AfricaResource: The Place for Africa on the Net

The World's Most Influential Music

Tuesday, 08 May 2007 19:00

I remember when I first heard rap. I was standing in the kitchen at a party in Harlem. It was 1980. A friend of mine named Bill had just gone on the blink. He slapped a guy, a total stranger, in the face right in front of me. I can't remember why. Bill was a fellow student. He was short-circuiting. Problem was, the guy he slapped was a big guy, a dude wearing a do-rag who'd crashed the party with three friends, and, judging by the fury on their faces, there would be no Martin Luther King moments in our immediate future. There were no white people in the room, though I confess I wished there had been, if only to hide the paleness of my own frightened face. We were black and Latino students about to graduate from Columbia University's journalism school, having learned the whos, whats, wheres, whens, and whys of American reporting. But the real storytellers of the American experience came from the world of the guy that Bill had just slapped. They lived less than a mile (1.6 kilometers) from us in the South Bronx. They had no journalism degrees. No money. No credibility. What they did have, however, was talent.

The Civil War in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Wednesday, 30 May 2007 17:00

The DRC has been plagued by a disastrous civil war for nearly five years. It has been a bloody, brutal conflict that has cost more lives in such a short period than any other on the globe in recent history. The weapons of mass destruction employed have been mutilations, rape, and starvation. Terrorists in military uniforms from various lands have carried out strikes daily on innocent civilians, murdering, torturing, plundering and destroying. Children, some as young as seven, are given a mix of Kalashnikovs, machetes and drugs to make them effective killers for rival armies. Yet somehow, unlike regions in Western and Central Asia with key oil reserves or Eastern European atrocities of ethnic cleansings that threaten region stability, the DRC's War and the snuffing out of 2.5 million citizens of the global community has gone remarkably unreported over the years. In the US, neither Democratic nor Republican administrations seem to have given it much attention. The news media has only become interested when sensationalist stories of ritualistic cannibalism appear that help the notions of "Darkest Africa" to flourish. And with everyone's focus on taking stances for or against Operation Iraqi Liberation (catch the acronym), the horrors in the DR Congo have gone unnoticed. Either the world has turned a blind eye to the region, or its victims have merely been emitting silent screams.

French Rappers Articulate Communities Struggles

Friday, 17 August 2007 16:55

But most French rap songs show a deep urge to articulate what would otherwise go unexpressed in words, and - whatever your feelings about the genre - many do so with invention. The French language, with its repeated end of word inflections, is widely recognised as lending itself to rap, and even masters of the form in the US have been complimentary. Today many French rappers are saying that if only their words had been listened to, the suburban violence might never have occurred.

A Critique of Nicolas Sarkozy

Saturday, 18 August 2007 10:35

If they'd had the chance, the majority of French-speaking Africans would have no doubt voted against Nicolas Sarkozy at the last French presidential elections. It's not that his rival of the time, and even less the Socialist Party, had anything particularly convincing to say about Africa, or that the Socialists' past practices demonstrated any desire whatsoever to radically change relations between France and its former colonies. The new French president would have simply paid a high price for his attitude to immigration when he was Jacques Chirac's Minister of the Interior, his alleged collusion with the racist extreme right-wing and his role in sparking the riots in France's deprived suburbs in 2005.

A Rising Voice: Afro-Latin Americans

Sunday, 13 April 2008 10:58

A five-part series on Afro-Latin Americans by Miami Herald. The black experience is unveiled through a journey: to Nicaragua, where a quite but powerful civil and cultural rights movements flickers while in neighboring Honduras, the black Garífuna community fights for cultural survival; to the Dominican Republic where African lineage is not always embraced; to Brazil, home to the world’s second largest population of African descent.

Constructing a New Sudan During Conflict

Tuesday, 24 July 2007 17:24

For people in the camps, the economic boom has had the perverse effect of further undermining their already precarious existence. With land at a premium, the local government of Khartoum state periodically sends police and bulldozers into the camps to plow under swaths of mud houses, pushing people even farther out into the desert, and then sells the cleared land to developers."This government has a different feeling towards the southerners," Yobu said. "They look at the south as inferior and themselves as superior. If we separate, we'll have more revenue, and more freedom also. The south has oil, and gold. But right now, the money is in their hands."

Professor Clarke on Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars

Wednesday, 23 May 2007 01:20

Many of these Black scholars, whose work Professor Gates questioned, were reading works by Whites in French, German and other languages that spoke positively about African American achievement long before Mr. Gates' parents were born. This school of Black scholars are neither demagogues nor are they pseudos; they are the forerunners of the present propagators of Afrocentricity. They know what Professor Gates doesn't seem to know: that African people are the most written about and the least understood people in the world. If Professor Gates has not read the works of the White pioneer scholars about the role of African people in world history, it stands to reason that he has no understanding of the senior Black scholars such as Yosef ben-jochannan, John G. Jackson, Cheikh Anta Diop, Jacob Carruthers, Chancellor Williams, Lao Hansberry and myself.