Guest Post by Harry Stopes Africa is a Country readers may not regularly check the London Review of Books, a British literary magazine with a circulation just over 50,000–it’s meant more for Bloomsbury than Bamako or Bloemfontein (though some readers could probably find it in Brooklyn; it’s online too with a subscription)–but the magazine has […]
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 […]
While we were on vacation this past summer, something big happened. Many of you no doubt have heard by now of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ mapping report, which, among other things, details the human rights abuses committed by Rwandan troops against Hutu refugees in then-Zaire in 1996-1997. The […]
@Boima (at Ghetto Bassquake) posted a music video (via Sonja Uwimana) by the Congolese artist Baloji, “… the greatest music video maker in the world right now.” Baloji is doing an update of Grand Kalle et l’African Jazz’s independence rumba from 1960. Remember Baloji’s last effort? He is killing it now. UPDATE: My man, Tom […]
Revisiting the Muhammed Ali-George Foreman fight in the then-Ziare in 1975 as performance art. Tonight in Brooklyn.
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).
