Tony Allen's forthcoming book Tony Allen: An Autobiography of the Master Drummer of Afrobeat (Duke University Press, September 2013): "Tony Allen is the autobiography of legendary Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, the rhythmic engine of Fela Kuti's Afrobeat. Conversational, inviting, and packed with telling anecdotes, Allen's memoir is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with the [...]

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Gata Misteriosa and Lee Bass (the Mozambican-Portuguese-Ghanaian-German duo who go by the name of Gato Preto) dropped this new video for "Pirao" last night: no longer strictly kuduro, not yet sure what to call it, but right in time for our weekend special of ten. Janka and the Bubu Gang (Sierro Leone via Brooklyn) also surprised [...]

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With the gutting of foreign coverage by most U.S. newspapers and the need to populate infinite Web space with content, a new creature has emerged: the foreign affairs blogger. Max Fisher, who hosts the Washington Post's WorldViews page, is a leading exemplar of the species. Fisher's newsy nuggets are often low-priority zeitgeist items that may [...]

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Imagine you're a 17 year old middle class Dutch girl. You just cycled home from another boring day at school. Trapped in the conventional humdrum of the day, you are deprived of the stirring type of high school tales that you often watch. Back home, you switch on the TV and stumble upon a rerun [...]

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An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is the creative debut feature of director Terence Nance who we got to know through the work he did together with Blitz the Ambassador. His new film is sold as a take on "young love" in the city of New York. First reviews praise, among other things, the mesh of [...]

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My knowledge of European club football doesn't stretch much further beyond what gets posted here on Football is a Country and the odd link I come across on our Twitter feed (blame my wary interest on the historical underperformance of Belgian teams* and a time-consuming preference for all things music) so I was surprised to [...]

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Karim Wade, the son of octogenarian ex-president Abdoulaye Wade, has been sitting in a central Dakar prison for nearly a month as he awaits trial for corruption charges. The younger Wade was arrested and formally charged with illicit enrichment after an investigation revealed that he amassed $1.4 billion in personal wealth. During his father's presidency [...]

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In a 2010 interview, Aristide Zolberg--the pioneer Africanist political scientist who died on April 12 at the age of 81--described his early interest in the politics of a continent in the first throes of independence: "India was a beacon of the future, and of the triumph of the powerless over the powerful. Africa, and in [...]

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Guest Post by Harry Stopes Africa is a Country readers may not regularly check the London Review of Books, a British literary magazine with a circulation just over 50,000-it's meant more for Bloomsbury than Bamako or Bloemfontein (though some readers could probably find it in Brooklyn; it's online too with a subscription)-but the magazine has [...]

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Many collaborations and surprise comebacks popped up in our feeds this week. First, this one by Kenyans DNA and Tanzania's Mr. Nice, who tried his luck in South Africa for a while but now seems to have found his ground again back home: A Swedish-South African collaboration between Kwaai, Driemanskap, Syster Sol, Mofeta, Kristin Amparo, [...]

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