Coronavirus in Africa: what happens next?

Posted on April 8, 2020 by Admin

As Covid-19 creeps across the region, fears mount over how it will unfold. Will a young population help stem the spread of disease, or will it unleash catastrophe on creaking health systems?

Just seven weeks after Africa recorded its first case of Covid-19 – an Italian national in Algeria – the virus is creeping across the continent, infecting more than 10,000 people and causing 487 deaths. Three of the region’s 54 countries – São Tome and Principe, Comoros, and Lesotho – remain apparently virus-free.

“Case numbers are increasing exponentially in the African region,” said Dr Matshidiso Moeti, the World Health Organization (WHO) regional director for Africa. “It took 16 days from the first confirmed case in the region to reach 100 cases. It took a further 10 days to reach the first thousand. Three days after this, there were 2,000 cases, and two days later we were at 3,000.”

‘Sensitise to sanitise’: Bobi Wine uses song to fight coronavirus across Africa

Posted on March 26, 2020 by Admin

Ugandan star among those taking to the airwaves with a message on how to avoid spreading Covid-19

Bobi Wine, a Ugandan musician and rising political force, has joined the likes of footballer-turned-president George Weah in resorting to song to help stem the spread of coronavirus in Africa.

Wine, whose real name is Robert Kyagulanyi, worked with fellow artist Nubian Li to release a song on Wednesday laced with east Africa’s signature rhumba melodies about the importance of personal hygiene.

The veiled rapper breaking taboos for women in Senegal – video

Posted on December 31, 2019 by Admin

Mina La Voilée is a female rapper from Parcelles, Dakar, who is breaking taboos by rapping about women's rights. As a woman who chooses to wear a veil, she explains how criticism from industry professionals who told her "the veil and hip hop don't flow together" drove her to succeed, and inspired her to tackle other controversial societal issues in her lyrics such as child marriage, rape and infanticide. She performs both as a solo artist and as part of an all-female rap movement, Genji Hip Hop, who use their music to fight cultural stereotypes and gender violence

'Rap does not shut up': hip-hop women of Senegal

‘Rap does not shut up’: hip-hop women of Senegal

Posted on December 31, 2019 by Admin

All-female Genji Hip Hop collective use rhymes and art to fight cultural stereotypes and gender violence

Aminata Gaye picks up a grey scarf and stretches it into a T shape. She ducks under the fabric, wraps it around her neck and crisscrosses it over the crown of her head.

It is almost dusk outside, but in this windowless room there is no indication of time as Gaye gets dressed for a concert starting at 9pm. Her veil in position, the 27-year-old old is transformed into Mina la voilée (Mina the veiled one), her stage name as a rapper in Dakar, Senegal.

Atlantics review – poetic Dakar love story

Posted on December 1, 2019 by Admin

A prosaic script lets down Mati Diop’s visually arresting, ghostly first feature

Although set in suburban Dakar, this beguiling debut feature from Mati Diop is a film that walks between worlds. The story is woven in the hinterland amid wealth and poverty, love and expediency, this life and the supernatural. It’s silkily enigmatic and unpredictable, and certainly unlike anything else you will see this year.

It took me a second viewing to engage with the tonal shifts of the story of Ada (Mame Bineta Sane), promised in marriage to a wealthy man, but who loves Souleiman (Ibrahima Traore), a construction worker who disappears at sea in search of a better life. Diop has a keen eye for a poetic image: the film opens with a shot of bustling streets dwarfed by the monstrous, looming haunch of a half-built tower. Later, there’s an achingly pensive shot of the sleeping quarters of the men who have left, their beds still rumpled from warm bodies; bottles of Victory aftershave primed for a night out that will never come. But the lyricism of the photography by Claire Mathon is not matched by the screenplay, which Diop co-wrote with Olivier Demangel and which seems rather flat and declamatory next to the eerie magic of the film’s gauzy light.

Soaring arches, broken tiles: why Gaudí’s style was perfect for Senegal

Posted on November 27, 2019 by Admin

Experts from Barcelona combined local techniques and materials with the tradition of the Catalan master to build new school

At first sight the school buildings that have sprung up in Thionck Essyl in Senegal resemble a lost work by Antonio Gaudí.

The strikingly-designed school, where classes began in October, is the work of a group of volunteers led by the Barcelona architect David Garcia and his colleague Lluís Morón, who established a foundation to crowdfund the project.

Tamba: Senegal’s migration starting point – photo essay

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Admin

People of Tamba is a project by the Italian artist Giovanni Hänninen, consisting of 200 portraits taken across the Tambacounda region in Senegal and accompanied by Senegal/Sicily, a series of documentaries created with the film-maker Alberto Amoretti, courtesy of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and Le Korsa

Exhibited at Also Known as Africa (AKAA) art and design fair, 8-11 November 2019, Paris

People of Tamba, inspired by German photographer August Sander’s seminal work, People of the 20th Century, was conceived as a catalogue of the society of Tambacounda, the largest city in the most remote and rural region of Senegal, and the point of departure for the majority of Senegalese migration.

Sir Dawda Jawara obituary

Posted on August 30, 2019 by Admin

Democratically elected founding father of the Gambia

Sir Dawda Jawara, who has died aged 95, was the first leader of the small west African country of the Gambia when it became independent in 1965. Although he was hailed as a rare democratic leader at a time when Africa was better known for military regimes and single-party states, he was twice overthrown in military putsches.

The first time, in 1981, he was reinstated as president by troops from neighbouring Senegal, while the second time, in 1994, nobody came to his aid and he left the country for eight years. But he was still well respected, and on his death was acknowledged by the current democratically elected president, Adama Barrow, as the Gambia’s founding father.

Surf’s up in Senegal for first ever pro event in west Africa

Posted on March 31, 2019 by Admin

Ngor is on the global circuit, 50 years after featuring in surfing film The Endless Summer

A wave of boys ebbs and flows on the black rocks, watching surfers paddle out, pop up and catch the right-hand point break they know so well. Surfers from all over the world hop from rock to rock past them, waiting their turn to compete, their boards swaddled in giant stripy socks.

Ngor right, a Senegalese wave put on the international surfing map by the 1966 surf documentary The Endless Summer, has never seen so much sun-bleached hair. This week, the World Surf League brought its qualifying series to west Africa for the first time, a historic moment for surfing off a continent with plentiful waves but few people who have the means to take advantage of them.