I’m a DJ. So it’s only right I give you ten songs that filled up my crates in 2011 to play out the year. No rankings, just the first 10 club friendly Afropop tracks I could think of:

2011 was a good year for African cinema. In various cinema seats and at home, I’ve been intrigued and moved, horrified and sickened, surprised and hugely entertained by a group of industries that together we call ‘African cinema’ — a sign that what can be expected is anything but stereotypical. In the list below, I’ve […]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yffEiWHIoZI&w=600&h=349] This morning, Cape Verdean singer Cesária Évora passed away in Mandelo, São Vicente, the island were she was born. One of the many meanings of “Sodade” — that most difficult to translate Creole word — is a feeling of loss.

Ploughing through the blog’s archives to come up with a fair selection of ten videos for next week’s year-end lists, I wondered why we haven’t written about the Congolese Salaam Kivu All Stars. Things went well in Goma, Kivu during the elections last week. A year ago, youth and media organization Yole! Africa staged the […]

I finally got to see director Andrew Dosunmu’s debut feature film, “Restless City,” this summer (at the Urban World Film Festival). The story, part American dream narrative, revolves around a young West African immigrant, Djibril, who lives in Harlem, trying to start his record career, while selling CDs and delivering packages and mail on his moped. […]

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1 Mike Skinner playing keys in this “improvised” video for Ghostpoet makes perfect sense. The online audience at home voted from multiple choices options in real time. It included a yeti.

Two events in London this year focused on female filmmakers working in African cinema. This is high exposure for a demographic of the African film industry that is generally low on the radar.

This list is partly self-indulgent. It is also a way–hopefully weekly–for me to keep an online record of films I still would like to see. Here’s a few. First up, Lotte Stoofs’s documentary film about the life of a landmark hotel in Beira, Mozambique:

14-minute clip from a recent TV profile by Norwegian television of a visit by Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah to Norway. I never imagined book TV could look this good and informative.

Three Kenyan videos to remember today’s Independence Day. Three popular tunes for our Independence meme. A ‘celebration’ of sorts turned out to be a useful lead for the first two. Madtraxx’s ‘Ida Waiter’ (with a nod to South African kwaito and that Prodigy video):

In a recent video interview (first spotted on film blog Shadow and Act), Kenyan film director Wanuri Kahiu revealed her participation in an exciting new film initiative  ImagiNations. Under the helm of South African producer Steve Markovitz, the producer of hit Congolese film ‘Viva Riva!‘ (2010) and producer of Kahiu’s own sci-fi short ‘Pumzi’ (2009), […]

We like stylish Rwandese-Brooklyn singer Iyadede‘s take (in French) on the Theophilus London song “Flying Overseas.”  His verses (in English) are retained unchanged in Iyadede’s cover.  The video also visits some of the sites of Brooklyn. (Yes, there’s some Manhattan in there.)  The Brooklyn tourism bureau should pay the makers of the video. And if […]