Africa Is a Country

Diplo vs Boima Redux

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

Diplo vs Boima Redux

By
Sean Jacobs

Remember when famed DJ and tastemaker, Diplo, got mad at Africa is a Country’s Boima for a post Boima did about global dance music and cultural appropriation? (Click here for the post and scroll down for Diplo’s outbursts). Anyway, Okayplayer’s Eddie ‘Stats’ Houghton (check out his Large Up blog btw) got the two to sit down (and even shake hands) recently in New York City. You can read the transcript of the exchange on Okayplayer’s blog. It is all very civilized. In related news, Diplo is the subject of a rambling Rolling Stone profile that went up today in which vague reference is made to “critics [who] have accused [Diplo] of hipster imperialism.” I hope they weren’t talking about Africa is a Country. Later today (Friday) Boima will join Eddie, Wayne Marshall (of Wayne and Wax) and Venus X Iceberg (it was her twitter ‘beef’ with Diplo that first prompted Boima’s post btw) at New York University for a roundtable discussion at the EMP Museum’s 2012 Pop Conference on “Tropical Music, Appropriation and Music “Discovery” in the Global Metropolis.” Let’s hope there’s a tape.

Further Reading

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.

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.

Energy for whom?

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.