Shoga Films

Shoga Films Shoga Films is the production company of Robert Philipson. Vimeo Link: http://vimeo.com/user6835725

Shoga is a Swahili word with a special meaning for g**s and women along the East African Coast. Shoga Films specializes in gay and le***an audio visual media.

Today is Bi Visibility Day.In 1928 the Mother of the Blues sold a record that dared anyone to prove it on her. Ma Rainey...
09/23/2026

Today is Bi Visibility Day.

In 1928 the Mother of the Blues sold a record that dared anyone to prove it on her. Ma Rainey married a man, sang about wanting women, and never picked a word for herself. The blues had room for both.

Save this one. The ad on slide 4 ran in the Chicago Defender on September 22, 1928.

09/21/2026

"She would compare them to animals."

Karen Blixen published Out of Africa in 1937, and the prose is
gorgeous. That's the problem.

Near the end of the book she describes an old Kikuyu woman standing
in her path — staring, she writes, in the exact manner of a giraffe.
Then weeping like a cow making water on a plain.

Joseph Mbele taught literature for decades and was born in colonial
Tanganyika. He won't condemn Blixen outright. He told us the book
handed back his own childhood: the coffee farms, the ripe berries,
the women carrying firewood on the road. Then he named what else
is in it.

Dr. Robert Philipson reads the passage. Joseph answers it.

Listen to the full conversation on Shoga Speaks, wherever you get
your podcasts.



09/18/2026

Aunt Sue never got her stories out of any book. The book she lives in just turned a hundred.

Langston Hughes published "Aunt Sue's Stories" in The Crisis in July 1921, at twenty. Five years later Knopf put it in The Weary Blues — January 1926, his first book, a hundred years this year.

Four stanzas. A woman on a summer porch tells a brown-faced child what happened to Black people in this country, and the child works out that she isn't reciting. She's remembering.

We set the whole poem to photographs from the Library of Congress. Farm Security Administration pictures of Southern porches and cotton rows, 1936 to 1942. And five portraits made in Texas in 1937 by the Federal Writers' Project, of people who had been born into slavery.

Nobody on screen is named. Nothing is captioned as more than where it was taken and when. They carry the poem; they don't illustrate it.

Sound on.

Claude McKay was born September 15 in Sunny Ville, Clarendon, Jamaica. Nobody can agree which year. The world prints 188...
09/15/2026

Claude McKay was born September 15 in Sunny Ville, Clarendon, Jamaica. Nobody can agree which year. The world prints 1889. His biographer argues 1890 — the family aged him up on paper so he'd be old enough to assist teaching at his brother's school. He found out in 1920, from his sister.

In 1912 the Institute of Jamaica gave him the Silver Musgrave Medal, the first person of African descent to win it. The stipend paid his passage to America. He never came back.

That same year he published Constab Ballads, poems in Jamaican Patois. One of them is a love poem to a fellow constable: "One in passion, one in will, bound / By a boundless love an' wide." Two scholarly editions read it as ho******ic.

In July 1919, mid–Red Summer, he wrote "If We Must Die" while working as a dining-car waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad.

You've probably read that Churchill recited it to Parliament. He didn't. Researchers searched Hansard and the Churchill Archives and found nothing. It's a myth.

He died in Chicago in 1948 and is buried in Queens.

Then the books kept coming — nine of them, across seventy-two years. The last in 2020. Two exist in English only because someone translated them back out of Russian.

The photographer who shot him for Bain News Service wrote his name on the negative as "Claude McRay." That strip is the last slide.

Happy birthday, whichever one it is.

Alain Locke was born 141 years ago today, September 13, 1885, in Philadelphia. He was buried sixty years after he died.I...
09/13/2026

Alain Locke was born 141 years ago today, September 13, 1885, in Philadelphia. He was buried sixty years after he died.

In 1907 he became the first African American Rhodes Scholar. Several Oxford colleges refused him because he was Black. Hertford admitted him, and he left without a degree. The Rhodes did not select another African American until John Edgar Wideman in 1963 — fifty-six years.

