In Frelimo’s (Mozambique’s party in power since independence) official story of its liberation struggle and its socialist project after independence, many aspects get silenced. One among these are the re-education centers to “purify” the “compromised” that had not yet adhered to the values of the “new man” that Frelimo intended to create. Alleged criminals, traitors, […]
South African actress/singer/writer Masello Motana has had a career in the entertainment business that many would envy. She has played a leading role in a number of South African television shows as well as in a mainstream feature film. Her poems have been published in several anthologies in that country and she regularly amazes audiences […]
I had the opportunity to sit down with Rana Allam, Managing Editor of the Daily News Egypt towards the end of January this year, just days before the two-year anniversary of the start of the Egyptian uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak. Not surprisingly, the publication’s modest offices, located in the downtown Cairo neighborhood of El Dokki, […]
Aaron Kohn’s African Lookbook interview with David Goldblatt covers a wide swath of subject matter—from childhood experiences, how he began working as a photographer after his father’s death, and why he was never cut out to be a “political” photographer (because “I am a coward,” he says, and because “I’m interested in the underbelly” of […]
I first met Aaron Kohn, one of the co-founders of African Lookbook, a site that combines a one-stop online fashion store with oral interviews, earlier this summer at a New York University sponsored conference on Distance and Desires: Encounters with the African Archive. Sometime during the afternoon session on “the end of the colonial gaze,” we […]
The Yoruba have a word–tutu–for cool. Robert Farris Thompson describes it in his book Flash of the Spirit: “As we become noble, fully realizing the spark of creative goodness God endowed us with, we find the confidence to cope with all kinds of situations. This is Ashe. This is character. This is mystic coolness. All […]
Promised Land is the title of the German photographer Gregor Zielke’s feature about the relocation of 700 families in Mozambique’s Tete province to make space for the Brazilian company Vale’s construction of the Southern Hemisphere’s second largest coalmine. The New York Times recently covered the plight of the people in Cateme following relocation. Gregor Zielke’s […]
The richly layered portraits of Nigerian-American artist Toyin Odutola have been on the Africa is a Country radar for quite some time. Painstakingly created with marker and ballpoint pen, Toyin’s drawings have been making waves in the art world and across social media platforms. Aesthetically striking in their own right, Toyin’s unique style sparks important […]
We tracked down Abdellah Karroum in Paris, and asked him some questions about the Biennale Regard Benin 2012, of which he is the artistic director (more on that in yesterday’s post). Born in 1970 in Morocco, he is artistic director of L’appartement 22, an experimental space for exhibitions and residencies in Rabat, which he founded in […]
This past summer on a rainy June afternoon, I spent a few hours interviewing Nigerian poet and critic, Odia Ofeimun. I met him while co-producing a radio documentary about Nollywood (streaming in full here). Odia has been writing about life in Lagos for the last forty years. His observations reflect many of the key tensions […]
