Mos Def, ‘Supermagic’
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_RXEJLx2Uw&w=500&h=307]
I love the sample as well as the graphics in the video for “Supermagic” off Mos Def’s latest album, “The Ectastic.”
Further Reading
The end of AGOA
A postmortem on the African Growth and Opportunities Act.
Goïta, gift to the insurgents
Despite the popularity of the Sahel’s military leaders internationally, most Malians have yet to see improvement to their material conditions at home.
Hollywood gloss and cinematic Afropology
Africa’s biggest filmmakers are rejecting Western demands for resolution and containment in cinema—instead embracing ambiguity, rupture, and silence as tools for historical reckoning of African stories.
Between Washington and Beijing
Amid Trump’s tariffs, Africa faces trade disruptions, corporate power, and emerging partnerships in its quest to control its economic destiny.
The resurgence of Benin sound
Musical traditions and language from Edo State have moved from the margins of Nigeria’s national (and international) culture to the center.
Fighting for the waste commons
A new documentary film examines the politics of waste work and discard infrastructures in Dakar.
Hope after liberation
A portrait of South Sudan’s unfinished journey, where political sacrifice meets everyday survival, and the burden of memory contends with the quiet power of continuity.
Sunday service on two wheels
In Johannesburg, a new generation of Black cyclists is redefining joy, movement, and solidarity—taking over the streets to ride, to reclaim space, and to reimagine freedom.
What to do about Kenya’s femicide problem?
A lack of reliable statistics and coherent strategy to address femicide in Kenya, has left a culture of everyday insecurity for women in the country.
How to unmake the world
In this wide-ranging conversation, para-disciplinary artist Nolan Oswald Dennis reflects on space, time, Blackness, and the limits of Western knowledge—offering a strategy for imagining grounded in African and anti-colonial traditions.
A migrant’s tale
On his latest EP, Kwame Brenya turns a failed migration into musical testimony—offering a biting critique of ECOWAS, broken borders, and the everyday collapse of pan-African ideals.
The global gateway to nowhere
Europe’s flagship development plan promises investment and partnership—but delivers debt, displacement, and old colonial patterns dressed up in green.
What Portugal forgets
In the film ‘Tales of Oblivion,’ Dulce Fernandes excavates the buried history of slavery in Portugal, challenging a national mythology built on sea voyages, silence, and selective memory.
Afropolitans and the fantasy of a digital nation
Web3 utopians promised a sovereign future for the African diaspora—but what they delivered was a networking club for elites, wrapped in crypto-libertarian hype and Afro-futurist aesthetics.
After the digging, who remembers?
In the aftermath of the Stilfontein mining tragedy, South Africa must confront not just policy failure but a deeper amnesia: the erasure of women, memory, and indigenous ethics from its extractive economy.
Velvet rebellions
The oppositional sartorial lens of Congolese sapeurs exposes the limits and frailties of representation work in New York’s Met Gala.
South Africa’s American refugees
Cape Town’s digital nomads chase cheap luxury and scenic backdrops—but behind the matcha lattes and “social impact days” lies a deeper story of economic power, displacement, and global inequality.
The other route to the American dream
With Europe increasingly closed, West African migrants are turning to the US—via Latin America. But the journey is long, dangerous, and brutally expensive, raising urgent questions about global responsibility.
The politics of class from above
In Tanzania and beyond, political elites manage informal workers not by ignoring them—but by shaping their identities, dividing their ranks, and using class to tighten their hold on power.
Green hydrogen, old colonialism
The EU’s hydrogen push in North Africa is sold as climate progress, but beneath the green gloss lies a familiar story of extraction, debt, and dispossession.