AfricaIs aCountry

Jeffrey Wright Reads Walt Whitman

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

Jeffrey Wright Reads Walt Whitman

By
Sean Jacobs

This is from a minute ago, but I had to post it as it features part of my neighborhood. Wright, actor and unassuming Fort Greene, Brooklyn, resident (that’s also my neighborhood) reads his favorite Walt Whitman poem (from his blackberry) in front of the Walt Whitman Houses on Myrtle Avenue in the neighborhood. The reading was for “… a segment from “Works In Progress,” a new TV and online series about storytellers around the world in development from creator Ina Howard Parker.” The series also includes a less dramatic interview with Ismael Beah, the writer from Sierra Leone, at Madiba Restaurant, also a few blocks from my house. BTW, is that it for the series?–Sean Jacobs

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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.