New York is an amazing city, especially from a hip-hop perspective. It’s one of the few places on earth where you can see that hip-hop is part of the culture, not just something that you watch on TV. But for me – doing music that is mostly in French and not in some Congolese language that sounds exotic for Western people – it’s a difficult market. I take everything that happens here like a plus one. I’m not supposed to be here.
There’s a fast growing collection of cross-over hip hop songs produced by Central and West African artists making a living in the diaspora (especially in French-speaking hotbeds like Marseilles, Paris or Brussels), lyrically reaching back to the countries they’ve left. This collaboration between Togolese artist YaoBobby (rapping in Mina) and the prolific Fredy Massamba (singing […]
The opening scene of Belgian filmmaker and artist Nicolas Provost’s new feature film, “The Invader,” set on one of the beaches of the Italian resort island Lampedusa, which has become a primary European entry point for undocumented African migrants into Europe. (Halfway into this video interview at the Venice film festival, Provost talks about why he opens the […]
Yes, some Europeans, specifically Belgians — who else but “a fine group of web designers, web developers, communication specialists, tech, boys and girls” — came up with this idea. So if someone asks you why you need another piece of cake, just say “I’m eating for Africa.” To help starving “people and children” in East […]
If you missed this: Lilian Thuram, the former footballer who won a World Cup medal with France in 1998 and sometimes philosopher, was in Brussels last week to promote his anti-racism campaign. While having lunch at a restaurant, the staff there told him that the toilets were “reserved for clients.” The manager David Martin is […]
Stephen Smith in The London Review of Books: I am not arguing that we should all know everything there is to know about Rwanda. My point is that we don’t seem to want to know what happened in 1994, or what’s happening now. We’ve learned the wrong lesson from the organised massacre of 800,000 people, […]
