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Africa

Read Aloud With Me While We Violently Overthrow the Government

A public reading in a Luanda bookstore by a group of young rappers. The result? Beatings, arrests, hunger strikes and absurd charges of plotting a coup d’etat. A pair of Brazilian journalists visiting Angola investigates the country’s climate of fear and violent intimidation in the waning years of Eduardo Dos Santos’ elongated presidency.

“Together with Luaty, I was writing the last songs for my album”,

Dakar: The Fine Line Between Gay and Homo

Sweeping through the Senegalese press these days is one of those periodic outbreaks of hysterical denunciation that social scientists call a moral panic. Everyone, it seems, is writing alarmed screeds about the fashionable clothing being affected by Dakar youth. Anna Louise Sarr here, writing in Sud, takes a deeper dive than most, trying to hear, through the generation-gapped buzzing in her ears, the actual voices of Dakar’s young trendsters.

Tchekelma, pinw, bodys in v-neck or crewneck, bright, floral colors:

The Last Days of the President’s Pet Parliament

Just days ago, Burkina Faso president Blaise Compaore had instructed his parliament to amend the constitution so he could head toward a fourth decade in power. But as deputies prepared to vote the measure through yesterday, the population turned out en masse to burn down the parliament, and went on to sack the prime minister’s office, the national television and radio offices, and the homes of various authorities for good measure.

Protestors dead or injured, others knocked unconscious. But in spite of it all, the people of Burkina Faso have accomplished something that not a single political analyst would have predicted.

A Freedom Fighter at Rest, and At Ease With Her Own Contradictions

Are a country’s traditional cultural practices a lodestar for a post-colonial people, or a historical burden that holds back progress? In this interview with Mozambiquan novelist and writer Paulina Chiziane, onetime activist with the anti-colonial leftists of FRELIMO, both beliefs are on display.

On a warm November afternoon, Aldino Languana, a Mozambican painter and documentary filmmaker, drove us to Paulina’s house

Ethiopia, Too, is a Gift of the Nile

Ethiopia has spent the last three years of Egyptian domestic disorder building one of the highest dams in the world, the potently named Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Upon completion the structure will rear some 500 feet from the floor of the Blue Nile valley, produce as much as 6,000 megawatts of power for export to other African nations.

The Egyptian people are clamouring for tough measures against Ethiopia.

In Mozambique, the Meager Opulence of Rhino Poaching

In the poacher towns of Mozambique that border South Africa’s enormous Kruger National Park, young men hand-thread the barrels of old rifles to fit them with silencers, then slip barefoot across the border into South Africa to shoot endangered rhinos for their horns. Back home, they build ‘mansions’ in their hometowns’ millionaires row-rude shacks built of brick instead of reeds. The Star‘s reporter crosses the border into Mozambique to report on the poacher’s life.

Kabok, Western Mozambique - You can't find this town on Google Earth, and it appears on no maps.

Mali: That Rap Music of Yours Has Simply Gone Too Far

Whiskey, fast cars, underground rap, and battling MCs versus a moralizing ‘conscious rap’ group and the rage of the state: Mali’s youth music scene erupted into a full moral panic in recent weeks, after one rap crew denounced the rest of Bamako’s rappers as a cesspool of moral corruption.

The group Sofas of the Republic on Monday organized a press conference.

To Be a Nigerian in South Africa

The Nigerian as villain: Movie still from South Africa's District 9.

For Nigerians who have migrated halfway down the continent to the comparative prosperity of South Africa, their adopted country can be a hard and brutal place. Nigerians often face racism in South Africa and elsewhere, where they are considered disreputable and dishonest. Official corruption and violence, even against relatively well off immigrants, is rampant and often deadly.

He is by every standard a successful Nigerian businessman and resident in South Africa

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Nigeria: ‘Anger as suspected homosexuals escape lynching’

The sudden and very public recent switch to allowing gay marriage in the west has triggered retrenchment and hostility in numerous countries, from Russia to Uganda and Nigeria. The tone of an article from Nigeria’s leading newspaper, Vanguard, shows the local establishment’s attitude toward gay rights, even when opponents threaten public order:

Nigerians demonstrated their disdain for same-sex relationships last week.

Dakar, this Potemkin Capital

A Senegalese writer daydreams: if I could ride back from Dakar airport with President Macky Sall in his lavish limousine, what would I tell him? Well, I might start by pointing out all of the ways the capitol is falling apart, all of the dilapidation they work so hard to hide from the motorcade as it zips through town…

Your Excellency,When I swore my total allegiance to you.

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