http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEe96sQsRg4&hd=1 You know we like the Dutch magazine ZAM. The promised English edition is (almost) here. As a sneak peek, they’re giving us this ‘digital introduction’. 

This is brilliant. The BBC, working with the Royal Geographical Society, has posted an audio slideshow showing how the continent’s been depicted on maps from the 14th century onward. A few highlights: we get one theory how the continent got its name from a tribe of Berber who lived in what is now the Sudan, […]

Negar Azimi, in Frieze Magazine, on what the ascendency of ‘political art’ means for art’s actual engagement with politics in the industrial north:

http://youtu.be/Wd6NxkKCVI8 I am not cool like Theophelius London. I don’t wear nice, patterned shirts. Solange Knowles* doesn’t want to hang out with me. But sometimes I fly overseas. * Bonus fact: My 5-year old is cool: Solange is her favorite grown-up singer.

Rob Boffard writing in The Guardian: Hip-hop in South Africa faces the same problems all music faces – how do you reach as wide an audience as possible? But it has additional posers unique to this country – can you rap in any of South Africa’s 11 languages and still be relevant to all your […]

I received my copy of this year’s Commonwealth Prize winner Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love in the mail the other day. Not that I don’t like its cover (or the book), but this is just silly. And here’s why: Some of us (in Canada, Great Britain, South Africa and India) also know 2008 Commonwealth Prize […]

As 42 opposition activists were facing treason charges in Zimbabwe for watching video footage of the Egyptian democracy protests, the Financial Times sent Alec Russell, its comment and analysis editor, down to Harare to interview Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister. Tsvangirai’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change is serving together in a Government of National Unity […]

http://vimeo.com/10523895