organizers of the event, as it allowed people to see at close range the Kung Fu skills they previously just watched on television.


    A participant demonstrates Kung Fu during the 2023 African Shaolin Kungfu Games held at the Shaolin Cultural center in Lusaka, Zambia, June 25, 2023. The Shaolin Temple in Zambia has organized the first-ever African Shaolin Kung Fu Games and other activities aimed at promoting the sport on the African continent and promoting cultural exchanges. The six-day event, which started on June 21 and ends on June 26 at the Shaolin Cultural Center in Zambia, has attracted over 150 contestants from 23 African countries and regions. (Xinhua/Peng Lijun)
    Not to let the cat out of the bag, but there's some talk of staging a USA Shaolin Games. I was in a zoom meeting yesterday about this.
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
    Author of Shaolin Trips
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