Yesterday Nafissatou Diallo “agreed to settle” the civil lawsuit against prominent French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn—she had accused him of sexual assault last year—for an undisclosed amount. Diallo has also settled a lawsuit against The New York Post. (The newspaper, without any evidence and citing “anonymous” sources, had reported that she worked as a prostitute.) After […]
Last week, before a rugby test match between France and Australia in Marseille, as the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” began playing, Kinshasa-born rugby player Yannick Nyanga began sobbing uncontrollably. It went viral. [See video below.] Nyanga then helped his team to demolish Australia’s, with France winning 33-6, a victory soon forgotten as the post-match media […]
Rachid Khimoune grew up in a small mining town in Northern France where his Algerian parents had settled. It was there that he saw first hand the end of industrialisation: his father lost his job at the local mine and the family moved to the suburbs of Paris. The waves of urban immigration to the cities […]
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 […]
On show at the Islamic Cultures Institute in Paris until January, 50 Years of Reflection, is an exhibition of the work of French-Algerian artist Halida Boughriet. It is one of many recent installments in France commemorating Algeria’s half-century of independence. Boughriet lives and works in Paris, where she has made videos, created installations, and continues […]
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 rapper Awadi was a founder of a Senegalese’s brand of political hip hop. As ‘kola wrote on this blog, Awadi was at the forefront of a 1990s social movement that helped to galvanize a youthful constituency to help elect Abdoulaye Wade as the new president in 2000. “Of course, after [Wade] got the presidency, […]
“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 […]
Boima blogged here recently about UNICEF’s efforts to raise awareness about the drought in the Sahel; what he described as “a step in the right direction towards facilitating genuine empathy, and away from the sensationalistic portrayals that have come to define awareness campaigns.” Then there are campaigns like this one by the French Action contre […]
