How does it feel to be an African asylum seeker in Europe

“Bon voyage” (“Have a nice trip”), a Swiss animated short movie by Fabio Friedli, seeks to convey how it feels to be an African asylum seeker in Switzerland, and it does so by capturing the experience in the simplest manner, with ballpoint pen and paper. Reactions to the movie show how divided the Swiss are […]

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‘Golden Theater or Gutted Whore-house?’

Grace Ndiritu, To Africanize is to Civilize, 2003 (Courtesy of the artist/Galerie Baudoin Lebon)

The latest issue of Savvy Journal (#3) includes an article, ‘Transcending “Africa”‘, by Emeka Okereke, photographer and founder of the ‘Invisible Borders Trans-African Photographic Initiative’ (whose work we’ve been excited about here). It is an interesting contribution to debates about the recent successes of African art in the contemporary art world, which has been getting increasingly lively. In its […]

Azonto Germany

AZONTO

So apparently there’s more to the Ghana-Germany connection than the Boateng boys. I think the above Azonto rave in Hamburg this past January is proof of that. It’s perhaps an illustration of some of the points we were trying to make about diverse histories and orientations of African pop, the diaspora, and its international dissemination. […]

Colonialism

A satirical film made by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1986. Worth seeing again.  It should also be the dvd you pop in at your colonial-themed wedding.

Europe’s Apartheid

In a recent interview on French television to promote his new book “Sortir de la Grande Nuit: Essai sur l’Afrique Décolonisée,” Johannesburg-based political philosopher Achille Mbembe suggested that Europe “seems to be gripped by an enormous desire for apartheid.” (We blogged about it here.) This is also the implicit theme of a recent lecture by British social theorist […]

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