Weekend Music Break

Gata Misteriosa and Lee Bass (the Mozambican-Portuguese-Ghanaian-German duo who go by the name of Gato Preto) dropped this new video for “Pirao” last night: no longer strictly kuduro, not yet sure what to call it, but right in time for our weekend special of ten. Video above. Janka and the Bubu Gang (Sierro Leone via […]

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The Cartography of Bullshit

With the gutting of foreign coverage by most U.S. newspapers and the need to populate infinite Web space with content, a new creature has emerged: the foreign affairs blogger. Max Fisher, who hosts the Washington Post’s WorldViews page, is a leading exemplar of the species. Fisher’s newsy nuggets are often low-priority zeitgeist items that may […]

How to Please Your Man “Zambia Style”

Imagine you’re a 17 year old middle class Dutch girl. You just cycled home from another boring day at school. Trapped in the conventional humdrum of the day, you are deprived of the stirring type of high school tales that you often watch. Back home, you switch on the TV and stumble upon a rerun […]

5 New Films to Watch Out For, N°27

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is the creative debut feature of director Terence Nance who we got to know through the work he did together with Blitz the Ambassador. His new film is sold as a take on “young love” in the city of New York. First reviews praise, among other things, the mesh of […]

Does Karim Wade’s arrest mean “the time when one could pillage public goods is gone” in Senegal?

Karim Wade, the son of octogenarian ex-president Abdoulaye Wade, has been sitting in a central Dakar prison for nearly a month as he awaits trial for corruption charges. The younger Wade was arrested and formally charged with illicit enrichment after an investigation revealed that he amassed $1.4 billion in personal wealth.

Aristide Zolberg and African Studies

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In a 2010 interview, Aristide Zolberg—the pioneer Africanist political scientist who died on April 12 at the age of 81—described his early interest in the politics of a continent in the first throes of independence: “India was a beacon of the future, and of the triumph of the powerless over the powerful. Africa, and in […]

Weekend Music Break

Many collaborations and surprise comebacks popped up in our feeds this week. First, this one by Kenyans DNA and Tanzania’s Mr. Nice, who tried his luck in South Africa for a while but now seems to have found his ground again back home:

5 New Films to Watch, N°26

Kicking off this week and running until the 26th of May, the fifth edition of Festival Cinéma Arabe will take place in The Netherlands (in the cities of Rotterdam, Den Haag, Maastricht, Den Bosch and Utrecht). With more than 30 feature films, documentaries and short films by international filmmakers with an Arab background, the festival presents […]

The Relationship between Visual and Text

While we seem to spend an enormous amount of virtual space at AIAC critiquing the ways that Africa and Africans are represented, we do so because we believe that it is possible to subvert expectations, to create images that shatter myths and ideology and that make people think about why they are surprised by particular […]

People in glass houses: South Africa’s news media and editorial independence

Late on Monday, the South African Mail & Guardian ran an online feature contrasting how local newspapers have been covering what’s become known as “Guptagate”, the unimaginative shorthand for the bi-national diplomatic and national security scandal unfolding around the Guptas, a wealthy South African family of Indian heritage, and their outsize influence over the country’s […]

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