Last month, Mali’s trio SMOD (consisting of DJ Sam, Ousco and Donski) released a second single, Les Dirigeants Africains, taken from their new self-titled album. Sure, producer Manu Chao’s stamp is all over it, but SMOD’s lyrics and director Chris Macari* make up for that. And if you think DJ Sam looks a bit like Amadou or Mariam, you might very well be onto something…

* If you’ve never heard of Chris Macari, then his 2003 short movie The Letter is a good place to start.

Further Reading

And do not hinder them

We hardly think of children as agents of change. At the height of 1980s apartheid repression in South Africa, a group of activists did and gave them the tool of print.

The new antisemitism?

Stripped of its veneer of nuance, Noah Feldman’s essay in ‘Time’ is another attempt to silence opponents of the Israeli state by smearing them as anti-Jewish racists.