When it comes to football punditry, hindsight is the easy way out. So while your very own and brave AIAC published a top 10 list of African footballers who could emerge this year way back in early January, pundits, like the BBC’s Piers Edwards, waited until after the AFCON to make the same prediction. But our early or Edwards’ after the fact predictions have nothing on a Lagos pastor who claimed God showed him the final match in its entirety beforehand.
The Lagos preacher and the football final
February 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment
The Whitney Soundtrack
February 14, 2012 By 1 Comment
Written by Guest Blogger Keguro Macharia
I grew up listening to Whitney Houston. Not simply in the sense that she was famous as I entered adolescence, but that the affect-world she created saturated and colored my sense of what it meant to live in the world. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was fun, Prince was nice to like, New Edition appealing, but Whitney’s “Greatest Love of All” felt transformative. Along with my best friend then—I claimed him as a best friend while he tolerated me—I memorized and sang the song, performing it, if memory serves, for a school assembly. I might be misremembering this. I do remember how affirming it was to believe, as a child, that children were “the future,” and how, as I entered my non-rebellious adolescence as a very religious person, I embraced the possibilities of living “as I believed,” determined not to “walk in anyone’s shadow.” [Read more...]
February 11, 1990
February 11, 2012 By 2 Comments
Today, 22 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked free from a prison outside Cape Town. Four years later, in April, the ANC won South Africa’s first democratic elections and in May 1994, Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa’s first black president. These were, however, only 22 years in the 100 year history of the ANC and in the long history of colonialism, Apartheid and now brief freedom in South Africa. Last month the ANC held a massive party in Mangaung, the place where it was founded in January 1912 by a small group of activists. Hundreds of thousands people headed to the capital of the now Free State province. But this is also a different ANC. Its legacy is not so clear cut anymore and we have covered the personalities that shape it as well as some of its calamities on this blog. Amongst the thousands at the ANC celebrations in Bloemfontein was Prexy Nesbitt, a trade unionist, college professor (he’s taught for years at Columbia College) and leading figure in the US anti-apartheid movement as well as the liberation struggles in Angola and Mozambique between the 1960s and the 1980s. He has a long association with Southern African freedom movements. When Prexy returned to his home in Chicago, he jotted down his impressions of the celebrations, of the ANC and South Africa. With his permission we republish it here. We think it is a fitting reflection on the commemoration of a momentous day. –Sean Jacobs [Read more...]
What’s wrong with abortion?
February 9, 2012 By 7 Comments
In Praise of Mohamed Aboutrika
February 8, 2012 By 1 Comment
By Karim Azeb, Guest Blogger*
It was 76 minutes and 41 seconds into the 2008 African Cup of Nations final match between Egypt and Cameroon when Mohamed Zidane beats defender Rigobert Song to the ball and squares across the goal to Mohamed Aboutrika who calmly maneuvers the ball beneath Cameroon’s diving keeper to score the match-winning goal. This goal cemented Aboutrika’s place as the ‘superman’ of Egypt’s footballing history, was followed by his trademark celebration: dropping to his knees and touching his forehead to the ground in symbolic prayer. Aboutrika’s exploits are also admired outside Egypt. In 2008, BBC readers named him African Footballer of the Year, and CAF named him (or shafted him as, depending on your point of view) to the 2nd best African player in their African Footballer of the Year selection (the same year Egypt and Al Ahly took National Team and Club of the Year, respectively). But Aboutrika is also a hero off the field.
More Benetton Politics
February 6, 2012 By 1 Comment
I swore I wasn’t going to add a thing to the discussion about the idiotic poster campaign by the student/youth wing of South Africa’s opposition Democratic Alliance about a future non-racial love-fest. I have remained shtum (yiddish for ‘quiet’) about its horrid aesthetics, its awful family snap-shot quality. (Some have claimed it’s like a Benetton or Calvin Klein commercial which should leave said brands reeling). I have silenced myself in the face of the straight(ened) hair of the black model which, seriously DA students, is insulting. And, of course, I, like many others out there, have been annoyed at the shallowness of their vision of a non-racial future. Here in North America, it’s reported as a “racial furore” and “heated debate”. But then I heard “Q” on CBC radio the other day. And watched CNN yesterday morning. [Read more...]
JM Coetzee’s Cricketing Life
February 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment
It was with some intrigue that my J.M. Coetzee google alert recently informed me that the elusive author had published something new; this time, apparently, in a contribution to a book celebrating, of all things, Australian cricket.
Intellectual Property Propaganda
February 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment
In his recent State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama highlighted the need to reduce inequality, widen access to healthcare and education and create jobs in the US. It is unfortunate that his administration’s foreign and trade policies threaten to undermine those very things for billions of people in the developing world. This is particularly so when it comes to trade. For example, in several fora and in a range of ways, the US is pushing agreements and encouraging countries to adopt laws that are much more restrictive than World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, and threaten to dramatically limit the ability of millions of people around the world to access affordable medicines.
‘Very African and Very Modern’
February 1, 2012 By 2 Comments
Written by Wayne Marshall*
As if there weren’t already enough to tease out about Konono N°1 and Congotronics, a recent article in The Guardian points to a song and video called “Karibu Ya Bintou” by Baloji, a Congo-born rapper who cut his teeth on the Belgian hip-hop scene but who has worked over the last few years to return to “roots” — in part by incorporating “traditional” sounds of the Congo, from soukous guitars to Konono’s hallmark distorted likembé. The latter can be heard supporting the vivid video for “Karibu Ya Bintou”:
Zambia’s Turn
January 31, 2012 By 5 Comments
As someone who grew up in the leafy suburbs next to the Kafue River, I’m no longer surprised when reporters and tourists exclaim about the tranquility to be found “inside the Real Africa”—with no irony whatsoever.
