We’re starting a new weekly series today. We ask photographers who make portraits of African subjects to introduce us to their work. Basically they pick their five favorite photographs, describe the subject matter, what brought them to the image and what kind of mood they were trying to capture. Our first guest is Zachary Rosen, […]
At the moment when Africa is once again reduced to a cesspool of panga-slashing child soldiers and the abode of the world’s most dangerous man, a vanity piece on where Lucy Liu goes when she wants to get away (safari) is harmless enough.
Gonçalo Mabunda’s chilling constructions are now on display at the Jack Bell gallery in London. His thrones (above) and faceless masks (below) are made from weapons used in Mozambique’s civil war. These designs make dark mockery of ergonomics: you wouldn’t want to put these masks on your face. There is some uncanny resemblance to Modernist assemblages, and […]
David Patrick Lane writes on ‘Searching for Pancho’, a short film by South African filmmaker Christopher Bisset about the work of Pancho Guedes, perhaps the most renowned of all building designers — about five hundred structures all told — in what was then Portugal’s piece of the action, Lourenço Marques, now Maputo.
In the last two decades, SABMiller become one of the world’s biggest beermakers by buying domestic labels and marketing them locally. They’ve hired anthropologists, historians, and sociologists to help sell ‘local intimacy’ for 200 plus brands in 75 plus countries and demonstrated that regional branding can be competitive on a global scale. Their domesticating efforts […]
The Mozambican Associação da Luta Contra o Cancer (ALCC) enlists female superheroes to raise awareness around breast cancer. If you can’t read the small print copy: “Nobody’s immune to breast cancer. When we talk about breast cancer, there’s no women or superwomen. Everybody has to do the self-examination monthly. Fight with us against the enemy […]
In May 2000 The Economist ran a cover story: “Africa. The Hopeless Continent.” People talked about it for a while afterward. It spawned countless op-eds about Afro-pessimism and -optimism. It even became the basis for “Contemporary African Politics” college courses for a while. Now last week, they ran a feature cover where the magazine predict a more hopeful scenario for the continent’s 54 states.
In 1978 Jean-Luc Godard and his partner Anne-Marie Miéville traveled to Mozambique on the invitation of the new government to advice the latter on the start-up of a national television system. Read about it here and here.
Many of you know those spectacular images of burning computer parts and beautiful, sad young men, taken in some God-forsaken corner of polluted Ghana where the ‘West’ has dumped all its obsolete toys to be ‘recycled’. Now, here’s Southern Africa’s answer: we can do apocalyptic burning and degraded human beings on rubbish tips, too. Portuguese […]
We had much fun selecting recent videos coming out of South Africa last week, so we decided to follow up on this. At the occasion of each country’s independence day, over the next months we’ll try and collect songs (and videos, if we can sleuth them) we find interesting. We’ve already missed some this month, […]
