Via Jeremy Weate at Naijablog: “Photos by Brian Blazek. The Tuk-Ham festival takes place each year at Kwoi in Kaduna State. The planting festival is a celebration within the Jabba ethnic group, who claim direct descendancy from Nok culture. The second picture is of this year’s Tuk-Ham beauty queen winner.”

Jacob Boersema, a Dutch PhD student who works on Afrikaner identity in postapartheid South Africa, recently told me about a new film, “Black Butterflies,” about the life of Ingrid Jonker, the late Afrikaans poet (she committed suicide in 1965), whose work gained renewed interest after Nelson Mandela read one of her poems during his inaugural […]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB238bOfbIk&w=480&h=295] This clip of an incoherent, rambling politician ran on South African TV a few weeks ago.

I was at a friend’s house, paging through “Annie Liebovitz at Work,” in which the photographer recounts details of famous shoots. I was struck by this passage of a visit Liebovitz took to Apartheid South Africa in 1975 to photograph Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the country to compete for Mr Olympia. (The picture above is not […]

[vodpod id=Video.3327165&w=450&h=370&fv=] Live performance in Rennes, France, by the Dubai-born, Iraqi-Canadian rap MC, who is now a solo performer but for a while fronted the hip hop band, Euphrates. It is worth your 50 minutes. (BTW, Narcicyst has a Masters degree in Media Studies.) Via Ben Herson.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUe83JKeXAI&w=480&h=295] In his book, “Murder in Amsterdam,” about the death of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004, the writer Ian Buruma provides this description of Dutch football: “Proud of their superior skills, their multicultural makeup, the almost mocking manner of their free-flowing play, maddening the players of more prosaic teams, like Germany … […]

On Sunday “The New York Times” published a photo essay on the daily lives of the approximately 300 immigrants from the Darfur region of Sudan who live in Kensington, Brooklyn. The images are by Dave Sanders, “a photojournalist who lives in nearby Park Slope, has been documenting the community since the fall of 2008.”  (He […]

Once you get pass Julius Malema’s ramblings or the fact that whites play the victim card so well, it is easy to forget who the real victims of the new South Africa are. Land is one way to find out. As political scientist Allison Drew recently reported in an analysis of political developments in South […]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o6Rxc_JZKg&w=480&h=295] Sudanese went to the polls yesterday and will do so again today in two days of voting for a new president or in the case of a depressing scenario that the controversial incumbent, Omar Al-Bashir, gets another term. The latter scenario is more likely. However, one outstanding feature in this depressive scenario has been […]

* The latest issue of the New Yorker has a piece by Jon Lee Anderson on recent developments in Guinea-Conakry in West Africa, where a possibly coked-up military dictator, Moussa Dadis Camara, and his coked-up underlings miscalculated how far France and the US’s backing for his regime would go when they killed at  least a […]