Didier Drogba, Truth Commissioner
Cote d'Ivoire's newly-appointed commission counts 11 members, with footballer Didier Drogba one of them, representing the country's diaspora.
Politics
'Slavery, The Game'
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJMzeQicAh8&w=600&=369] While watching out for Fifa 12, I got distracted by this Youtube “commercial” for another video game, “Slavery: The Game.” Within days it had half a million views. Watch the trailer above. It just seemed to absurd to be true. There was a a website, with a video, ways for you to share it […]
Nicholas Kristof Saves Another Woman
In The New York Times columnit's world, Kenya is just another Third World site of pathos, despair, degradation, and fallen women waiting to be saved.
The Real Maids of Beirut
The vast majority of domestic workers in the Middle East are migrant workers. A fair number are from Africa, particularly Kenya and Ethiopia.
Weekend Special, August 12
Liberian Hipco music culture—”Liberia’s version of hip-hop, the ‘co’ is short for colloquial or Liberian English”—in pictures. The full set via Al Jazeera English). (Separately we’ve blogged about Hipco here.) * Meanwhile, in Senegal: Life President Abdoulaye Wade must wish rap never made it to Senegal. From the BBC here and here. * Talking of […]
Song and Dance
By Dan Moshenberg Tuesday, August 9, 2011, was the annual celebration, in South Africa, of National Women’s Day. This public holiday commemorates August 9, 1956, the women’s march on the Union Buildings in Pretoria, in protest of the infamous pass laws. That day 20,000 or so women famously, and heroically, chanted, shouted, screamed: “Wathint’Abafazi Wathint’imbokodo!”. […]
There’s more to Staten Island than ‘Mob Wives’ and Wu Tang Clan
Photographer Glenna Gordon, no stranger to AIAC, is working on a new project in Staten Island, home to the largest population of Liberians outside of Liberia. I asked her if I could publish some of the work here. You can view the full set here. She also sent this note: Most New Yorkers still think […]
Music Break / Stromae
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Vr1nyXu4Ts Stromae seems determined to turn every song on his 2010 album Cheese into a hit. A video like the one above will no doubt help. I’ve always been surprised by articles digging for his ‘Rwandan roots’ (e.g. “in Africa, I am considered white”), for in Belgium we just know him as the dude from […]
Malawi Spring
By Dan Moshenberg Did you hear about Malawi Spring? It started Wednesday, July 20. Thousands of people filled the streets of the capital Lilongwe, the commercial capital Blantyre, the northern city of Mzuzu, and elsewhere. Police are accused of having killed protesters, protesters are accused of having looted. According to the Western press, the streets […]
Happy Birthday Nelson Mandela
South Africa’s first democratic president is 93 years old today. The artwork is a collaboration between the two Dutch artists Anton Corbijn and Berend Strik. (Via: ZAM Magazine) * It would be appropriate to click through to our February 11, 2010 post “Songs for Nelson Mandela” (on the 10th anniversary of Mandela’s release of Mandela). […]
What about the maid?
African women work as domestics over the world. How have they responded to or organized to improve their conditions?
The Mobile Phone Chimera
Two recent articles highlight the fact that the digital divide is very much still with us, and in fact new kinds of divides may be opening up.
The Black Maroons of Colombia
The spontaneous mobilization of Afro-Colombians against mining corporations (backed by the Colombian state) is something to pay attention to.
The ‘African chambermaid’ and the media
Nafissatou Diall's rape accusation against Strauss-Kahn plays out in front of wider struggles by African women to secure justice and well-being.
The Rwandan Glass Ceiling
When does being a Rwandan woman matter? When that woman is a killer, a rapist, a torturer, a `monster.’ Not when she is an organizer and a healer.
It is the time for summer lists
A few of those things we missed, tweeted or could not get to this past week.
The Party is not The Nation
From that same interview that I have been so liberally cutting and pasting from this week—in Comparative Literature–the Communist poet and intellectual, Jeremy Cronin, talks about the conundrum for black intellectuals after the end of Apartheid: … For obvious reasons that I’ve already alluded to, a great premium is placed on unity and loyalty within […]
This Generation of African Women Leaders
Dan Moshenberg has written guest posts for AIAC before and we’ve HT’d him a few times. But this posts marks the first of his weekly posts here on gender politics. He’ll keep the focus on Africa. Like today when he discusses Michelle Obama’s South Africa trip. Dan, who has lived in South Africa (I’ve known […]
Pseudo-cosmopolitanism
More from that 2008 Comparative Literature interview with my favorite Communist poet, Jeremy Cronin. Bua Komanisi: … A sense of audience has always been important for me. When I write a poem, or when I go back to an old poem, I try to listen to it with the ear of someone else, perhaps an […]
An African in the Arctic
One of the key Greenpeace activists making an assault on oil drilling in Greenland is a political activist who was regularly arrested by South African police under apartheid.