I first saw this video this summer when it was posted online. I love the swing treatment given to Donny Hathaway’s 1973 song by The Miguel Atwood-Ferguson Ensemble and singer Bilal, Recorded live in Los Angeles, June 2010.

You probably know Belgian photographer Cedric Gerbehaye from his portrait of Laurent Nkunda. That 2007 picture was part of a broader story on Eastern Congo. Gerbehaye is a frequent visitor to the Congo. Many of the resulting pictures were collected and published in Congo in Limbo, including his most recent story on the Katanga mines. […]

I don’t care much for Cape Town group Freshlyground’s muzak. But you can’t deny the cleverness of the video for their new single, “Chicken to Change.” They recruited the puppets–especially Robert Mugabe–from the intermittently funny, online South African satirical news show ZANews. And they called Mugabe a chicken. Then Zimbabwe’s humorless immigration authorities banned Freshlyground […]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGqwvyugbZI&w=500&h=307&rel=0] Video of legendary 1960s model Bethann Hardison interviewing Togolese-American model David Agbodji for Vogue Italia. (Hardison is a longtime critic of the modeling industry’s favoring of white models; the video is from Vogue Italia’s Vogue Black site.)

I, like a few others here at AIAC, update my Twitter feed regularly, but occasionally I have to put some of these things in blog post form at the end of the week. * First up, performer Gonjasufi (above) is ‘super-hybrid.’ What’s that?

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/12812385 w=500&h=281] The promo for South African-US duo Blk Sonshine‘s latest release.

Long before Sun City there was this kind of thing. From Time Magazine, June 1, 1962: Composer Igor Stravinsky was conducting the South African Broadcasting Corp.’s symphony orchestra [that’s the state broadcaster] in the first of five concerts for whites only (a sixth was reserved for blacks). Stravinsky had asked that seating be integrated, but […]

For a while now I’ve been wanting to post some of the images by celebrated architect David Adjaye‘s to “… photograph and document key cities in Africa as part of an ongoing project to study new patterns of urbanism.”  It is also part of Adjaye’s “… personal quest … to address the scant knowledge of […]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0mPUpojd84&w=500&h=307&rel=0] This past summer at least three prominent figures of the Cape Town jazz scene–the saxophone players Robbie Jansen and Ezra Ngcukana and, most recently, pianist and historian Vincent Kolbe–passed.

Geert Wilders, the rightwing Dutch politician was in New York last week to lend support to his American counterparts at a rally in lower Manhattan near the site of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Then this happened: On a packed block of demonstrators between Murray and Warren streets, Wilder’s words were drowned out when a slim […]