In March 1925 he guest-edited the Survey Graphic issue "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro." By December it was a book, The New Negro, and a scattered set of writers had been assembled into a movement. Four months after the magazine issue, Howard University's board voted him out: "Voted: That, Alain LeRoy Locke, Professor of Philosophy, be not reemployed for the school year 1925-26." He had been pressing the board on pay equity between Black and white faculty. He was back within three years.

He was gay, and his circle knew. Jeffrey Stewart calls it the open closet — Locke never pretended otherwise and never discussed it publicly. He kept changing the name on his own doorbell, and guests got in if they knew which name it was that night. Then he left 116 linear feet of his papers to Howard University, letters included. It took Leonard Harris's 2001 essay accusing scholars of burying what Locke himself had preserved, and Stewart's 2018 biography, before anyone read them properly.

He died in 1954. His ashes passed to his executor, then to a tin in a paper bag at Howard, and sat unburied for sixty years. In 2014 Black Rhodes Scholars found them, bought a plot, and laid him in Congressional Cemetery on what would have been his 129th birthday.

"The Old Negro had long become more of a myth than a man." He wrote that in 1925, about someone else.

Happy birthday, Dr. Locke.

Rosh Hashanah 5787 begins at sundown tonight, and with it Unetaneh Tokef — the prayer that asks who shall live and who s...
09/11/2026

Rosh Hashanah 5787 begins at sundown tonight, and with it Unetaneh Tokef — the prayer that asks who shall live and who shall die, and for those who die, how.

Who by water. Who by fire. Who by sword. Who by plague.

The year now ending answered it in words the liturgy does not contain.

Between the October 10, 2025 ceasefire and September 2, 2026, 1,334 Palestinians were killed in Gaza. In the West Bank, 82 were killed by Israeli forces or settlers since the start of this year, nineteen of them children. Twenty-three of those eighty-two died in the context of settler attacks — against seventeen in all of 2025. By June, OCHA was recording settler attacks that caused casualties or property damage at an average of six a day, higher, it says, than in any year on record.

A prayer asks who shall live. A policy answers.

Shanah tovah.

Sources: UN OCHA occupied Palestinian territory Humanitarian Situation Report, September 4, 2026 (Gaza figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health; West Bank figures as of August 31, 2026); OCHA Humanitarian Situation Report, July 23, 2026, for the 2025 comparison; OCHA statement on settler violence, June 11, 2026. Manuscript: Unetaneh Tokef in a maḥzor for the whole year, Italian rite, Mantua, 1481 — MS. Canonici Or. 27, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Photograph: Jabalia camp, Gaza — Hussein Jaber for UNRWA, CC BY 4.0.

09/09/2026

2 a.m. A record is playing. Two people at the bar are talking over it.

Langston Hughes put both on the page at once in "The Cat and the Saxophone." The capital letters are the song. The small letters are the conversation. Neither one waits for the other to finish.

The song is real. "Everybody Loves My Baby (But My Baby Don't Love Nobody But Me)" — words by Jack Palmer, music by Spencer Williams, 1924. Clarence Williams' Blue Five cut it that November with Louis Armstrong on cornet and Eva Taylor singing. Hughes wrote down what a record sounds like in a room where nobody is listening to it quietly.

From The Weary Blues, Knopf, 1926. His first book. We built the look after the flat-color poster style of its jacket.

Type and animation by Shoga Films. Images from the William P. Gottlieb Collection at the Library of Congress, public domain.

Sound on.

#1924 #1926

They picked a president who had never worked a train.On August 25, 1925, in the Elks Hall in Harlem, the Brotherhood of ...
09/07/2026

They picked a president who had never worked a train.

On August 25, 1925, in the Elks Hall in Harlem, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was founded. The men who started it were porters. W. H. Des Verney called the meeting at his apartment; Roy Lancaster came, already fired; Ashley Totten came. And then they sent for someone who had never drawn a Pullman paycheck in his life.

A. Philip Randolph edited The Messenger. That was the point. Randolph documented the reason himself in February 1926: he was chosen "because of the fact he was not a porter and hence had nothing to fear from the Pullman Company." Every porter who tried to organize got fired. So the porters found the one man Pullman could not fire.

