A few days ago, Al Jazeera English channel screened (and then put online) a 30 minute documentary, “The Power of Song,” on the Ivorian reggae star Tiken Jah Fakoly. Made by a Canadian production company, the film was billed by Al Jazeera as following Fakoly on a visit to two village schools in Côte d’Ivoire that he funds (51% of Ivorians are illiterate). The publicity also emphasized generalities. Tiken Jah “fights for Africa’s poor and marginalized.”
A painting sits glowering on the wall of the Jack Bell Gallery in London. Figures daubed in bright colours stare out from the canvases against a dark background broken up by bits of newspaper cuttings. This is Les Fantômes, the work of Aboudia, a 26-year-old Ivorian painter whose stark images have recently been receiving some […]
It’s clear that truth and reconciliation commissions are half-successful attempts at inventing half-baked feelings of national identities (turning a blind eye to economic restoration in South Africa; with some self-interested pressure from above in Rwanda). So it is interesting to note that Côte d’Ivoire’s new president Alassane Ouattara reasoned that one of the first things […]
James North: Orientalism takes a different form in sub-Saharan Africa. There, Orientalists do not emphasize the “Islamic” angle quite as much, although they do sometimes suggest that a “fault line” running across the Sahel, with an expansive “Islam” to the north and “Christianity” to the south, is a reliable guide to conflict in many countries. But […]
That’s how Alexis Okeowo (on Twitter) sums up the end of the four-month stand-off against democracy by Cote d’Ivoire’s former Life President, Laurent Gbagbo. The New York Times has the details and the photograph above on the arrest of Gbagbo. He was found “… sweating [and] plaintive … he appeared in a white tank-top undershirt, […]
Jesse Jackson, whose brand of black politics has quickly become outdated with the emergence of Barack Obama, was in the news recently after he was crowned a prince in Cote d’Ivoire. Because the Agne had crown the recently deceased (murdered?) Michael Jackson in 1992, much of the coverage of the event, like the one above, […]
