Hello Lowe, I want to introduce myself. My name is sandy kiefer and I went to school with andrew jones in boston, we have the exact same birthday so we always felt some kind of bond, Im a cellist. we played a lot of jobs together. anyway, I was looking to contact him becasue I want to move to a new country by this time next year. I figured he could give me some leads. I was shocked to hear of his death. Thank you for writing about it, I would if possible like to know a few more details, My God, he did so much had so much potential, came up from nowwhere due to the LBJ hand out to blacks just at that time. I mean going to prep school and then to concervatory..... from his littleness in Virginia and then what a life what a life. If you could be in touch with me I would greatly appreciate it, thank you, sandy kiefer

so sorry... the little i know of Andrew says like all others, i can't try and understand. But I know the feeling of when something like this comes close to home. A few years ago, my secretary at Mokgosi (the setswana language newspaper which folded) was a victim of 'passion killing' - a weired one. Her 70+ year old father shot her mum (just turned 60), Ponki (she was 40) and then turned it on himself. Since then, passion killing story is not just--. stay blessed

Dearest Friends- what a very difficult time for everyone... may the Almighty grant you the strength to help the children who have witnessed this trauma and will for a very long time endure this pain. Our thoughts and prayers go out to all family and friends. This brings into sharp focus the realities of the challenges we face in the gender realm- when good people succumb... how do we report... and more importantly what about the children? As The Children and Broadcasting Foundation for Africa (CBFA) our focus is on children and media and we hope that the children will be protected from media and supported through this very difficult time. Kubeshni - our thoughts and prayers are with you and your family- we pray that you will find inner peace and strength and know always that there are many people who love and respect you and look forward to your speedy recovery! God Bless!

Like Colleen, I was shocked to hear of Andrew's death and Kubeshni's wounding. I took the picture that heads Colleen's article and I realise that I probably took the last picture's of Andrew ever alive. A sobering thought. Like a lot of others I've sought to understand what might have been going through his mind - impossible. I too have been reading Maya Angelou, bell hooks and others including our own Dr. Mamphele Ramphele. The all speak of black men, African and Afro-American, and their silent suffering - we men are not good at sharing - and the last time I spoke with Andrew he seemed very tense but smiling at the world. Is it so strange that we all seem to have gone to women feminist writers to mediate our emotional and (barely) rational efforts to understand this tragedy of such a talented and caring man undertaking such a rash and irrational deed

This comes as great shock and I am so far away from home- and feeling sad for the loss of life. My thoughts got to Kubeshni and her family. This article is informing of Andrew's life and more like an obituary and not on femicide. A loss indeed and the concern- for Kubeshni is also necessary as she was almost became a statistic.

Glenda you are right in many ways. We've become too categorised and I think Colleen's shock echoes this in her struggle to put this into the GL system when just coming out of her own surgery!I didn't realise that so much of what I went on to say in my post would be just cut out. I am too verbose and need to shorten my comments. I will do a post on AFI. As always CLMs piece is a start in the exploration of our agony about this tragedy and not the final word. She will no doubt post again! and we need the dialogue.

As a journalist who attended the just ended Gem Summit in Joburg, I was shocked by the sad news that Andrew has shot himself, out of sheetr domestic differences with his wife. Andrew was of help to me during the summit; I even borrowed a memory stick from him, which I returned later, after finishing uploading my photos. May Allah forgive him and give his family a heart; Amen!

