AfricaIs aCountry

Bwana Kitoko

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Bwana Kitoko

By
Tom Devriendt

If you’re passing through Brussels the next months and you haven’t seen Belgian painter Luc Tuymans’s series Mwana Kitoko: Beautiful White Man yet, go visit his retrospective (Friday 02.18 > Sunday 05.08) at BOZAR. The original 2000 exhibition’s title ‘Mwana Kitoko’ refers to “the rather derogatory nickname Mwana Kitoko, i.e. beautiful boy, which was given to Belgian’s young King Baudouin by the Congolese, and which was promptly changed by the Congolese authorities to the more respectful and authoritative Bwana Kitoko, i.e. beautiful, noble man.”

[Source]

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.