Mendi & Keith Obadike

Mendi Obadike and Keith Obadike are a married Igbo Nigerian American couple who create music and art. They were both born in 1973. Their music, live art and conceptual Internet artworks have been exhibited internationally. Mendi is a poet and Keith is a composer and sound designer.

Biography

Mendi

Mendi Lewis Obadike was born in Palo Alto, California while her parents were completing graduate work at Stanford. Mendi grew up writing poems, singing in bands and acting in theater as a child. Early on she experimented making songs with cassette overdubs of her Casio keyboard and computer graphics on a Commodore computer. Her mother's research in linguistics and father's stint as the founding director of Black Studies at the University of California at Berkeley sparked her interest in language and culture. Later Mendi studied Latin, became fluent in Spanish and lived and studied in Venezuela and later the Dominican Republic.

Mendi wrote her first play and edited Focus literary journal while living in Atlanta and studying at Spelman College. She graduated with honors in English and was awarded a fellowship to pursue a Ph.D. in Literature and Sound Theory at Duke University and joined the Cave Canem Poetry Collective.

Mendi

Mendi, Papua New Guinea, is the provincial capital of the Southern Highlands Province.

Climate

Köppen-Geiger climate classification system classifies its climate as subtropical highland (Cfb). Temperatures and rainfall are relatively the same round the year.

References

Mendi (disambiguation)

Mendi is the capital of the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea.

Mendi may also refer to:

Mende people

The Mende people are one of the two largest ethnic groups in Sierra Leone; their neighbours, the Temne people, have roughly the same population. The Mende and Temne both account for slightly more than 30% of the total population . The Mende are predominantly found in the Southern Province and the Eastern Province, while the Temne are found primarily in the Northern Province and the Western Area, including the capital city of Freetown. Some of the major cities with significant Mende populations include Bo, Kenema, Kailahun and Moyamba.

The Mende belong to a larger group of Mande peoples who live throughout West Africa. The Mende are mostly farmers and hunters. During the civil war the Civil Defense Force (CDF), a militia group founded by late Dr. Alpha Lavalie, a Mende himself to fight the rebels along government troops. The forces included five groups drawn from all major ethnic groups in the country: Tamaboros, Hunters, Donso, Kapras and the Kamajors.

Kamajor is a mende meaning for hunter; they were not only the dominant warring factions but the most fearful among the CDF militias headed by late Deputy Minister of Defense, Chief Hinga Norman. To date, the Kamajors are honored among the elite groups of men and women who fought to restore democracy in modern Sierra Leone.