Africa is a Radio, Episode #7
This month's selection of tunes is from Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Colombia, the United States, the U.K., Angola, and classics from East Africa.
Culture
The Bullshit Files: The “Mandela Ray Ban Sculpture”
Public art, the vandalism of Nelson Mandela’s legacy for commerce and the spoiling of public space in Cape Town.
Africa Through a Lens
An online archive of photos taken from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office photographic collection housed in the UK's National Archives.
Sodade
There's something amazing about not being able to understand lyrics but still being able to comprehend what a song means.
You’re told that you will get used to it
A South African doctor working for MSF writes about her experience working in the Ebola zone in Sierra Leone.
Passports and nations
The writer Taiye Selasi doesn’t seem to realize there is a difference between identity as a subjective, biographical problem and identity as a legal and political reality.
Five Questions for: Filmmaker Philippa Ndisi-Herrmann
Filmmaker Philippa Ndisi-Herrmann sees film as a powerful tool to inspire compassion by briefly letting us live another’s life and expand our understanding.
Making African celebrity culture
Considering the proximity of celebrity culture to how capitalism operates in Africa, why is it not given more serious attention?
Every Man Gotta Decide His Destiny
Survival is an album with a purpose. Released in 1979, it is Bob Marley’s most political recording.
Angry farmworkers on a tractor
Done 'debating' whether “Larney Jou Poes” is free speech? Let's talk about the conditions of farmworkers.
My barber loves these tunes
Hipsters Don't Dance 'Top 5 World Carnival Tunes' for October 2014.
The Afrobarometer
Inaugurating our series on digital African projects. We'll document projects working to make more resources about Africa’s past and present available online.
How to be an expatriate in Nigeria
Nigerians love expatriates more than they love themselves. Nigeria is expatriate heaven, claims novelist and lawyer, Elnathan John.
Children’s Books African Kids Could Relate To
While visiting relatives in Nigeria, I found a children’s bookshop in Lagos with no African children or African languages in their books. That day changed everything.
The Dookoom Debate
What role should media play in the midst of controversial cultural expressions, like songs that address racist violence by white farmers against their workers in South Africa?
Pan-African fashion that rejects “social entrepreneurship”
Rejecting how African products are marketed to Westerners.