In case you haven't heard about it yet, a new magazine about Africa in Spanish was just launched: Africaneando. It's published (on the Maneno platform btw) by he Barcelona-based and awesomely named association Oozebap devoted to the promotion of African culture, research and better knowledge. And it has a photo essay of life in Abengourou by yours truly. Oh, and they're accepting submissions, preferably in Spanish but also in English and French.
Here's an awesome visualization of the decline of the four main maritime empires of the XIX and XX centuries, which of course has a lot to do with the Scramble for Africa. By Pedro M. Cruz.
As spotted by A Bombastic Element, Gawker managed to lay their hands on a picture of Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue--son of the Equatorial Guinean dictator Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo--rocking an S-curl and his million dollar watch. They conclude with "We are living in a Frederick Forsyth novel". Indeed.
Last Saturday was International Day Against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), so a it seems only appropriate to post the trailer of the documentary film Africa Rising, about the grassroots movement to end FGM.
KenyaBuzz has created a matatu map of Nairobi! I wonder if somebody could do the same with the gbakas in Abidjan...
And speaking of matatus, Sarah Elliott has a hilarious photo series of matatus decorated with pictures of all sorts of political leaders, such as the one below:
The always awesome Strange Maps blog had this great map sequence that gives a different perspective on the pre-historic earth puzzle which "reverses the drift that continues to widen the Atlantic Ocean, and returns to the age of the dinosaurs in another way". Here you have what the author calls the Afro-Latinosaurus Rex, in which the narrow southern strip of South America shared by Chile and Argentina is the beast’s lower jaw, Africa’s southern part its upper jaw. And "the big, blunt bulk of West Africa is the animal’s neck. Lake Victoria, the greatest of African lakes, doubles as the menacing eye of the Afro-Latinosaurus…"
While my family and friends in Europe are probably already enjoying a fancy New Year's Eve dinner with cava, I'm still in my pajamas sipping on my morning tea and reviewing my blog posts in 2009 (I hate this timezone).
So here are 10 of my favorite posts in 2009, so you can have something to read tomorrow while you recover from the partying. In no particular order:
I loved seeing K'naan play live for a small audience in my neighborhood, and to hear him talk about his beloved Somalia. It was spring in San Francisco, but it was greay and cold, was feeling a bit down and uninspired, but he really made my day. Here are some photos too.
I just love it when The Onion covers Africa. Always brilliant.
This post started out on Twitter and it ended up being a collection of initiatives trying to show the positive sides of Africa, which there's no shortage of. It was a very rewarding post to write.
I don't usually write very personal posts on this blog, so I loved talking about my friend Tim and remember the good old times in Kinshasa with him. This post made me really nostalgic.
For some reason March was a very prolific month for me. The post about Tim's photography was written on that month, as well as a review of a photo exhibit, an African Diaspora event a movie about Liberia, a book presentation and a Congolese music band.
It was my first big event in Abengourou, and I enjoyed sharing my impressions and photos about it as there isn't much content about Abengourou online.
I thoroughly enjoyed this documentary movie made up of archive material of a concert that took place in Kinshasa during the famous Rumble in the jungle boxing fight of 1974. Once again, I loved being transported back to Kinshasa's golden years.
I loved sharing these old black & white photos of Francophone West Africa, from the French National Archives.
I was so impressed to learn about this online project while attending a conference in South Africa, that of course I had to write about it. It blew my mind.
Thanks to my visit to South Africa to attend the Highway Africa conference, I finally got to learn a bit about this country and to educate myself further. I also realized things are still very complex down there, which is what this post was about.
Apparently, these are the covers of some French atlases for children:
The left one says:
Europe, the cradle of extraordinary civilizations.
The right one:
Africa, the kingdom of wild animals.
They remind me of a phrase coined by the blog Wronging Rights to describe Africa: Land of rape and lions. Obviously.
Today is International Migrant's Day, and although one way or another we are all migrants, some people have a harder time than others migrating. Such as children. Or people forced to migrate because of the less than ideal conditions back home. This film is a reminder of how hard it is.
[H/T Oso]
For only $5 per month, you can help continue photographing this child. You can donate to Inepd to help bring more poverty development to poor communities around the world. Or help the UN manage international conflicts. Just donate.
Thanks to a tweet from Madatsara, I discovered the Ulysse database of the Centre des Archives d’outre-mer of the French National Archive in Aix-en-Provence. This database is an online treasure of scanned old photographs (as well as a few posters and maps) of French colonies, including over 4,500 of black and white images from Africa. Although I only browsed through a small portion of the collection after spending two hours enthralled with the website, it seems that the majority of them are from the first half of the 20th century. Some of them are of buildings, landscapes or of groups of people posing for the camera, but there are also a great many of them capturing scenes of daily life, such as shopping in the market, a class at school, handcraft production, hunting, rural activies, ritual dances or ceremonies, chiefs meetings, etc. etc.
Even when no white people are pictured, and there are many of those, in amusing dignified poses, light-colored shorts, tall socks and the inevitable pith helmets or long missionary robes and beards, they all seem to have a certain colonial quality to them. In spite of the diversity and the often seemingly casual local scenes, it's as if the bewilderment in the eyes of the photographers reflected on the images, showing their fascination with things that they were unable to understand and which appeared so incredibly foreign and exotic to them.
I recommend anyone interested in the history of Africa to spend some time digging into the database, which contains some truly unexpected gems. As a sample, here's a small selection of the images of the French posing with the natives that I found amusing, but there are many other types of pictures in the Ulysse, and believe it or not most of them don't even include ungraceful Indiana Jones look-alikes wearing pith helmest or suspicious moustaches in them. You'll see if you look for yourself.
The explorer Binger buying karité butter at the market in a village in the Haute Volta region (nowadays Burkina Faso) between 1900 and 1936.
Soldiers of the Forces Françaises Libres near Bangui in the Oubangui-Chari region (nowadays the Central African Republic) in 1940
Missionaries and their students in front of a school in Fada Tikondi in the Haute Volta region (nowadays Burkina Faso) in 1957.
[Poster above of "Visitez le Congo Belge", meaning "Visit Belgian Congo", displaying the Niragongo volcano and an okapi, from 1930]
[Previous Afrilinks can be found here]
Nadytch, who writes a blog about advertising and communication in Côte d'Ivoire [in French], asks Is black awful? after observing the everlasting presence of skin-lightening commercials. Her post has sparked quite an interesting debate [in French, hello Google Translate] on why these products remain popular in African society.
On the topic of skin whitening products, A Bombastic Element posted a video by AFP about their popularity in France among African diaspora communities although their sale is banned.
Since I linked to a post in French and one in English on that topic, here's are a couple more in Spanish written here over a year ago: Ser blanco es tan ideal and Requisito: blanquitud which has a video in English about skin whitening in India.
While skin bleaching creams are still popular among some African women and commercials tell women that lighter skin is more desirable, at the same time albinos are murdered for their body parts. What a paradox.
Speaking of ignorance, Ghetto Radio collected a couple of videos on Stupid questions people ask about Africa. It's funny but sad at the same time because it's so true.
On a lighter note, here's a cool photoset of Malian hairdos at Journal du Mali.
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