Margaret Thatcher died yesterday. Or the day before maybe, I don’t know. At any rate, Thatcher died, and now the hagiographers and the demonizers can have their day. All by herself, apparently, Thatcher “reforged Britain”, “transfixed the United States”, and was “a great leader, a great prime minister and a great Briton.” And how did […]
The opening scene: Soul Brother No. 1 dressed in a skin tight matador-cum-gimp suit, drop-kicking the mic, screeching, roaring, galvanising a Congolese crowd into pure hysteria, while chanting ‘I’m black and I’m proud’, so camp as to be almost melting. This is Zaire ’74, the little known concert to accompany the mega-fight Rumble in The […]
Guest post by Brussels-based anthropologist and, more importantly, Africa is a Country reader Tom Devriendt on a new graphic novel written and illustrated by a group of Congolese graphic artists taking stock of the half-century of DRC independence — Sean Jacobs. When asked in 2009 how he would celebrate Congo’s 50 years of Independence, Congolese […]
Stephen Smith, the former African editor of Le Monde, writes in the London Review of Books (a publication not known for its sober coverage of Africa) that “Francafrique”–the corrupt French-African alliance with its strongmen (like the life president of Congo Brazzaville, Denis Sassou Nguesso, writing shotgun with Nicolas Sarkozy in the picture above), arm sales […]
Starting tonight through October 24th, the excellent Maysles Institute in Harlem is showing films about the Democratic Republic of Congo for the next three and a half weeks. Films like “Soul Power,” Raoul Peck’s “Lumumba,” Mweze Ngangura’s “Piece d’Identite,” “White King, Red Rubber, Black Death,” “Dan Rather Reports: All Mine” (about the sale of a […]
In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, conservative columnist Michael O’Hanlon goes on about a permanent US military presence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (this in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s visit to Eastern Congo, the site of a civil war implicating not just Congolese but two other countries in the region).
