The Northern Nigeria repping White Nigerian (isn’t he Lebanese Nigerian?), along with JJC, invites us all to a Hausa-Pidgin speaking world of cross-racial national identity. It’s schticky, but the truth is, the world could use a little more exposure to stuff like this. Download the track over at TIA.
March 8, 2012. It’s International Women’s Day, and so how to celebrate? Over the weekend, The Independent on Sunday ran a piece entitled, “Revealed: The best and worst places to be a woman.” 20 categories of “surprising results”. Here’s one you might find interesting: Best place to read and write: Lesotho.
Leo Goldsmith and Rachael Rakes, film editors at Brooklyn Rail, write about the documentary film “Imagining Emanuel” (trailer above), which recently played at the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight in New York City:
The power to choose on social media who is to be the next target of America’s moral manhunt, all with the benediction of a panel of biddable celebrities.
The new video for the song “Alf Hilat” by Moroccan lute player and singer Aziz Sahmaoui (he made his name playing jazz with the late Joe Zawinul), off ‘University of Gnawa’, his album (it came out late 2011) of “African” sufi devotional music from the border regions of Morocco and Algeria.
The Canadian High Commission to South Africa, probably meaning well or deliberately unaware of the emptiness of rainbow metaphors, is looking for photographs capturing “the Rainbow Nation”. They’re working with the Johannesburg Bailey Seippel Gallery on this. The photographer’s entries will have to display “multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-racial South Africa”. Like it’s still the 1990s. […]
Remember Mikko’s post on African Jokes? Comedian Mike Epps, a few days before he threatened his daughter with violence, gets some cheap laughs at the expense of Nigerians on late night US television.* Host Conan O’Brien gently guides him away. * Btw, Epps is merely repeating an old trope among African American comedians that some people find […]
Nadine Hammam’s work turned out to be “too risky” for Art Dubai. Her new exhibition, Tank Girl, opens tonight at the Gallery Misr (Cairo, Egypt).
From Financial Times profile of Eve Arnold, the brilliant American photographer who died in January 2012: One of her toughest assignments was in South Africa, in 1973, where she saw apartheid at its worst. She sneaked inside hospitals where black children were dying from malnutrition and disease; she witnessed the separation of black families, the […]
I was in Dubai recently, working on a documentary, and on the way back to Cape Town I visited Ethiopia to see some friends and experience some of the Ethio-jazz music I had fallen in love with ever since I first heard Mulatu Astatke and the “Ethiopiques” compilations. Even though I had high hopes, Ethiopia […]
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80_BugBDym4&w=640&h=360] When the ubiquitous “Shit (People) Say” meme was still popular, and after seeing the genuinely funny Shit Nigerians Say video, I thought about making a video myself about shit South Africans say. Then I saw that someone had beaten me to it. Watching it, I literally laughed out loud, but for all the […]
Last week, after Malema was expelled from South Africa’s ruling party, we went back and looked at our archives to see how we’ve blogged about him and his politics. Here’s a sample.