“Africa Rising” stories have become old news in English-speaking media, so much so that Africa is a Country called them a meme not long ago. But only a few have run in French news outlets, and one such op-ed [fr] recently made it to the pages of the well-respected daily newspaper Le Monde. The piece […]
Perhaps it is simply through good timing that I am rereading Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark and lingering over one sentence: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. Such it is with artist Kehinde Wiley’s continued complex relationships with the Black body.
Even if you like Mads Brügger’s documentaries, chances are you hate him. The characters he plays in his “non-fiction films”—a Communist theater director in The Red Chapel and, more recently, a corrupt diamond smuggler in The Ambassador—are manipulative and brash, pushing his subjects into greater levels of absurdity and maybe even hurting people. But are […]
Why should it be a big deal if a French president gives a speech in Dakar? Lots of reasons. Rarely does anyone walk softly and carry a big stick in quite the same way that François Hollande did earlier this month. Hollande was walking softly—even talking softly—while in Dakar. Some five years after Nicolas Sarkozy’s […]
“The face of the threat has changed,” a French military officer tells Jeune Afrique. “Our preoccupation is no longer to support the regimes.” The comment isn’t followed by a winking emoticon but Jeune Afrique did draw a map (link) of the French army presence in Africa today.* In 1960 France had around 30,000 soldiers on […]
What is there to say about that other African election, the one in France? Sunday was the first of two rounds in this presidential contest, which is a lot more about Europe—specifically Brussels, but also Berlin—than it is about Africa. Still, it will have real effects on both shores of the Mediterranean and of the […]
Sarko has, yet again, got into hot water with its former French colonies in Africa. Troops from France’s former French colonies are to march down the Avenue des Champs-Elysees during Bastille Day celebrations today to commemorate their own independence from Paris, circa 50 years ago.
