The West are not those most affected by terrorism
Malian director Abderrahmane Sissako’s film "Timbuktu" complicates the Jihadist narrative in Africa.
Culture
The Grammys are irrelevant
Why are the Grammys so clueless about what is contemporary Latin pop music? They keep handing out awards to veterans like Ruben Blades or Vicente Fernández.
The African Rock Art Digital Archive
Last summer, I got the chance to visit the Origins Museum on the University of the Witswatersrand campus in Johannesburg. A major feature of the Museum’s collection is an installation of San rock art. As the Rock Art Research Institute’s website attests, rock art is a key medium through which to understand our collective pasts […]
5 Questions for a Filmmaker: Jim Chuchu
The Nairobi-based filmmaker and musician aims to bring stories, pictures and sound together to create something immutable on the screen.
Maputo’s masked Mapiko dancers
A new film about how Mozambican youth express and negotiate the country's post-socialist modernity through dance.
The Black Messiah
This post, is the first in a new occasional series for Africa Is A Country; Campus Notes. The series adapts research papers by undergraduate students and reformats them for readers of the blog. Many of the AIAC editorial collective are academics; we and are colleagues are fortunate to meet students from around the world whose […]
Bogotá’s Music
Teca, how we call our own Latin American jukebox, plans to bring you the newest, most interesting artists from the region.
African Hip Hop
This week I thought I’d try something a little different, inspired by some links I came across on Twitter. Earlier this week, John Edwin Mason tweeted a story from The Guardian featuring five African musical acts to watch in 2015. Three of the five acts featured in this article were either hip hop acts or […]
Roger Young’s ‘Keys, Money, Phone’ explores the heart of young whiteness in Cape Town
Something is shifting in South Africa. White privilege is a hot topic, specifically in print and social media, and for good reason. In the past few months, a number of racially motivated assaults on black people in Cape Town’s affluent suburbs have surfaced. This month Nelson Mandela’s former personal assistant Zelda La Grange had a […]
Your concepts of African belonging
The El Foukr R'Assembly collective wants to challenge dominant ideas of African identity and cultural diffusion on both sides of the Sahara.
5 Questions for a Filmmaker: Newton Aduaka
For Aduaka, cinema is important if it illuminates or resonates something that makes up the essence of this thing called human nature.
The birth of Malawian hip hop
Bantu Khamuladzi are pioneers of Malawian hip hop. Like most first generation African hip hop artists, they mimicked American styles, then found their own voices.
The first feature film out of the DRC in over 28 years
Viva Riva! director, Djo Tunda Wa Munga, on African self-representation, and opening a production company in "chaos."
The importance of cultural preservation
The multimedia artist Tunde Owolabi brings Aso-Oke weaving to gallery spaces.
African Activist Archive
In the U.S., the past few months have showcased the power of social activism in bringing awareness to injustices in the country. Social activism has a deep history in the States; one that is not limited to domestic issues. U.S.-based organizations and individual activists have frequently looked abroad to attempt to impact change in nations beyond […]
The Triptych: On the personal stories of three of contemporary art’s freshest black voices
Ever wonder what inspires an artist to paste red-lipped Cheshire cat grins over the mouths of white men and women hanging black people in a photograph depicting a commonplace lynching scene from the Jim Crow South? In the first episode of Terrance Nance’s new documentary The Triptych, premiering this week on U.S. public television, multi-media […]
5 Questions for Filmmaker: Branwen Okpako
Okpako wants to show people as they see themselves but in a way that others can recognize themselves as well.
Singer Jojo Abot Speaks the Heart’s Burdens Through Music
In a world dominated by social injustice, it’s uplifting to find someone whose creative essence is dedicated to the pursuit of love. Such is the ambition of Ghanaian singer Jojo Abot. Singing in Ewe and English on her upcoming EP, Fyfya Woto, Jojo interrogates the complexities of love and culture through her lyrics and the […]
The Winterton Collection
I absolutely love photography. This might be obvious from some of the choices I’ve made for previous editions of the Digital Archive, like World War I Africa and Africa Through a Lens. It’s always been a medium that I enjoy on an artistic level but, recently, this interest in photography has trickled over into my […]
World War I in Africa
In honor of the centenary of the Great War, Jacques Enaudeau and Kathleen Bomani set out to bring attention to the forgotten story of Africa’s involvement in World War I. As Enaudeau, a French geographer/cartographer, and Bomani, a Tanzanian activist (and frequent contributor to Africa Is A Country), rightly point out, “the story of Africans’ […]