This video for Raashan Ahmad left me wondering why I have never taken the train to Poland. It was recorded in Poznań, while Ahmad was on tour there recently.

Brit-Ugandan singer Michael Kiwanuka (featured here before), who sounds like James Taylor, performs two of his songs — ‘I’m Gettting Ready’ and ‘Tell Me A Tale’ — on the British TV show, “Later with Jools Holland”:

At the recent Film Africa film festival in London, the new Ethiopian feature film “Atletu” (The Athlete) was screened to a sold-out audience. Directed by Rasselas Lakew and Davey Frankel, it is a portrayal of Abebe Bikila, the Ethiopian runner who won two Olympic marathons in a row, and broke the world record in Rome […]

71-year-old GAL draws a weekly cartoon for the Belgian magazine Knack.* More of his 2011 work related to Africa below. All speak for themselves, except maybe for the last one in which Belgian politician Bart De Wever (leader of the country’s biggest party) tells the man at his feet to “take his own responsibility” (a […]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRwz-flV2dE French IAM member Akhenaton and Faf Larage (brother to other IAM rapper Shurik’n) clearly had fun producing their We Luv New York album this year. They make videos too. We’ll give you a full translation of the lyrics another day; let’s say they puncture the glary images of the French Riviera nicely.

We presume you’ve had Tumi and the Volume’s latest album, Pick A Dream, as much on repeat as we had this year. This the video for its opening track. Directed by filmmaker Khalid Shamis and 340ml member Tiago Correia-Paulo. Graphics are by French artist Hippolyte.

I am no contemporary art expert. Sometimes one has to start with a disclaimer. The term and whatever definition whoever gives to it have been on that awkward zone where I have felt that I should be equipped with more specific knowledge to say even something quite generic about it. Also, my intuitive and somewhat […]

From Maputsoe, Lesotho comes a new video for Kommanda Obbs’s ‘Hona Joale’, recorded in the city of Maseru and on the Thaba Bosiu sandstone plateau (where the previous–under the rule of King Moshoeshoe in the nineteenth century–capital used to be). The chorus goes something like this: “I have been broke for a long time, standing on […]

We read that the balafon is being considered for inclusion on Unesco’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. Lansiné Kouyaté knows how to play it.

Is African studio photography, Cape Town art writer Sean O’Toole asks in frieze magazine, dying out? The answer, non-subscribers, is maybe. Everywhere in the modern world the business of professional photography is in decline. O’Tool argues that studio photography has suffered the economies of the ‘digital revolution’ and the rise of the mobile phone camera. According to […]

I recently interviewed the Northern Irish filmmaker Phil Harrison (credit: “Even Gods“), who is crowd-funding his first feature, “The Good Man,” set in Ireland and South Africa.  The film tells the stories “of a young banker in Belfast and a teenager living in a Cape Town township. When their lives unexpectedly collide, their impact on one […]

By Dan Magaziner* South Africa’s 1970s are rightly remembered as a time of rising militancy. From the universities to the docks to the schools–the decade saw the rise of Black Consciousness and Steve Biko’s calls for a radical reorientation of black culture towards the struggle for political and mental liberation. We curate our memorials to […]