We published “Neymar and the Disappearing Donkey” (to coincide with the World Cup in Brazil) on June 17th. The story included a list of race-colors from a 1976 study done in Brazil. On June 22 the big-time news agency AP published a “story” which basically consisted of the list. That story’s been repeated /shared / […]
Some young Danes thought they'd have some fun with colonialism.
If Israel doesn't send asylum seekers back to the countries they fled from, it deports them to "third countries."
The meticulous engagement by Noura Mint Seymali with the history of her country Mauritania, the current global music landscape, and her own personal journey as a musician.
What the Amsterdam court ruling against blackface figure Zwarte Piet really means.
The Mexican writer Alma Guillermoprieto declared this World Cup “the best ever.” Few can disagree. A total of 136 goals were scored in 48 group matches and another 18 in the 8 matches of the last round. Not everything is surprising: with the exception of Costa Rica, all the top seeds made it to the […]
We’re shortening the name of Africa is a Country Radio. From now on (save for when we slip up) the show will be known as Africa is a Radio! This month’s show dives fully (rather than the toe dip of last month) into World Cup fever with a show that features 16 songs for the 16 teams […]
How do you tell a story about African liberation through the lens of an outsider? Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense, the 2014 documentary by Swedish filmmaker Göran Olsson, attempts to answer this question through presenting a sequence of episodes in the struggle for liberation in colonial Africa. Consisting exclusively of footage drawn from […]
Watching the World Cup match between Algeria vs Germany in one of New York City's most diverse boroughs.
Singing or rapping off key in an expensive or sometime low budget music video is now a cottage industry in the rabbit hole that makes up Youtube. The African diaspora have not been spared. The pioneer of this subgenre was Bangs, the Sudanese-Australian rapper (see here for an “archive” of his exploits), then came the American […]
Except for the people that saw her take pictures, nobody else knew what the Chicago street photographer did and very little was known of her.
I can’t recall when I first fell in love with hip-hop, but I do know that the first song I transcribed was Coolio’s ‘Gangster’s paradise.’ Transcribing lyrics in ‘songbooks’ was a big deal in the mid-nineties; it was shortly before I discovered that oohla.com existed, around the same time I was heavy into the culture […]