A lot of people dismiss Dominican-American pop singer George Lopez Jr, also known as Twin Shadow, as a hipster who packages new wave nostalgia. Maybe that’s true. But there’s something about this tune–which came out late last year–that I like.

A long, long time ago when there was still Apartheid, I needed a passport to travel by bus from Cape Town to Durban in South Africa. That meant going through the “independent homeland” of Transkei in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. If you forgot that’s where the state banished surplus black people and from where capital […]

Timothy Burke, Swarthmore history professor–he’s written a book on commodity culture in Zimbabwe–and blogger, has a great post about ‘memoirs from Africa.’ Basically he was asked to prepare a year-long reading list of books about Africa for school alumni. Burke decided to only include memoirs or first-person perspective accounts from the last 30 years or […]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWjlPiJlihE&w=500&h=307&rel=0] Zim Ngqawana (b. 1959), a key member of the second generation of South African jazz musicians, a student of Darius Brubeck, Yusuf Lateef, Max Roach and Archie Shepp and a major influence on the next generation of artists like Kyle Shepherd, passed Monday. Ngqawana, a Muslim, was to be buried today in Johannesburg. Obituaries […]

A 13-year-old South African girl is the latest victim of “corrective rape,” in which men rape lesbians to “cure” them of their sexual orientation in South Africa. As The Guardian reports 31 lesbians have been killed because of their sexuality in the past decade, and more than 10 lesbians a week are raped or gang […]

We’ve featured Dutch R&B singer, Ntjam Rosie, here before. We had to do it again.