Africa as Science Fiction
Science fiction as genre offers the opportunity to African artists to consider Western cartographies of the future as fictions in their own right.
Culture
An Ode to Oshodi Market
Old Oshodi highlighted the complexity of the city, showcasing the ingenuity of the people of Lagos in their use of the informal market in making a living.
Somewhere between folklore, memoir and modern fiction
Reading Yewande Omotoso's novel "Bom Boy," just when you think you’ve figured the characters out, the author opens them up a little more, and our perceptions change.
We’ve always been migrating
A film about a Sudanese migrant to America explores a general fact of contemporary existence.
The Passing of Ernest Cole
We don’t know why the South African photographer decided to apply to become "coloured" under Apartheid's racial classification laws.
Fighting Pop
Congolese/South African (via Belgium) musician Yannick Ilunga, AKA Iamwaves, has been rather busy lately. His group Popskarr, a new ‘electronic/Nu Disco/Misty Pop’ outfit, has just released a stylish single called Fighter; and as his alter ego Petite Noir he has released a mixtape for Okayafrica’s ‘Africa in Your Earbuds’ series (which earned him a tweet shout out from Questlove of The Roots) and a new video for his song ‘Till We Ghosts.’
A French migration fairytale
A remarkable amount of new films in recent months have used migration, detention and illegal sea crossings as their subject matter.
The cinema of liberation
The film, "Come Back, Africa," first released in 1959, challenged how white liberals imagined black people or tried to shape their struggles in South Africa.
Friday Bonus Music Break, N°9
Your weekly #musicbreak roundup. Mokobe and Oumou Sangare pray for peace in Mali:
Not the Caine Prize
Since 2004, Le Salon africain (part of the annual Geneva Book Fair) awards the Ahmadou Kourouma Prize to an ‘African oeuvre, essay or fiction that reflects the spirit of independence and creativity which is the heritage of [Ivorian novelist] Ahmadou Kourouma’. This year the Prize goes to Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga for her latest novel […]
Documentary–‘I am Malawi’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA6F553L17g ‘I am Malawi’ is a short documentary by Geert Veuskens and Pieter de Vos. (Part 1 above, part 2 below.) Veuskens gave us some more details about their project:
Tintin’s Day in a Belgian Court
Tintin is full of offensive, racist, stereotypes. Should Africans take the publishers to court? No, argues the author; it is counterproductive.
Sunday Bonus Music Break, N°8
Since Friday’s Special was reserved to Sierra Leone — and for archival purposes — here’s your Sunday Bonus. First up, above, from the same label that brought us Baloji, Konono N°1 and Staff Benda Billili comes a new recording by Jagwa Music: ‘Live in the Streets of Dar’ (es Salaam, Tanzania).
The magazine as Tumblr
Globetrotter's organizing logic may be a bit elusive, but the content itself is often quite captivating.
Sierra Leone Independence Day
Freedom Day in South Africa. Togo Independence Day. And Sierra Leone’s 51st Independence Day. That’s all today. We’ve been celebrating Freedom Day with music elsewhere today. So this post is for Sierra Leone. My current favorite song we played last week but there’s more: a Bajah and Dry Yai Crew song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bHOWazDJls
African Men
The video, "African Men. Hollywood Stereotypes," made by an American NGO, is part of the "Brand Africa" discourse that's all the rage now.
The value of a people and their social structure
Djibril Diop Mambéty's film "Touki Bouki" is an excellent example of how the contemporary can be read through the (re)construction of myths and narratives from a collective memory.
An unusual sensitivity
One of the striking facts of Nabil Ayouch's film is that Israelis love the land and the Palestinians love it too.
Yinka Shonibare’s National Treasure
The ever-well-informed African Art in London announced this week that Yinka Shonibare’s contribution to the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square — Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle (2010) — has been bought for the nation after a successful campaign by National Maritime Museum and the Art Fund:
Guggenheim’s map–Where is the rest of Africa?
The recent announcement of the Guggenheim Foundation’s new “Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative” bears all of the hallmarks of the present era. It is funded by a bank. It has the word “global” in its title. It claims explicitly to challenge “a Western-centric view of art history,” according to the Foundation’s director, Richard Armstrong, […]