Africa Is a Country

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Africa Is a Country

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The “wisdoms” of Akon

When the Senegalese-American singer Akon is not claiming to provide electricity around the continent, he gives interviews. The latest, to Larry King, is a train wreck because of Akon’s reactionary’s views. For those in the know, this is peak Akon.

The trouble with #WhiteHistoryMonth is that it is not history yet

Today, the theft of Aboriginal children – including babies taken from the birth table – is now more widespread than at any time during the last century. As of June last year, almost 14,000 Aboriginal children had been "removed". This is five times the number when Bringing Them Home was written. More than a third of all removed children are Aboriginal – from 3% of the population. At the present rate, this mass removal of Aboriginal children will result in a stolen generation of more than 3,300 children in the Northern Territory alone.

#CaptionThis: What was Madonna pointing at?

For some odd reason, last weekend, this striking black and white image by photographer Terry Kane of pop singer Madonna "tour(ing) a UN millennium village in Mtanga, Malawi, in 2007" illustrated a Financial Times book review of ‘The Tyranny of Experts’ by William Easterly and ‘The Idealist’, by Nina Munk. Madonna is not mentioned in the piece and the review rumbles on. You can read it here. In any case, we were struck more by the image and posted it on our Facebook page, where we asked readers to #captionthis. We promised that we'd feature a few on the blog, so here are some of them.

#WhiteHistoryMonth: When Marlon Brando brought up Native American rights at the Oscars

In March 1973, Marlon Brando won the Oscar for Best Actor for his role in “The Godfather.” Before the live broadcast of the ceremony Brando indicated he would not turn up at the ceremony and refuse the prize if he won. He won. Brando had asked Shasheen Littlefeather, a Native American media activist, to go on stage and give a speech about the portrayal of Native people in Hollywood films. In this video you can see what happened at the ceremony. Basically Ms Littlefeather was not able to give the full speech (no surprises, some attendees in the audience booed her), but afterwards handed it out to journalists. Some media ran it in full the next day.

On the Journalistic Value of Internet Map Memes

At the Washington Post, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a complex issue, when color-coded in a way that reassured Americans of their innate Superiority over inferior Peoples, could always be relied upon to get way more Hits than any actual Reporting.