Flying back from Dakar and Bamako to my home near “Little Senegal,” I snatched up Courrier International’s special issue “Afrique 3.0″ while passing through Paris. Tom made a quick survey of it just as it hit the newstands. Now that we’ve had a little more time to spend with it, what to make of it? […]
In the past decade the international media first focused on China’s economic boom, which was then followed by the ‘Africa is rising’ narrative. The latter partly as a result of China’s investments. Many have wondered whether China’s interest in Africa would trigger a new wave of colonialism and exploitation of mineral resources, needed to keep […]
Yesterday, Goodman Gallery emailed a press release to its huge recipient list, announcing a “joint settlement with [the] ANC.” After closed meetings, conducted in “order to establish common ground and a basis for resolution” in which all parties strove “to strike a balance” between maligned factions “in a spirit of amicability,” the Gallery felt it […]
The moderator received a text which said that the political philosopher was trying to find an internet café, then another saying Mbembe was trying to find an internet café with Skype, then another saying that he was trying to find an internet café with Skype in a part of the city where there wasn’t a power-cut.
At the end of 2011 we contemplated asking you, dear reader, who you think was the most influential African thinker alive. We abandoned the idea for a while because of our thing against lists (except our end of year lists, of course). I got the initial idea from the British blog, Left Foot Forward, which had […]
John Akomfrah’s new film, The Nine Muses, continues the powerful cine-cultural tradition inaugurated by the Black Audio Film Collective in Britain in the early 1980s. Similarly to his earlier films, Akomfrah handles archival footage with a profound sensitivity; he does not interrogate the history of migration through the archive, nor pore over ‘celluloid fossils’, rather, […]
Four moments which rocked France this year were the cases against rapper Youssoupha and IMF Head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the unveiling of the Paris exhibiton Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage, curated by former French footballer Lilian Thuram, and the 50th anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s death.
Cameroonians went to the polls today. In an interview with SlateAfrique, Achille Mbembe (b. 1957, Cameroon ) explains why no one else but the 78-year-old incumbent Paul Biya stands a chance to win. “Having stripped society of all security, [the current regime] now holds the entire population by the balls”:
Achille Mbembe (the links are to previous references of Mbembe on this blog) gave a lecture at the Birkbeck School of Law in March of this year. You can download an audio recording of the talk entitled ‘Law, Democracy and the Ethics of Mutuality: Notes on the South African Experiment’ here.
