In the last week I attended a conference of 'Future Leaders of Nigeria', and one of the facilitators made a very interesting statement, "Politicians do not value the number of followers you have on Twitter, they value the number of people you can bring to the table when it matters." That proposition was proved beyond [...]

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This year marks the 20th anniversary of the New York African Film Festival. The Festival-from April 3rd to the 9th at Lincoln Center-is still the longest running, and probably most significant, African film festival in North America. (I've helped out on the festival in the past, so I'm biased.) It is worth remembering what the [...]

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Angola is a country that has been ruled by the same party, the MPLA, since independence in 1975. The party has effectively transformed itself from a socialist bloc into a purely capitalistic organization with a diverse array of business interests and impressive market-savvy, all thanks to the barrels upon barrels of oil the country has [...]

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Indira Mateta is a young Angolan photographer transform her hobby into a promising career. In 2008 she won the BESA Award for Photography in Luanda and has since had her work appear at the Teatro Elinga, the Catholic University of Angola, Oscar Ribas University, Instituto Camões de Maputo and the União de Artistas Plásticos Angolanos, [...]

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Post by Percy Zvomuya As Pope Francis supports San Lorenzo (nickname Los Santos), a premier league team in Argentina's Primera Division, what better way to dissect his ascension to the papacy than by way of football. The pope as intellectual For the first time in the Catholic Church's 1,300 year history the Catholic church has [...]

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We hardly ever feature Brazilian music, and even less their take on Afrobeat. The above tune by the Abayomy Afrobeat Orchestra dates from last year, but the video's new. Hope to see more from them. We've got 9 more videos lined up for you this week. Ugandan duo Radio & Weasel came up with this:  Nigerian [...]

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Vers la forêt de nuages ("To the cloud forest") is a film by Robin Hunzinger, who tells a story about his Ivorian wife Aya and their son Tim (in the image above), travelling in Côte d'Ivoire to pay tribute to Aya's father who recently passed way. The film intends to offer a portrait of and an "initiation" to [...]

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Mali is short of heroes at the moment. War in the north has produced very few, only villains aplenty, some of them in uniform. The same holds for Bamako's deep, existential political crisis. Many people have tried to seize the moment; few have risen to it. So it's good to be reminded of someone like [...]

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Guest Post by Abdourahman Waberi, Ali Deberkale and Dimitri Verdonck On the eve of the legislative election of February 22, 2013, in the Republic of Djibouti, Hafez Mohamed Hassan, a 14-year-old schoolboy, was shot dead by the secret service of President Ismaël Omar Guelleh's regime while he was taking part in a demonstration organized by a [...]

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Burkina Faso's president, Blaise Compaoré (that's him above posing in between Michelle and Barack Obama at the UN a few years ago), is receiving some mixed PR right now. The Telegraph in the UK has said that even with a murky past, Compaoré may be shaping up to be West Africa's chief negotiator in regional [...]

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