The 20 Best Videos By African Artists (and Those Inspired By Africa) of 2014

Afripop - December 29, 2014

Mookho Makhetha

African artists have released some amazing visual work these past 12 months. Some videos gave us a powerful introduction to new artists, powerful enough to etch them in our memories and encouraging us to keep an eye on them in the New Year. Others cemented the popularity of already established artists. Some musicians opted to produce more filmic, iconic music videos. As is customary at this time of year, we have sifted through the huge library of musical releases to find the best visual accompaniments to those releases. We have compiled a list of those, in no particular order, for your viewing pleasure.
Okmalumkoolkat – Holy Oxygen
Director: Wim Steytler
Holy Oxygen is the title track off Okmalumkoolkat’s EP released on Affine Records. Quite like the song itself, the video for Holy Oxygen explores rejection, neglect and redemption. A group of people are cast out of society for a perceived physical or social illness. Rapper Okmalumkoolkat is part of this group of outcasts who are carried off into the boondocks wrapped in thick layers of plastic because presumably whatever malady they suffer from is contagious. However, out in the acrid boondocks and led by the rapper, a new society is born where everyone is treated equally. It is very interesting that this video came out when the world was gripped with fear about the growing Ebola epidemic.

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Our Man in Africa By Michael Bronner

Foreign Policy - 1/24/2014

On the last night of november 1991, the city of N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, was on edge. President Hissène Habré, who had seized control of the country in a coup eight years earlier, was in power -- but the vice was closing.
Rebels were converging on the city in Toyota pickup trucks mounted with machine guns and packed with fighters -- turbaned against the dust and sand, armed to the teeth, and screaming pedal-to-the-floor across the desert. Supplied and funded by Libya, they had crossed into Chad from their camp on the Sudanese border some 700 miles to the east, led by Habré’s former chief military advisor, Idriss Déby.
It was an odd time, then, for a diplomatic dinner party.
The gathering was a last-minute affair organized by the wealthy and well-connected Lebanese consul at the urgent personal request of a key minister in Habré’s cabinet. The presence of some two dozen Chadian elites, French businessmen, and notable expats was really just a ruse to invite the one guest who really mattered: Col. David G. Foulds, the U.S. defense attaché.
The minister pulled Foulds to a quiet corner. “He was chain smoking -- extremely nervous, shaking all over,” Foulds recalled. Habré’s forces had beaten back Déby’s rebels once before, and conventional wisdom, including in Washington, which had long been starstruck by Habré’s military prowess, was that they’d prevail again. But the Americans knew little more than the optimistic picture Habré’s camp was giving them, and the minister knew better. The rebels could reach the capital that night, he said, much sooner than anticipated.

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Decolonising white Berlin

Cornelia Knoll

Africa is a country - December 19, 2014

The myth of an all-white, Christian German society largely persists. So does the idea that anyone who is black only arrived here in the late 20th century or the 21st as refugees, or for economic reasons. Though many Germans actually remain unaware or do not acknowledge it, German colonialism did exist—and no, it was not a “benign” form of colonialism, either; German forces were responsible for the genocide of indigenous Herero populations in Namibia (to find out more: see here and here). These are facts that are difficult for Germans to bear, especially since they also bear the responsibility for the trauma and genocides during World War II So colonial atrocities – and the fact that the nation was involved in slave trade and exploitation of Africans – are, for the most part, happily forgotten. And since German society represents itself as racially white, black lives and bodies are invisible and voices of resistance against this dominant narrative of Germany – those that question Germany as a “white space” without a colonial history in Africa – are hardly ever heard.

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China 'shocked' by deaths at Madagascar plant

Violent labour dispute at Chinese-run factory kills four as workers demand better wages.

Al-Jazeera - 13 Dec 2014

China's embassy in Madagascar has said it was "very shocked" by a violent labour dispute at a Chinese-run sugar factory in the west of the island that resulted in four deaths this week.
A spokesman at the embassy told the AFP news agency in a statement it was "regrettable" that "troublemakers incited by people with bad intentions" were using violence at the Sucoma plant.
The embassy also complained that Malgasy authorities were not upholding a duty to protect the factory.
On Wednesday, clashes between police and Sucoma workers demanding the release of two of their leaders who had been arrested turned deadly, with two people killed and nine wounded. The plant's sugar stocks were also looted.
On Thursday, a policeman and a soldier posted to the factory were slashed to death with knives.

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Africa Ugandan leader calls on Africa to quit ICC

On a visit to neighbouring Kenya, Yoweri Museveni says International Criminal Court is a tool for "oppressing Africa".

