Let Kenyan planes fly
The writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o on the Kenyan government’s habit of inhibiting the country’s talents.
Culture
Gazing at a distance
Two exhibits at the same museum: one seeking to deconstruct the white Western gaze, the other perpetuating it.
Vamba Sherif’s ‘Bound to Secrecy’ is masterful storytelling
In 2012, The Economist Magazine’s style blog, Prospero, featured an essay titled “War and Peace in Monrovia: Where is Liberia’s Tolstoy?”. The essay was written by a journalist who visited Liberia for research on a magazine feature about an ex-warlord running for president. While in Freetown, during what he explains was an unexpected amount of […]
Weekend Music Break No.78
South Carolina and the island that Haitians and Dominicans share is on our minds this weekend, so your music break reflects that. The Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters kick us off with an African folk tale from the Sea Islands; then Fatoumata Diawara bridges the distance between Charleston and Timbuktu, with a Malian Blues from the movie Timbuktu; we […]
Blood dripping from his head
A painful, violent story of migration captured in the song "Lagos" - for our series "Liner Notes," in which musicians talk about making music.
Buika is the best
Earlier this week I was at the launch of a friend’s excellent book about music piracy. The book goes into the nitty-gritty of how the MP3 file was first developed, through a painstaking process of figuring out how to compress recorded sound without the smaller file sounding any different. (This, of course, permanently changed the music industry.) Sounds made […]
Freedom, youth and remembrance
In the documentary "Remembered Futures" the filmmakers interrogate the ways South Africans understand their own history and how this affects their futures.
Hillbrow invasion with @YoungstaCPT
Cape Town-based wordsmith Youngsta’s been in Johannesburg for a few weeks, here on a mission to build bridges and shake a few industry players’ hands, all the while invading the city with his brand of Kaapse rap. It’s been roughly five years of steady hustle and grind for the emcee whose claim to fame is having released 24 mixtapes in a period of eighteen […]
What’s the word? Sister/woman have you heard from Manenberg?
To honor the June 16, 1976 Soweto Uprising, aka Youth Day, the Rock Girls are on a five-day road trip, from Manenberg to Port Elizabeth. These girls embody all that is powerful and hopeful about Youth Day. They live the injunction of organizer Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, “Pray for the dead and fight like hell […]
Badvertising and the Soweto Uprising
The worst crime of a new ad "celebrating" the martyrs of 1976 is the message does not accord with the realities of young black South Africans.
Weekend Music Break No.77
Weekend Music Break, your weekly round up of hot tunes and music news from around the African Continent and its diaspora, is here! This weekend we have Belgium based Congolese artists Badi and Fredy Massamba’s team up “Belgicain”; Show Dem Camp puts out an Afro-House song featuring Iye on the hook; still in the house […]
No exoticism, no promos, just the music
The Hipsters Don’t Dance "Top World Carnival Tunes" for May 2015.
Swaziland’s Bushfire
The Southern African country, Swaziland, is an absolute monarchy characterized by widespread oppression. It also hosts the Bushfire Music Festival.
Rhodes Must Fall in the West too
The Rhodes Must Fall movement is starting a much-needed conversation about the institutional roots of racism at universities in the West. Hopefully that conversation will lead to solutions.
Time of the pathetic hero
Andrew Miller’s a Jozi-based freelance scribe. Years spent with a muscle disease have allowed the writer to patiently hone his writing craft as well as flex his philosophical biceps with Jozi’s artists, writers and passers by at his dinner table in Melville, Johannesburg. A tireless six years of editorial bench pressing has saw him produce […]
Decolonizing the University
What to do with the universities South Africa inherited from the violences of Apartheid.
Weekend Music Break No.76
We took a break last week, but we’re back experimenting with a new format. This Weekend’s Music Break is in the form of a Youtube playlist so you can just hit play, sit back, and enjoy. Let us know if you have any thoughts about the new format in the comments! Our selection this weekend is: A […]
Was the German composer Beethoven, African?
There's even an album to advance this argument: "Beethoven Was African: Polyrhythmic Piano Sonatas."
Cape Town is Three Countries: Curatorship in times of load shedding
“Load shedding” is a nice South African term for daily deliberate shutdown of electricity supply in parts of the country due to shortage in supply. The following are three short stories from art exhibitions that took place on one week of May in the suburb of Woodstock, Cape Town. Torches and candles provided. … 1. […]
The War Story We Need Right Now
The book, 'Guantanamo Diary' is an exception about America's 'War on Terror': an account of torture and terror by one its victims.