Once again, the Qatari media company, Al Jazeera has announced it is in the advanced stages of launching a French-language news network. It has already confirmed a 5-hour news block to be aired on its English language network aimed at the UK. In the US, the Qatari media company has also bought Current TV, and […]
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 […]
Strange bedfellows in the Malian Sahara of late. The Tuareg rebel movements that took control of northern Mali last month looked to have struck a deal over the weekend, only to have it come into question since. The supposedly secular, progressive, and multi-ethnic MNLA shook hands with the Ansar Dine, the Salafist movement that has […]
What is there to say about that other African election, the one in France? Sunday was the first of two rounds in this presidential contest, which is a lot more about Europe—specifically Brussels, but also Berlin—than it is about Africa. Still, it will have real effects on both shores of the Mediterranean and of the […]
My friends and the musicians we listen to–we’re mostly the children of immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean–prefer Francois Hollande and the Socialists over Sarkozy, but know Hollande won’t win.
Malian rapper Mokobe ripped into French perfumer Jean-Paul Guerlain’s comments about “hard working blacks” in his recent video, “Ca passe tout seul.” Now Burkinabé MC Art Melody takes on Nicolas Sarkozy and other “chefs d’états.” That’s a sample of Sarkozy’s infamous Dakar speech at the beginning of the song about how Africans have “not fully entered […]
Every major Western government now makes up histories of long-held opposition to Muammar Gaddafi’s dictatorship. Then there’s the truth: As The Financial Times reminded its readers in January this year (H/T: Peter Dwyer) the West’s 2003 decision to change Gaddafi’s regime status from dictatorship to reformer, was really about business. Tony Blair flew down to […]
Sarko has, yet again, got into hot water with its former French colonies in Africa. Troops from France’s former French colonies are to march down the Avenue des Champs-Elysees during Bastille Day celebrations today to commemorate their own independence from Paris, circa 50 years ago.
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 […]
