Category: Africa
The Looting Machine: Investigating Corruption in Africa
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtbypBGGY2E]
Mapping out the networks that link kleptocrats to middlemen, multinationals and markets is the key to understanding the dark side of the globalised economy. Tom Burgis, Financial Times investigations correspondent and author of a new book on the looting of Africa, discussed the tools required: following money trails, reporting from conflict zones, understanding the bigger context – and door-stepping Zimbabwe’s secret police.
Ebola: Beyond the Headlines, Paul Farmer
Google.org hosted Paul Farmer – founder of Partners In Health and Harvard professor – to talk about the global response to Ebola. For more on ebola from Paul Farmer see his LRB article.
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o on HARDtalk
HARDtalk speaks to one of Africa’s greatest living writers, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. Tipped to win the Nobel prize for literature, he decided years ago not to write novels in English but in Gikuyu, his mother tongue. His work includes extraordinary memoirs of colonial times and the Mau Mau uprising in his native Kenya. How far have today’s young Africans forgotten the sacrifices that brought about independence? And has that independence itself been a disappointment?
Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask
The documentary film, Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, explores the life and work of the psychoanalytic theorist and activist Frantz Fanon who was born in Martinique, educated in Paris and worked in Algeria. Examines Fanon’s theories of identity and race, and traces his involvement in the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria and throughout the world.
Reconsidering a Classic: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Reconsidering a Classic: Walter Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”
The seminar on March 19, with commentators Pius Adesanmi and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, focused on Walter Rodney’s influential and much debated book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, originally published in 1972. Rodney was a Guyanese scholar educated first at the University of the West Indies and then at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His pioneering work focused both on the slave trade and on the European colonization of Africa. Rodney was also active politically in Guyana, where he was assassinated in 1980 at the age of thirty-eight.
Nelson Mandela on Palestine
The above video is from a 1990 town hall meeting, held in New York City and chaired by Ted Koppel of ABC Network.
Chinua Achebe Discusses Africa 50 Years After Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe Discusses Africa 50 Years After ‘Things Fall Apart’ on the PBS Newshour.
Continue reading “Chinua Achebe Discusses Africa 50 Years After Things Fall Apart”
Binyavanga Wainaina: Rewriting Africa
Among other things, Binyavanga Wainaina is author of ‘How to write about Africa‘, a biting satire on Western writings on Africa. (See video below the fold.)
It is time to change our image of Africa. Critics say that for too long now, aid organisations, foreign diplomats, politicians and journalists have been stuck looking at this vast continent as a convenient photo-opportunity to illustrate victimhood and desperation. And few men are more forceful in advocating a change in how we perceive Africa than Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina. Talk to Al Jazeera sat down with one of the continent’s most influential young authors to explore why the world is still not understanding Africa, and how to break the lens of media distortion.
How Not to Write about Africa
Djimon Hounsou performs Binyavanga Wainaina’s ‘How to write about Africa‘. It is ironic that this video is produced by Bono’s (Red) campaign, which indulges in just the kind of White Messiah crap that Wainaina satirizes. Also see this and this.
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