London

Thursday, November 28th, 2013

The Afropolitan Must Go

My first thought when reading Taiye Selasi's 2005 essay ‘Bye-Bye Barbar’ (or ‘What is an Afropolitan?’) was that this is the kind of sludge that would piss off Binyavanga Wainaina. One quick google and lo and behold: “For Wainaina, Afropolitanism has become the marker of crude cultural commodification -- a phenomenon increasingly ‘product driven,’ design focused, and...

Tuesday, October 30th, 2012

Film Africa (5): ‘The Assassin’s Practice’

Somewhere in the opening shot of The Assassin’s Practice there is a woman crying alone in bed, tangled in a blue room. If the sound of her racking sobs is enough to turn your stomach, you won’t...

Monday, October 1st, 2012

Africa is a Country and London’s Film Africa 2012 Festival

This year Africa is a Country is partnering with Film Africa, London’s only annual African film festival to review some of the films that will be screening 1-11 November. Perhaps this should also be filed partly under...

Friday, July 27th, 2012

Africa Utopia and London’s “Festival of the World with Mastercard”

The London Olympics starts tonight and certain streets of the city are swollen with purple-shirted volunteers, track-suited athletes and tourists. In Hyde Park, the continent of Africa has been reincarnated as ‘Africa Village’ and ‘Africa Land’; the emphasis...

Saturday, June 23rd, 2012

Gaddafi Archives at the London Photography Festival

The ‘Gaddafi Archives – Libya Before the Arab Spring’, which opened this week at the London Festival of Photography is an embarrassment of riches. This exhibition of images recovered from the remains of Gaddafi’s archives and rephotographed...

Friday, June 22nd, 2012

A Room Adrift in London

Here in London we have been having a lot of trouble with pageants. After the riots last August, the state is hoping that summer plans – the Olympics, the Hackney festival – will be distraction from the...