This weekend Chelsea play Bayern Munchen in the European Champions League final. One player whose contribution is likely to be decisive is the Ivorian Didier Drogba. Cup finals always end in triumph or disaster, and Drogba has made a habit of exaggerating those extremes, either scoring the winner or else missing a penalty or getting himself disastrously sent off. Above is a clip of Drogba doing the rounds of English chat shows. [Read more...]
Ever since Rupert Murdoch invented football in 1992 (see Fivers passim), African players from all over the continent have lit up the English Premier League and helped turn the competition into a continent-wide obsession. (Just last week, Arsene Wenger said he had been “frightened” by the intensity of Arsenal’s popularity in Nigeria and Kenya.) African players have also scored some memorable goals in the process. So while the Premier League was busy anointing Wayne Rooney’s jammy overhead shinner from last season as the official “Goal of the 20 Seasons”–presumably only fans under the age of seven were allowed to vote?–we put the question to Twitter: What is the greatest goal scored by an African in the English Premier League? As the final day of this 20th season begins, here’s the run-down of the 10 biggest goals scored by African players in the Premier League.
The central point of this song and music video by violinist Lindsey Stirling (the singer is one Alisha Popat) begins with an invocation of a familiar trope: Africa is a hopeless place. But African love springs eternal. So much so that it has the ability to save and teach privileged people from the west, who arrive with fancy hopes of ‘saving’ picturesque Africans. Hell, I’m sure you could even save the elephants if you spent long enough prancing around them playing the violin and the elephants somehow managed to resist the temptation to grind you into the dust with their massive feet (note to American celebrities). And people love this kind of thing. By late last night, this video had nearly half a million views since it was first posted on Youtube on Monday, May 7.
‘I am Malawi’ is a short documentary by Geert Veuskens and Pieter de Vos. (Part 1 above, part 2 below.) Veuskens gave us some more details about their project:
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If you’re unfamiliar with my musical work, OkayAfrica.com recently did a profile on me for their web TV series.
Mali’s on our mind. Mostly because of the confusion. Reports from Bamako abound, while there’s still very little information available from the north. Malian artists in the diaspora, it seems, are as confused. (Check Mokobe’s site for example.) Earlier this week, Tuareg band Tamikrest gave a shoutout to “our friend” Ben Zabo. (Is it true what his European label says? Is this “the first album ever to be released by a Malian of Bo descent”?) His hommage to Dounaké Koïta:
Photo: Jorge Antonio, director of "Kuduro: Fogo no Museke"
Kuduro has already received some attention on AIAC. (Is this Cabo Snoop clip intra-continental cultural colonialism?) Kuduro means ‘hardass’ or ‘in a hard place’ in Angolan Portuguese or a mix of Portuguese and Kimbundu, depending on how you parse it. And unlike most kinds of Angolan music it has garnered something of an international audience over the years, quite independent of the formal commercial channels of music promotion, be they national or international.* This new video by MC Sacerdote and Dama Linda “Xé! O que falaste!” (Hey! What did you say?) is a good example. [Read more...]
Filmmaker Shola Ajayi (she’s also a media studies student at The New School in New York City) is one of the people behind this humorous, but sharp, web series on “the African experience in America.” The point behind is to “refute negative portrayals of Africans in the media but it will also work as a window into the lives and traditions of individuals from different parts of the continent of Africa.” Here‘s a link to the trailer and below we’ve embedded the first three episodes. The first features Olajuwon Ajayi (Shola’s sister?) and people messing up her name. The second video includes the question, “Really you’re African?” to a Ivorian who people confuse for someone from the Caribbean.
Nigerian producers Chris Dada and Funmi Iyanda created chopcassava.com “to document the popular fuel subsidy protests in Lagos.” They have now stitched together their “short viral films and video-blog diary, made by a team of volunteers and first uploaded during the protests.” [Read more...]
Senegal voted this weekend. Abdoulaye Wade is gone after 12 years. Macky Sall, once Wade’s protege and variously prime minister and minister of mining under the old man, is now in charge. Only Senegal’s fourth President since independence in 1960. So not a clean break with the past (though the two did fall out over the role of Wade’s son Karim in government affairs). We hope to have a few post election analyses posts up in the next few days. Till then enjoy the exuberance of “the dancing man” filmed (with a cellphone?) by Al Jazeera journalist Azad Essa in Dakar last night.
