Blog
The Other African election: France’s First Round
Both of the front-runners, incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist François Hollande, have run against FrançAfrique. Easier said than done.
Mahesh Shantaram’s Addis Ababa Diary
Images of Ethiopia by Indian photographer Mahesh Shantaram
In Praise of Jeffrey Gettleman’s Pulitzer
Pulitzer awarded Gettleman $10,000 for "his vivid reports, often at personal peril, on famine and conflict in East Africa."
Goldman Sachs’s Angolan interests
When the Financial Times commits an entire article to topics Angolan, it fills my Google news alert for a week.
Soviet cinema and African filmmaking
Abderrahmane Sissako’s oblique suggestion of what a ‘socialist friendship’ might be in his first film, "October" (1993) set in a then-declining Soviet Union.
The impotence of the political bourgeoisie
Ousmane Sembene's "Xala" (1974) is a powerful political narrative. At times edging toward the surreal, at others an acute depiction of the complexity of the freshly independent Senegal.
Why is so much coverage of the Mali crisis so bad?
We mean the kind of bad that comes from being caught in a Beckettian loop of either saying nothing at all or having nothing to say.
The Swedish Golliwog Cake
It’s a brilliant staging of structural racism and post-colonial existence by the artist Makode Linde.
The Swarm of Insects Destroying the City
Interview with South African writer Henrietta Rose-Innes's about her novel, "Nineveh."