Bamako doesn’t feel like the capital of a country at war. True, people are stressed, and the pace of life might have slowed. The city’s building frenzy has subsided. Ça va pas, but things are calm, even if late in March, far from cool. In the distant North, a fifth French soldier died over the […]
Bentley Brown, director of the exciting new film ‘Faisal Goes West’, spoke with me about migration, building a cinematic bridge between Sudan and America, and lawyers turned pizza delivery boys.
Guest post by David Styan In recent weeks media coverage of African criminals and their victims have been dominated by capture (Kony) and conviction (Lubanga), largely overshadowing the latest twist in the most comprehensive and longest-running African legal case, that of Chad’s Hissène Habré. His crimes — the torture and extra-judicial killing of tens of […]
Twelve years after ground was first broken on an oil pipeline between Chad and Cameroon, the documentary film, Quel Souvenir explores the impact of this World Bank sponsored project on local communities from inland Chad to the Cameroonian coast. While the World Bank and oil companies like Exxon and Chevron promised local development along the […]
As the report by Al Jazeera English, above, indicates, being black in Libya, always a precarious existence, have become even more dangerous since the revolt against Muammar Gaddafi’s regime commenced. I asked my former PhD advisor, David Styan–who writes on politics in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa and who is based at Birkbeck […]
Africa has come to Cannes. First up is the documentary, Benda Bilili!, screening as part of the Director’s Fortnight. This French documentary, which was shot over several years and cut from over 600 hours of film, focuses on a group of Congolese street musicians, some of whom are paraplegic. The film is getting rave reviews—it […]
This is for real: Chadian authorities summarily expelled a Cameroonian-born journalist from the country on Wednesday, a day after he wrote an op-ed in response to a government official’s suggestion that the Nobel Peace Prize should have been awarded to Chad President Idriss Deby [whose forces are implicated in a civil war and the war […]
