Demba Ba has a habit of falling to his knees post-goal and praying.

Via FIFA.com:

Premier League matches without defeat represents Newcastle United’s longest unbeaten run in the English top flight since 1951. The surprise sequence has taken the Magpies up to third, with over six months having now passed since they last tasted league defeat. The star of their unlikely rise has been Demba Ba, who has already become the first Newcastle player since Andy Cole to score multiple league hat-tricks in a single season – a feat that not even Alan Shearer managed during his time on Tyneside. The Senegalese striker has proved to be one of the Premier League’s most prolific predators since moving to West Ham United from Hoffenheim last season, accruing 15 goals in 18 starts for his two English clubs.

See also Goal.com on Ba announcing his intention to play for Senegal in the 2012 African Nations Cup in Equatorial Guinea and Gabon from January 21st to February 12th, much to the dismay of his club, their fans and the Newcastle sports media.

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.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.