The history of popular music in South Africa continues to interest documentary filmmakers. Of recent offerings two films stand out: “Punk in Africa,” about the history of the genre in Southern Africa since the 1970s (word is it’s a bit unfocused), and Daniel Yon’s beautiful film about jazz singer Sathima Benjamin, “Sathima’s Windsong.” I’ve just gotten […]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahwth3qxnig The video for South African hip hop head Khuli Chana’s ‘Tswa Daar’ comes with a nod to Craig Mack’s Get Down. Have we already said DJ Raiko’s beats (and writing) are underrated?

On a recent trip to London I was hoping to catch a performance by Cape Town drummer Louis Moholo Moholo, the last surviving member of the famed jazz bands, The Blue Notes and The Brotherhood of Breath. Especially with the release of “Before the Wind Changes,” a live recording of The Blue Notes on tour in Belgium in 1979.

Our weekly round-up of new (and a little less new) music videos. First, this great video for ‘I Am An African,’ the first single of Dutch-Ghanaian artist Papa Ghana’s EP ‘I Am An African.’ (The song came out last year).

The creatives at South African satellite TV channel Kyknet — which also produces movies now — not only blatantly rip off American romantic comedy plotlines, but inhabit a South Africa where there is not a single black face to be seen. On the other hand, maybe they’re being honest.

The Northern Nigeria repping White Nigerian (isn’t he Lebanese Nigerian?), along with JJC, invites us all to a Hausa-Pidgin speaking world of cross-racial national identity. It’s schticky, but the truth is, the world could use a little more exposure to stuff like this. Download the track over at TIA.

Leo Goldsmith and Rachael Rakes, film editors at Brooklyn Rail, write about the documentary film “Imagining Emanuel” (trailer above), which recently played at the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight in New York City:

The new video for the song “Alf Hilat” by Moroccan lute player and singer Aziz Sahmaoui (he made his name playing jazz with the late Joe Zawinul), off ‘University of Gnawa’, his album (it came out late 2011) of “African” sufi devotional music from the border regions of Morocco and Algeria.

The Canadian High Commission to South Africa, probably meaning well or deliberately unaware of the emptiness of rainbow metaphors, is looking for photographs capturing “the Rainbow Nation”. They’re working with the Johannesburg Bailey Seippel Gallery on this. The photographer’s entries will have to display “multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-racial South Africa”. Like it’s still the 1990s. […]

Nadine Hammam’s work turned out to be “too risky” for Art Dubai. Her new exhibition, Tank Girl, opens tonight at the Gallery Misr (Cairo, Egypt).

I was in Dubai recently, working on a documentary, and on the way back to Cape Town I visited Ethiopia to see some friends and experience some of the Ethio-jazz music I had fallen in love with ever since I first heard Mulatu Astatke and the “Ethiopiques” compilations. Even though I had high hopes, Ethiopia […]

We didn’t expect anything else: the video for FOKN Bois “Sexin Islamic Girls” goes all the way. March 6 is Ghana’s Independence Day—which means we have an excuse to post it.

DRC born, France based Gasandji‘s “Na lingui yo.”

Gonçalo Mabunda’s chilling constructions are now on display at the Jack Bell gallery in London. His thrones (above) and faceless masks (below) are made from weapons used in Mozambique’s civil war. These designs make dark mockery of ergonomics: you wouldn’t want to put these masks on your face. There is some uncanny resemblance to Modernist assemblages, and […]

The emigrants Céline Condorelli interviewed about their past lives in Alexandria, Egypt, often arrived at this conclusion: “Il n’y a plus rien [There is nothing left].” Condorelli, an artist of Italian and Egyptian descent currently based in London, found that Alexandria was experienced, even in the classical age, as a a city “that has been”. She sees melancholia in the […]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=841i137-CYg Alain Mabanckou’s 2009 novel Black Bazar spoke successfully to and about the African diaspora in France, their daily hustle, fashion, style and language. All through the eyes of the Congolese migrant nicknamed ‘Fessologue’, sapeur and pub philosopher, and arguably the author’s alter ego. As a follow-up to the novel, Mabanckou now has produced an […]

When the good Lord handed down the Decalogue to Moses atop Mount Sinai, he limited himself to just the ten commandments. The new boss of Cameroon’s national football team, Rigobert Song, is obviously more demanding.