‘Tribal’ Reality Television
A Dutch TV channel created a fictive African ‘tribe’ for a reality TV show about ‘Africa.’ It employed an actual Namibian ethnic group to do the job. When will this end?
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Miguna Miguna
Miguna Miguna is a Kenyan activist and lawyer.
If This Is Banter
The Newcastle United defender, Steven Taylor, is another no-nonsense (racist) English centre-half.
Weekend Music Break 61
Your weekly collection of new tunes and videos -- this week from Zambia, Ghana, Jamaica, Mali, South Africa and the Netherlands, but first: Congo. This year's Salaam Kivu International Film Festival (SKIFF), which took place in Goma in July, had as its theme "Agizo ya Lumumba -- Justice". The festival's program included film screenings and dance/media/music workshops around the Justice theme and the following video by the same title, featuring Doris, Dak2, Black Man, DMD, BIN-G, Babu, Wanny S-king, Dj Couleur, M-Chris, Nathan, Jobson Madibo, Darsana, Fal-G, Gaius Kowene and Willy Ston, is a great product of that.
What happened to Mbuyisa Makhubo?
A youth activist that came to prominence in the 1976 student uprising in South Africa has been missing since 1978.
Trailers are mini movies
Netta Kornberg watches movie trailers, so you don’t have to. This edition: ‘Mr. Pip,’ ‘Captain Phillips’ and ’12 Years A Slave.’
Julius Malema’s EFF and the South African Left
It is not often that analysts of diametrically opposed ideological tastes in South Africa agree, except about Julius Malema.
Hollywood Pelé
The news that a major studio is bankrolling a film about the Brazilian Pele, contender for greatest player of all time.
The New Yorker and the Mercenaries
An open letter to the New Yorker over its approving coverage of mercenary-activity-for-humanitarian-intervention, despite its record of failure in Central Africa.
The Emperor’s Son
The decision by Spain’s national football team to go play a football friendly in its former colony, Equatorial Guinea, has spotlighted how the latter country is run.
T.O. Molefe makes his New York Times debut
The website of the international edition of the The New York Times website debuted two dozen new “international” columnists this week. One of them is an AIAC contributor.
The Old Smiling Guy
Eqatorial Guinea in West Africa was a Spanish colony. Few Spanish football fans know where it is or how the rulers continue the violent politics inherited from Spain.
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.
How about booking a night in this ‘shantytown’?
A resort in South Africa’s Free State province offers guests accommodation in “a Basotho village and a shantytown.” Who comes up with this offensive stuff?
P-Square are Investigative Journalists
For a while now we've been toying with the idea of starting a Tumblr called "Shit The Nigerian Elite Wastes Nigeria's Money On." Since the country's vast piles of cash are certainly not being spent on decent public health or education, improving the woeful national power supply or preventing planes from falling out of the sky, the super-rich in Nigeria have got to spend it on something.
Weekend Music Break 60
Wherever the sun is in the sky, it's the right time for new music. Here's this
Diagnosing the World’s Mental Health
Journalists are still keen to prod the soft spot of their readers’ insecurities around mental illness, with the fear mongering undertone of ‘it could happen to you.’
The increasingly shaky edifice of Luanda
How Nito Alves has become the symbol of a slowly emerging movement that has shaken the Angolan government’s narrative of post-conflict stability.
Football and Dictatorships
How much of Equatorial Guinean’s tax money did the Obiangs pay to the Spanish FA for a meaningless match between its national teams?
Anthony Bourdain goes to South Africa
For his CNN food travel show, Bourdain picks black Gauteng rather than pretend-European Cape Town and the Western Cape.
Against the Gospel of “Africa Rising”
The World Bank and IMF have waged a sustained assault on African public services over several decades, and have never been called to account for the profound and lasting damage they have done.