Since Friday’s Special was reserved to Sierra Leone — and for archival purposes — here’s your Sunday Bonus. First up, above, from the same label that brought us Baloji, Konono N°1 and Staff Benda Billili comes a new recording by Jagwa Music: ‘Live in the Streets of Dar’ (es Salaam, Tanzania).
Britain's secret service, MI5, passed on sensitive information to their Libyan colleagues to torture dissidents.
Globetrotter's organizing logic may be a bit elusive, but the content itself is often quite captivating.
Freedom Day in South Africa. Togo Independence Day. And Sierra Leone’s 51st Independence Day. That’s all today. We’ve been celebrating Freedom Day with music elsewhere today. So this post is for Sierra Leone. My current favorite song we played last week but there’s more: a Bajah and Dry Yai Crew song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bHOWazDJls
A comment on the enigmatic, and ambivalent, presence of rebel leader and former president, Charles Taylor, ten years after he left Liberia.
The video, "African Men. Hollywood Stereotypes," made by an American NGO, is part of the "Brand Africa" discourse that's all the rage now.
Djibril Diop Mambéty's film "Touki Bouki" is an excellent example of how the contemporary can be read through the (re)construction of myths and narratives from a collective memory.
One of the striking facts of Nabil Ayouch's film is that Israelis love the land and the Palestinians love it too.
The ever-well-informed African Art in London announced this week that Yinka Shonibare’s contribution to the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square — Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle (2010) — has been bought for the nation after a successful campaign by National Maritime Museum and the Art Fund:
The recent announcement of the Guggenheim Foundation’s new “Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative” bears all of the hallmarks of the present era. It is funded by a bank. It has the word “global” in its title. It claims explicitly to challenge “a Western-centric view of art history,” according to the Foundation’s director, Richard Armstrong, […]
If you’re unfamiliar with my musical work, OkayAfrica.com recently did a profile on me for their web TV series.
Makode Linde calls his approach Afromantics: it use the blackface to show the connection between stereotypes, part of the same system of oppression.