Twelve years. Pullman signed on August 25, 1937 — the union's anniversary, to the day. A 240-hour month. A hearing before a porter could be dismissed. The union had been down to 658 members four years earlier.

That is usually where the story ends. It shouldn't. The union was the machine. In 1941 Randolph threatened a march of a hundred thousand; Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 six days before the date. Randolph held the march anyway, twenty-two years later.

Fifteen days out, Strom Thurmond stood up on the Senate floor and read Bayard Rustin's 1953 arrest record into the Congressional Record — the draft, the Young Communist League, a conviction the record calls s*x perversion.

Randolph had already answered. In July, when reporters asked whether Rustin would resign, he said: "No. Rustin is Mr. March-on-Washington himself." Thurmond read that clipping into the record too. The defense is sitting inside the attack.

Rustin ran the march.

Sources: A. Philip Randolph, The Messenger, February 1926 and August 1926 · Daily Worker, September 13, 1926 · Mediation Agreement No. A-181, August 25, 1937, Newberry Library · Executive Order 8802, National Archives · 109 Cong. Rec. 14836–14840 (August 13, 1963) · National Park Service, Pullman National Historical Park. Images: Library of Congress, National Archives, Harvard College Library.

One hundred years ago this January, Knopf published a first book of poems by a twenty-four-year-old named Langston Hughe...
09/04/2026

One hundred years ago this January, Knopf published a first book of poems by a twenty-four-year-old named Langston Hughes.

The winter before, he had been busing tables at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington. One night the poet Vachel Lindsay came in for dinner. Hughes left three poems beside his plate — "Jazzonia," "Negro Dancers," and "The Weary Blues" — and walked off without saying anything to him. Lindsay read them aloud to his audience that evening. The next morning the papers announced that a Negro busboy poet had been discovered.

Hughes had signed with Knopf that fall. The book was already sold.

What he did in the title poem was put a blues song inside it and print the thing as literature — the vernacular, the repetition, the shape of a lyric you'd hear on Lenox Avenue. Not everyone wanted it there. Countee Cullen, reviewing the book in Opportunity that February, called Hughes "a remarkable poet of the colorful," then spent the rest of the review arguing the jazz poems were a detour.

Miguel Covarrubias drew the jacket: a black figure at a piano under a gas lamp, red and gold, no apology in it. It's the source of every color in this post.

The Weary Blues, Alfred A. Knopf, 1926. Still in print.

Langston Hughes wrote to her every day because she required it. She chose his books, his music, the plays he saw. He cal...
09/02/2026

Langston Hughes wrote to her every day because she required it. She chose his books, his music, the plays he saw. He called her Godmother. So did Zora Neale Hurston.

Charlotte Osgood Mason was a widow with a fortune and a theory: that Black artists carried some lost "primitive" spirit, and that with her money and her direction they could bring it back. She bought Hurston a car and recording equipment for her folklore trips through the South. The contract said Mason owned everything Hurston brought home.

When Hughes started pulling away after three years, she cut him off. Money and affection at once. He called it the greatest pain of his life. She spent her last thirteen years on the top floor of a hospital wing and died there alone.

That's the spine of September's issue: what the money buys, and what it costs the person taking it.

Also inside —

Dutch Schultz pulling a revolver on Andy Razaf to get "Black and Blue" written, and Louis Armstrong singing the joke back out of it.

Robert Philipson on the year he paid a man $26 a month to cook his meals in the Central African Republic, journal entries included. He does not come out of it well. That's the point.

Joseph Mbele, who grew up in the country Out of Africa is set in, on what the film leaves out.

Alamin Mazrui, who wrote a play and a book of poems while detained by the Kenyan government.

And September 19, 1964: ten people outside the Army induction center at 39 Whitehall Street with hand-lettered signs. Four gay men, six straight friends. No reporter came. Five years before Stonewall.

Free, in your inbox. Link in bio.

Shoga Films is a nonprofit. If the work matters to you, donations are tax-deductible.

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