Africa
ash.smyth
How much do you remember about the Ghanaian presidential run-off of 2008? Me neither. And there's a reason for that. The Swiss documentary-maker Jarreth Merz spent three hectic months on the campaign trail, the better that we might understand – and he's put it all down in An African Election.In little over 50 years since Kwame Nkrumah's groundbreaking election as Africa's first black prime minister, Ghana has been through five military dictatorships and four republics. The most notable figure in all this chequered history is Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings, who seized power in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
I’m stood in the dusk in front of the tomb of Sheikh Hamid al-Nil as the sun sets on Khartoum, reddening in the exhaust-filled air as it deflates over a receding jumble of low-rise blocks spreading down the banks of the Nile and out towards Tuti Island, where the waters of the Blue and White Nile meet. This is no quaint, picturesque view, though you do feel you're in some ancient theatre of humanity when you land in Khartoum.The voice of a Koranic singer billows and froths from the PA and speakers studded around the conical cream-and-green tower of the mosque, and a crowd of several Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Where’s the African car? Seun Kuti wanted to know. There are German cars, Chinese cars (he grimaced) even Brazilian cars. At least, anyway, there is “original African music”, not traditional but something new. Actually, not entirely new, as some of the music and some of his band, Egypt 80, were that of his father, that visionary genius, subversive and sex maniac Fela. (Not just 28 wives “on a rota system” as Fela explained to me in an interview I wrote up for theartsdesk, but plenty of groupies, too.) One of the things I found impressive about Seun and his band last night was how he Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Toumani Diabaté is the world’s greatest and best-known kora player. Plugged in deep to a musical tradition that goes back over seven centuries, this griot or jali takes his custodial role very seriously, but he is also an adventurer who has stretched the repertoire of his ancient strings by listening avidly to music from an astonishingly wide range of sources.All of this was already obvious when he first came to Bristol in 1987, to take part in a number of WOMAD-sponsored activities which were the subject of a Channel 4 film I was making at the time. Toumani, a fresh-faced 22-year-old, came Read more ...
andy.morgan
All was quiet in room 509 when I turned up with my bottle of Jura whisky. Tinariwen’s sound engineer, Jaja, was watching a vampire movie on TV. Elaga, their rhythm guitarist, was sitting at a small, darkly varnished table eating pasta from a Styrofoam carton. Said the percussionist was lying on his bed, delving through the archive of photos and recordings on his LG mobile, keeping his own counsel as he usually does. As I entered I saw Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, Tinariwen’s iconic founder and frontman (pictured below right), standing by the window. He looked better than he had done that morning Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Maybe it’s a quirk of night-filming that the minister’s eyes look blood-red. But the earth in the Democratic Republic of Congo is Martian too, especially near the hell-hole where many of the minerals that power our mobile phones and laptops are mined. Danish director Frank Piasecki Poulsen enters that hole, motivated it seems by unusually visceral guilt that, even in liberal Scandinavia, casually used electronic paraphernalia is linked to terrible crimes.As we often half-hear, 5 million people have been killed in the last 15 years of civil war in the DRC; 300,000 women raped. This is death on Read more ...
Thembi Mutch
“When I first came to Zanzibar I was expecting there to be a lot of local music in local cafés and bars on the radio. In reality it was the Spice Girls or "Barbie Girl". It was so disappointing, the state of the local music scene. Everyone was listening to soulless foreign music, American hip hop and gangsta rap, loud and angry and very foreign to the culture. It seemed people just weren’t interested in all the wonderful local music.”Yusuf Mahmoud talks with considered precision. There’s a whir of generators and heavy machinery going on in the background - the new port in Zanzibar is Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
“Go home. This is not your business. This is not your war.” So a Congolese warlord tells Sadhbh, an Irish human-rights defender, in Stella Feehily’s new drama for Out of Joint. Has the arrogance and exploitation of colonialism been replaced by the interference of aid organisations? Are the motives of those drawn to troubled countries purely altruistic? And what real hope have they of making a difference, after the media has lost interest in a conflict and left?Feehily’s drama is painstakingly researched and it asks some big, discomfiting questions about the West’s relationship with nations it Read more ...
howard.male
Malian singer-songwriter Fatoumata Diawara produces guitar riffs that are like quiet musical mantras from which songs seem to blossom like exquisite orchids. Or at least that’s the effect achieved by a combination of the songs themselves and the exquisitely understated arrangements which one can imagine were a pleasure for Diawara to work on with regular World Circuit producer Nick Gold.Comparisons have already been made between the Côte d’Ivoire-born 29-year-old and the Malian legendary diva she has sung backing vocals for, Oumou Sangare (who Diawara pays tribute to here with “Makoun Oumou Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Justin Adams is considered to be one of the UK’s most original guitarists and record producers and is an extremely versatile collaborator. He was brought up in the Middle East - his father was a British diplomat in Jordan and Egypt - and his music is very strongly influenced by his early exposure to Arab culture, in addition to African music, blues, dub and psychedelia. After eight fruitful years working with Jah Wobble’s band Invaders of the Heart, touring and co-writing three albums, including the Mercury Prize-nominated Rising Above Bedlam, Adams worked with various musicians Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When The Lion King first opened in London in October 1999, there were cries from some quarters that it was merely following in a long line of stage shows that had been lifted lazily from films. Indeed its creator, Julie Taymor, didn't depart too far from Disney's 1994 animated film of the same name for dramatic inspiration, but why would she when the movie had been a huge hit, winning two Oscars (for composer Elton John, lyricist Tim Rice and Hans Zimmer's original score), grossing nearly $800 million worldwide on its release and selling more than 60 million DVDs. The stage version was, then Read more ...
hilary.whitney
The stage musical The Lion King has been seen by nearly 10 million people in the UK - almost 60 million worldwide – and Lord only knows how many must have seen Walt Disney’s animation. I have a friend who reckons he has seen it at least 26 times and a female acquaintance who firmly believes that curling up in front of the DVD is the cure-all for heartache – well, we can’t all write songs like Adele - but until recently, The Lion King had completely passed me by. I couldn’t even have hummed so much as a crotchet and a quaver of Elton John and Tim Rice's Oscar-winning song “Can You Feel the Read more ...