Al-Jazeera - 12 Dec 2014

oweri Museveni, the Ugandan president, has called on African nations to pull out of the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court, amid accusations that it unfairly targets Africans.
Museveni's comments, made at a ceremony to mark Kenya's 51 years of independence from Britain, came a week after the chief prosecutor at the Hague-based court dropped crimes-against-humanity charges against Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta.
Museveni criticised the ICC for continuing with Kenya's deputy president William Ruto's case despite an African Union (AU) resolution that no sitting African head of state or deputy should be tried at the court.
"I will bring a motion to the African Union's next session. I want all of us to get out of that court of the West. Let them [Westerners] stay with their court," he said in Swahili.
Although prosecutors dropped charges against Kenyatta, the trial of Ruto on similar charges is under way at the ICC.
"With connivance, they are putting Deputy President Ruto, someone who has been elected by Kenyans, in front of the court there in Europe," Museveni said
The AU is scheduled to hold its annual summit of heads of state at its headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at the end of January, but has not announced a specific date.

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John Pilger - Apartheid Did Not Die

James Baldwin Debates William F. Buckley (1965)

Remembering Slavery in South Africa

Africa is a country - December 7, 2014

“I recognized Cape Town the first time I saw it,” Deborah Thomas revealed at a lecture she gave in the city in July 2014. A sociologist who works in Jamaica, she knew instantly that she was looking at a place shaped by slavery.
What do you see when you recognize slavery?
December 1st, 2014 marked 180 years since the abolition of slavery in South Africa. Few remember that apartheid was built on the systemic violence, displacement, racial formation and institutions of social control that marked slavery in the South African colonies from 1658 to 1834.
In fact, for 176 years, slavery was the central form of social and economic organization in the territories that would form South Africa. People were captured in Mozambique, Madagascar, India and South-East Asia to be brought as slaves to the Cape, the first and largest of the colonies that would form South Africa. Though the Dutch East India Company was forbidden from enslaving indigenous people at the Cape, the latter were subjected to genocide and conditions as brutal as slavery. Over the course of almost two centuries of slave-holding, enslaved people came to constitute the majority of the population of the Cape Colony, numbering more than 60,000 people (Ross, 1999, 6).

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Still Chasing Freedom: South Africa's Struggle After Mandela

God, Not Again: White People and an ‘Out of Africa’ Wedding in Kenya

Africa is a country -  December 5, 2014

Oh no. Africa has “touched” someone “deeply” again. This time, it’s Melbourne-based wedding photographer Jonas Peterson, who has reportedly “shot brides and grooms in all sorts of beautiful places around the world,” but none like this infamous lothario of a continental landmass, which “sung to [him] in a way [he] didn’t know possible, found new chords and played on strings [he] didn’t know [he] had inside [him]”. Africa! You sure know how to make white men swoon.  Surely, Peterson knew what he was getting into when he went to photograph the wedding of Nina, “a wildlife photographer and senior marketing advisor to wild cat conservation organization Panthera – and her fiancé Sebastian” in Masaai Mara in Kenya. This is primal Africa central. White people go there, and bam! They get touched and their chords get strummed. Then they usually end up throwing themselves all over “tribal jewellery” given to them by their close and personal Masaai, dancing about some acacias, taking pictures with smiling African children, and the rest is history.

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Angola's diplomatic dancing

By Zoe Eisenstein and Patrick Smith

The Africa Report - 02 December 2014

The four horsemen of the apocalypse seemed to be galloping towards delegates in New York in September for the UN General Assembly.  Top of the agenda was climate change and the devastation it could cause to Africa and other developing regions, then the growth of terrorism and religious intolerance and finally the most serious public heath emergency for half a century – the spread of the Ebola virus in West and Central Africa.  At the special summit on climate change on 23 September, Angola's vice-president Manuel Vicente spelt out the stakes: "We are at a unique moment of opportunity to safeguard the global climate system on which sustainable development and sustained economic growth depend."

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China trades investment for resources in Africa

Western countries increasingly see Beijing’s relationship with the continent as a threat

Bill Corcoran

The Irish Times - December 2, 2014

The crucial role China has played in Africa’s economic development over the past 15 years has become so pronounced that western countries now see it as a significant threat to their interests across the continent.

The Asian giant’s stated objectives in Africa are to promote development and mutually beneficial trade, much like the goals cited by the US and European Union in regard to their involvement on the continent. But the manner in which China goes about its business there is very different to that of western nations.

China has adopted a policy of “non-interference” when getting involved with African nations, which means it usually does not publicly intervene in countries’ internal affairs or impose political preconditions as part of its rules of engagement with them.

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Africa Cup of Nations Group Draw 2015: Date, Time, Seedings, Live Stream Info

By Tom Sunderland

Bleacher Report - Dec 2, 2014

Only six weeks remain until the Africa Cup of Nations makes its triumphant return to the football calendar, with Equatorial Guinea waiting to welcome the continental elite to its shores in January.

Wednesday's draw brings us a massive step closer to the competition, where we'll find out who will face off against who for the 2015 title.
To ensure you don't miss a minute of this week's draw, read on for viewing information detailing where and when to watch the event, along with discussion of which sides warrant extra attention.

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Robtel Neajai Pailey on Band Aid 30