By Frederick Philander
WINDHOEK
A workshop to assist Namibian musicians to promote their works internationally will be staged next Tuesday at the Warehouse Theatre, it was announced in a press statement.
German-born Christoph Borkowsky from Berlin is to present the event that will cover marketing, right partner choices, global strategies and the arrival of the digital age.
According to the press release Borkowsky was born in 1948, is an action anthropologist (MA – FU Berlin 1974) and is head of the Piranha shoal – swimming among the sharks of the music industry since 1987.
He grew up under vineyards, castles and the carnival spell in the Rhine valley to arrive in good timing in Berlin in 967 to study the world, religion and revolt at the Free University. With an in situ research about the anti-colonial resistance of the Nama in Namibia he finished his university years. His first long distance journey to pre-independence Angola in 1973 was followed by more travels in Africa, the Orient and Latin America.
After producing road festivals like S.O.S. Racism and Beat Apartheid on behalf of the German trade union youth he became in 1987 one of the founders of the ‘Piranha Kultur’ platform to research and market the diversity of music from the global South.
From 1988 – 2001 he directed Berlin’s big summer festival ‘HeimatKl