Bay State Banner NOVEMBER 11, 2010 — VOL. 46, NO 14 Shocking and tragic end to activist's incredible life by Brian Wright O’Connor Andrew Philemon Jones didn’t just play the violin, he made it sing. Horsehair bow flying over the strings, resin rising like smoke, he’d walk around the room, coaxing notes and chords from the fragile shell that came at you in a wall of sound. Throughout the performance, his eyes would peer out over the lacquered wood, gauging the effect of his solo symphony as his digits ran up and down the fingerboard. A wry smile completed the picture of Andrew in his glory, provoking with music before setting down his beloved violin to provoke you with ideas. In all the years I knew Andrew, he was a gentle soul – angry at injustice towards humanity but possessing a great love towards humans. News of the manner of his death in South Africa came as a shock. In late October, after an argument with his estranged wife – the mother of their three young sons – Andrew left their office, returned with a handgun, and fired one bullet. The shot went through her shoulder. He pulled the trigger a second time. The gun jammed. Andrew killed himself after she fled from the room. He was 58 years old. Andrew had battled demons but demons could hardly explain or condone such a violent end. Friends and family who attended his funeral in Johannesburg, the city where Andrew had started a new life after leaving Boston in 1995, were similarly shocked. His wife, Kubeshni Govender Jones, was sufficiently recovered to attend the services, as were their boys – Cochise, Sicelo, and Ayanda. Many Bostonians may remember Andrew as the driving force behind the Greater Roxbury Incorporation Project (GRIP) – the movement for the secession of Boston’s African American neighborhoods into a new municipality. The 1986 referendum campaign attracted national attention and embarrassed the Flynn administration, which mounted an aggressive campaign to defeat a ballot question seen as a vote on the quality of City Hall’s governance of Boston’s black community. The idea for black self-governance was not a rebuke, however, to the South Boston-born mayor who made racial reconciliation a theme of his administration. It came to Andrew during a stint as an ABC News field producer covering a town hall meeting in Vermont, where the notion of self-determination, deeply stamped into the character and landscape of rural New England, struck in Andrew a resonant chord. It just seemed to Andrew like the right thing to do. “The right of a people to self-determination cannot be denied,” he often said. “It’s as American as apple pie.” Working with urban planner Curtis Jones, Andrew launched the campaign in 1985. By the following year, the pair had come up with the name “Mandela” for the municipality in honor of the imprisoned South African leader. Faced with the hope of self-rule on one hand and predicted financial disaster on the other, voters rejected the question by a 3-1 margin in the midst of national news coverage of the bid for black self-determination. Andrew was “crushed” by the loss but acknowledged that GRIP should have been hatched at kitchen tables in Roxbury rather than over linen table cloths at the Harvard Faculty Club. Joyce Ferriabough, who ran the opposition campaign, respected Andrew’s passion but questioned his judgment. After hearing Andrew grumbling about Flynn’s “plantation politics,” Joyce confronted him. “How do you want your ass-kicking?” she asked. “Over easy or well done?” Andrew just laughed. “You had to hand it to him,” said Joyce. “He had a sense of humor.” Andrew had first come to New England as a child of the segregated Creighton Court projects in Richmond, Va. – a violin prodigy plucked from the banks of the James River and sent by the program A Better Chance to the elite Phillips Exeter Academy, where he was a varsity football player and wrestler and played in the school orchestra. Andrew loved competition. He thrived on full contact – physical and political. In music, it probably explained his love of Beethoven, the sweeping contrasts and plunging moods of a score in constant struggle. After graduating from Exeter in 1970, he studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, but concert halls and recording studios couldn’t contain his searching mind and restless spirit. He got a master’s degree in journalism from Boston University in 1982 and set out to use the media to change the world. Or, as a more seasoned Andrew put it later, “I switched from one form of entertainment to another.” The inevitable clash occurred when ABC sent an executive to the network’s Prudential Tower suite to advise bureau employees, who had long complained about strange fibers in the office air, not to talk to the press about asbestos dust falling from the ceiling. Andrew laughed at the man in the suit and denounced the network in public. The end of Andrew’s network producing career gave rise to a successful run as an agent provocateur seeding intellectual sedition through documentary films. In segments for public television stations around the country, including many first aired on Boston’s WGBH-TV, Andrew told the story of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, captured the growing pains of Russia in the first gasps of post-Soviet life, and conducted pioneering interviews with the reclusive leaders of North Korea. He broadcast reports from Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan, Jordan, Malawi, Angola, Mozambique, Brazil, Mexico and Zimbabwe. He picked up a New England Regional Emmy and scores of film awards along the way. His segments aired on NBC, Black Entertainment Television, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the PBS Network and Russia’s TASS News Agency. When leaving Russia after his last trip to Moscow, security stopped him at the airport gate, suspecting that the black American with the Homey the Clown haircut had illicitly obtained the expensive, 19th century violin in his possession. A burly guard came to escort him to a private room for questioning. Andrew held up his hand. “Now wait a minute, fellas,” he said. “Just give me a