April marks the springtime festival of fertility and harvest, Holi, which is celebrated throughout northern India. Because Holi is a yearly event that includes a large amount of revelry, without the obvious presence of the sacred, it's become adapted by some odd pockets of people. I even saw a "Festival of Colours Run" race recently: [...]

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When I first came to study in the US in the mid-1990s (at Northwestern University), I was quite enamored by American television. Of course that quickly wore off. But one of the programs that stuck with me, was a weekly film program, "Siskel and Ebert," presented by the city's two foremost film critics. You had [...]

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Guest Post by Janette Yarwood Senegal's rapper-activists recently collaborated on a new single in support of Amnesty International's campaign against impunity in the country. The human rights advocacy organization launched the campaign to draw attention to the fact that there has been no justice for those who died during the 12-year regime of former President [...]

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The International Center for Photography (ICP) is located in the heart of Manhattan, at the corner of West 43rd Street and the Avenue of the Americas. Nearby, Times Square's mirages--brilliant expanses of neon fantasies, some spanning the length of several stories and the breadth of entire city blocks--summon passers-by with images of athletes, models, slick [...]

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With this, I am bringing back Weekend Special for all those things we don't have the time to blog about or say more than the required 140 characters on Twitter.

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Here's ten new videos to get your weekend started. Some pop, some rap, some indie, but first, some dance (what's in a name). Above's Black Coffee latest, feat. Nomsa Mazwai and Black Motion on "Traveller". Next: Owiny Sigoma Band (that's Joseph Nyamungo, Charles Okoko and friends in London) put out this festival-vibes video for "Nyiduonge [...]

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The 23rd edition of the famed West African film festival FESPACO ran last month in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. We previewed it here. Since the festival, we asked two filmmakers--Newton Aduaka (who attended) and Haile Gerima (who stayed away)--and one film critic and academic, Mbye Cham (who served as president of the Official Jury for Long Feature [...]

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British filmmaker Roy Agyemang's documentary on Robert Mugabe, "Villain on Hero?", intended to be a three-month mission but turned into a three-year mission. "Roy and his UK based Zimbabwean fixer, Garikayi, worked their way through the corridors of power, probing the cultural, economical and historical factors at the heart of the "Zimbabwean crisis". In their [...]

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We had been studiously avoiding coverage of Madonna's latest trip to Malawi, but such is the deliciousness of the excoriating 11-point press release put out yesterday by Joyce Banda that we couldn't resist wading in. These two had previous -- Madonna's people had scapegoated Banda's sister over a botched school project -- and the latest [...]

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Welcome to the inaugural post of our new feature profiling African foods and drinks (plus other gastronomical related subjects); and the people on the continent and in the diaspora that are defining and reshaping our ideas and tastes of these. We'll call it "Africa is a Kitchen". To kick off the series, we will be [...]

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