Guest Post by Harry Stopes Africa is a Country readers may not regularly check the London Review of Books, a British literary magazine with a circulation just over 50,000–it’s meant more for Bloomsbury than Bamako or Bloemfontein (though some readers could probably find it in Brooklyn; it’s online too with a subscription)–but the magazine has […]
While shopping for Christmas presents this past December in a local gaming store, this little number caught my eye. Ticket to Ride: The Heart of Africa is a variation of a popular board game in which players compete to build railways connecting major cities. The original version of the game uses a map of the […]
Jogchum Vrielink, in this guest post, writes about the attempt by a Congolese student to obtain a ban on the comic book ‘Tintin in the Congo.’ A Brussels court rejected their claims. Despite this outcome, the reasoning of the court jeopardizes free speech, argues Vrielink, a postdoctoral researcher on discrimination law at Belgium’s University of Leuven. As regards the applicants: ‘offensive as the comic may be, their recourse to the law is both misdirected and counterproductive.’
Geo-branding is a serious thing. It is particularly serious when people from other geographic areas decide to brand your geographical area and the people in it, the way they see fit and the way that fits their purposes. No other country, region or continent, I’d argue, suffers from other peoples’ nonsense as much as the […]
NPR’s European correspondent Sylvia Poggioli filed this piece on Friday. Titled “Portuguese Seeking Opportunities in Former Colonies” it takes a breezy look at how the economic crisis in Portugal has sent the Portuguese to the shores of former colonies in search of employment. A number of such articles have circulated in the international press in the […]
Before Boima rides us out this year with West Africa’s best dance tunes, we couldn’t resist including a post with some of the lowlights of 2011.
By Megan Eardley Rhett McNeil’s translation of Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes’s “The Splendor of Portugal” received a lot of attention from the literary world when it was released earlier this fall. And with good reason. McNeil has interpreted Lobo Antune’s thick, cruel prose beautifully. But so far English-language critics have focused on the technical […]
By Basia Lewandowska Cummings We British are very good at honoring the dead. Last Friday Prime Minister David Cameron, his deputy Nick Clegg et al attended the annual Remembrance Day ceremony; our political elite competed to appear most sombre, respectful. Central London was peppered with war memorials–heavy sculptures in dark metals, the lists of names […]
Christian Louboutin is known for the same impossible stiletto heels as Jimmy Choo, but with an added attraction: a strip of carmine-red leather, sewn to cover the underside of each shoe. As a woman walks (or totters) off in those 5-inch heels, she leaves a flash-trail: an infinitude of sexual invitation. Or, as my uncles […]