chance.” Andrew removed the instrument from its battered case and tightened up the bow. Cascading notes from Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major spilled from the strings. Andrew smiled his smile. A crowd of spectators, drawn by the bravura performance, applauded. The apparatchiks shook his hand and let him board. In all his travels, Andrew did not just report history, he participated in it as an unabashed advocate, unafraid to show his political stripes. Hours before filming the first salvo of bombs falling on Baghdad during the first Gulf War in 1991, he was playing violin as a guest musician with Iraq’s national orchestra. In 1989, Andrew interviewed members of Manual Noriega’s government hours before Special Forces troops assaulted the Panama leader’s barracks headquarters. Leaving Panama City with his precious video, he came upon American soldiers engaged in a firefight and barely escaped strafing machine-gun bullets when they turned their weapons on his approaching vehicle. In 1995, Andrew left behind his U.S. producing career and a teaching post at Northeastern to move to South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s homeland and a society busy re-inventing itself. He was one of the first black men to earn a pilot’s license in the republic. On the media front, he turned his critical eye to the faltering promises of the ANC government, which brought political but not economic empowerment to the masses of poor blacks still living in townships. He produced programs for South African television and in the course of his work met Kubeshni Govender, a talented media professional who helped launch their own company, Black Earth Communications. After marrying and starting a family, Andrew and Kubeshni ran a successful media and production business, interrupted at times by Andrew’s focus on a crusade to protect “reproductive choices for men.” His “Fathers Bill of Rights” campaign grew out of his own bitter experience as a father forced to pay child support for a daughter born in the 1980s whom the mother and the courts would not allow him to see. Andrew’s decision to force the issue in a 2003 Massachusetts Probate Court appearance led to a 40-day sentence at the Suffolk County House of Corrections for refusing to pay arrearages. Typical of Andrew, jail-time proved to be more educational than punitive, opening up his eyes to the reality of the prison-industrial complex and the sometimes whimsical power of the law. In the dedication to his provocative 2009 book, “Diary of a Mad Black Voter,” Andrew offered special thanks to the judge and prosecutor who put him behind bars “and ignored everything I had to say about freedom of choice, justice, liberty, father’s rights, the illness of my sons, the safety of my family, and dignity. For had you not done so I would have been cheated out of the most special 40 days and nights of my life.” The book, a searing examination of the Barack Obama candidacy as either a redemptive opportunity for black America or a cruel illusion, was based in part on his perceptions of the ANC’s failure to bring real change to the struggling poor of South Africa. In writing the book, Andrew thought back to his cameo role playing boxing promoter Don King’s aide in the movie “Ali.” Zelig-like, Andrew was in Maputo, Mozambique, at the time of the 2001 filming and found himself in front of the cameras. “One night, Michael Mann the director decided to replace 30,000 black Mozambicans, who were supposed to be spectators watching the ‘Rumble in the Jungle,’ with cardboard cutouts flown in from Hollywood,” wrote Andrew. “My thought was ‘This is deep.’ All these people replaced just like that by cardboard figurines that actually looked better than the people did in the final movie. So that’s when it hit me that all of us regular people – black, white, yellow, whatever – walk a tightrope between what is real and what isn’t in our media-drive society. And at any time ‘mediarchical’ forces can replace any of us with cardboard cutouts.” Andrew struggled against forces most people took for granted. He questioned everything. Reflecting on Andrew’s life, Kubeshni recalled her husband’s belief in “Gaia,” the concept of Earth as a living organism on which mankind has become a threatening rather than benign and integrated presence. “Despite his reverence of Gaia – the living spirit of the planet – he came to believe that his way in life was to fight for everything all the time,” she wrote. “In adopting this stance, he missed out on the blessings that were his from the start. I pray that our boys are always able to pause and still their emotional beings long enough to hear the tone of the universe, to realize the sound of peace and love that we are born with despite the trials that life will bring us.” The last major work of Andrew’s long career as a political and media gadfly was a feature film completed just weeks before his death. The final scene was shot in the same cemetery where his body was cremated. The film left Andrew frustrated because he had no luck finding a distributor willing to release it. That failure came after he had come close to fulfilling a long-held dream of media self-determination. Black Earth Communications had won a valuable satellite TV license from the Botswana Telecommunications Authority to launch Black Entertainment Satellite Television. But financing troubles scuttled the effort. “Andrew,” said a friend, “was a visionary but not a businessman.” Meanwhile, Andrew’s marriage had faltered. Darkness closed in. The end came after Andrew penned a final message. “The illusion of death is that it’s final,” he wrote. “It isn’t. There is life after death. Life’s greatest illusion is that the conscious mind resides inside the body. It doesn’t. The truth is that we are avatars.” If so, then Andrew is still playing that violin, sawing out notes for heavenly hosts, mortals, and avatars alike, his eyes peering across the strings, provoking, searching, and ever restless. A memorial service for Andrew P. Jones will be held at noon on Saturday, Nov. 27, at the Cedar Street Baptist Church in Richmond, Va. your comment here

