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Tom Devriendt was an editorial board member of Africa is a Country before there was an editorial board.
I watched the Black Power Mixtapes last night and, among other issues, was struck to see that with the only technical exception of Robin D.G. Kelley, nearly if not all the non-participants who provided commentary were musical artists — Erykah Badu, Talib Kweli, and another rapper whose stage name I don’t recall, as well as Abiodun Oyewole from the Last Poets, who not only had nothing to add but also was off by five years on the Medgar Evers assassination. Not even Peniel Joseph, [who dominates current scholarship on Black Power], was involved. Although this is not at all to suggest that his presence would've made it any different. All I can say about it really is that, although the footage was a nostalgic moment for people like me and does provide a nice illustration of Stokely Carmichael’s performance of Stokely Carmichael and copious display of Angela Davis’s self-important emptiness, as insight into black power, the documentary is utterly incoherent and useless.
There's no sense of where it came from or went, nothing of internal tensions. At some points it leaves space for the impression that black power emerged after the King assassination, doesn’t clarify the temporality of Malcolm’s relation to black power rhetoric, most notably that he was dead before it emerged and always was linked to it as a martyr, juxtaposes Carmichael and the BPP without noting —except maybe through a passing, allusive reference by someone like Sonia Sanchez— the actual relations and tensions between the latter, Stokely and others in that radical wing on SNCC’s carcass that merged for a minute with the BPP. And, of course, there was no hint of anything other than speeches, pronouncements and the BPP’s breakfast programs.
Beyonce has been accused of appropriating others’ work without attribution. The latest is a Belgium choreographer and her dance company.
Slickly accomplished and anchored by an outstanding central performance by the imposing Issaka Sawadogo, this offbeat picture will be a surefire talking point at festivals (...). Art-house play in Francophone territories beckons for this film punctuated with frank nudity and resolutely unglamorized violence.
Much of the latter is meted out protagonist Amadou (Sawadogo), a swaggering bull of a man who makes his way from an unspecified African country to work illegally in Europe. He finds a tough construction job in Brussels, which involves wielding an enormous drill, the first of several instances where Provost deploys overt phallic imagery with semi-ironic directness.
Amadou is a man on the make, both financial and sexually, so it isn’t long before he’s engaged in a steamy affair with a sophisticated, white European woman – Stefania Rocca’s Agnès. When this liaison turns sour, Amadou’s fortunes quickly deteriorate. A chap who has previously been a potentially model EU citizen – hard-working, caring, conscientious, intelligent, resourceful – spirals into bloodshed and murder. Whether this change involves some revelation of Amadou’s true savagery, or whether he is haplessly driven to desperate acts by capitalist Europe’s callous cruelty, is a matter for debate."
Cote d’Ivoire’s newly-appointed commission counts 11 members, with footballer Didier Drogba one of them, representing the country’s diaspora.