My Brother will be missed. I moved to Boston in 1998 and meet Andrew as a result of friends, we went on work together for many years later, first with Maverick Media. Located in the old piano factory on Tremont street, Andrew went to Iraq and Panama filming the many atrocities this government perpetrates on others. He was one of my mentors and a Dear friend. A tragic loss! My heart goes out to his children and family.

Colleen, thank-you so much for sharing. Although a very sad and tragic episode, your contextualization of the situation was insightful and meaningful. At one point in my life, Andrew was one of my very best friends. Two days after moving to Boston, I met him at a party and the next day we were on the streets collecting signatures to place a referendum on the ballot that would allow voters in the mostly African-American neighborhoods of Roxbury, Mattapan and the South End to express their opinion on forming a separate city to be named “Mandela”. Over the next couple of months we, almost single-handedly, collected the required number of signatures and the referendum was placed on the ballot. At that point all hell broke loose in Boston and Andrew instantly became a public figure, with well-funded and vicious attacks coming at him from the powers that be and their agents. As the attorney for the movement and for Andrew, I was constantly on the defense as we were attacked from all angels. Although I was new to the city and its power structure, I preceded with a sense of security and a degree of arrogance as my confidence in Andrew’s leadership skills, his moral/political righteousness and his command of the facts were all empowering for me. As a leader and as an intellect he was so powerful. He overwhelmed Boston and the African-Americans who were vested in the system and directed to oppose the Mandela initiative. To be blunt, he kicked ass! The facts were on his side and he had done amazing research, some which had the endorsement of Harvard University. Andrew was offered positions and money to go away but he continued the fight. Although the referendum was non-binding, editorials opposing it were published in national newspapers and magazines, a political action committee was formed and funded to oppose it and at the end of the campaign his life was threatened. The referendum lost but not by a significant margin. Some say had Andrew been more diplomatic and less aggressive with the local opposition that the referendum may have won or a compromise reached. Nevertheless, it is very safe to say that as a result of Andrew’s efforts the African-American community of Boston became empowered. The facts were on the table regarding how the African-American community was being exploited and disempowered. Such data and hard facts were later used by other African-American leaders to leverage budget concessions, positions and other resources for the African-American community. Sadly however, the “victory in defeat” left Andrew bitter; which was mostly directed at those leaders who privately supported and praised him but publicly were either silent or cut deals behind closed doors. During that period and subsequently I learned so much from Andrew and learned so much about him. He was a very complex man and by no means perfect. There were private contradictions and there were private vices. But as a community leader, intellectual and artist he had very few equals. Many, including myself, would say he was a genius and all who knew him would affirm his intellectual brilliance, artistic courage and principled fortitude. He could be so focused, so determined and so insightful, even to a fault. My memories of Andrew are many and rich as he shared so much of his life with me and relied on me as his “main boy” when times were hard or when the good times rolled. I will never forget when he called me from a hotel in Panama City with the sound of bombs exploding and gun fire in the background. The USA was invading Panama and he was a guest of Noriega and staying in one of his hotels. The hotel was under attack and Andrew needed someone to know where he was and he needed to know what was going on in the USA. Hours later during a subsequent phone call, President Bush came on the airways announcing that the USA had invaded Panama. That experience, although electronic was the closest I had ever encountered a war zone. Later while with him during the editing of his film I actually saw what I had heard. We had a similar experience when he was in Baghdad during the first USA invasion. When he returned I saw footage of the cruise missile that flew by his hotel balcony while we were talking. Sadly our last meaningful encounter was regarding his daughter who he loved so much. We sued the mother for paternity, joint custody and support. Andrew wanted to be named on the birth certificate, he wanted to have custody on a bi annual basis and he wanted to pay child support. Such a lawsuit was unheard of in Boston at the time. We lost at the trial level and it was during a time when we were both planning to leave Boston, of which I did before an appeal could be filed. He was very disappointed in me and did not fully understand the precedent setting nature of his claims. I moved to Hartford and he later moved to South Africa. Regretfully, we lost contact and I later moved to Tanzania. Whenever I visited the USA I would inquire about him but could never get contact information. I always assumed that our paths would cross again; we were both on the continent and we both were committed social activist. My assumption proved to be wrong. Nevertheless, I feel blessed and appreciative for the rich times and experiences we shared. He was a warrior and a general. “Have fun, make a little money and do as much damage as you can!” Andrew Jones So it is with deep sadness that I learn about his departure. Andrew, as with all of us, had his demons. Because everything about his character was magnified, it must be assumed that so too were his demons. May God bless him and grant him the grace that he deserves. My love and prayers to his wife and children, Clark Arrington Dar es Salaam clarkarrington@hotmail.com