Kinshasa is the capital and largest city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is experiencing a demographic explosion due to a still high birth rate and migratory flows encouraged by rural poverty and the insecurity of war zones. Today, Kinshasa has 17.07 million inhabitants. It is currently the third most populous city in…
“Ebale ya Congo ezali lopango te, ezali nzela” (The Congo River is not a barrier, it is a road), sang the famous Congolese musician Joseph Kabasele. Today this statement must be taken with a pinch of salt. People have strong cultural and linguistic ties, but access to capital is no longer automatic. Over time, the…
African traditional political leaders cover both the temporal and the religious spheres. They represent the exigencies of the ancestors before the community of the living and the exigencies of the same community before the ancestors. This double responsibility before the people and before the ancestors confer on them both authority and power. The Congolese philosopher…
The Dipo rite is an integral part of the Krobo culture. Over the years it has been used to inculcate useful values into adolescent girls as they prepare to assume their marital responsibilities. The Krobos are part of the Ga-Dangbe ethno linguistic group and they are the largest group of the seven Dangbe ethnic groups…
The way electronic music entered the African scene in the 1990s, how it was developed, and how it is becoming increasingly relevant. From kuduro in Angola to gqom in South Africa. Two factors occurred in the 1990s that created the space for the entry of electronic sounds into the African musical panorama. Since the 1980s,…
Red and black are two of the fundamental colours in the Maasai culture and symbolize God’s two main traits. Red depicts anger and benevolence, and black (or dark blue) the sanctity of a person or object. Above all, they invoke God himself as Papa Jai Orok (the Black father) and they ask him to cover…
Afrobeats, bongo, amapiano, rumba, and gengetone are genres that are now heard everywhere. Thanks to social media and the growing investments of the recording industry. The world has never heard so much African music as today. Over the last decade, African music has risen to the forefront of the international scene. Out of all of…
A collective runs a cultural centre and a record company in Ségou, an unstable area of Mali. To keep the art scene alive and because ‘music and the desire to live cannot be stopped’. Now with eight titles, available digitally, The Lost Maestros is a series from the Malian label Mieruba intended to enhance the…
Every religion has some form of sacrifice. In fact, sacrifice is the most universal of all rituals. Most rituals imply an offering and quite often a blood sacrifice. A blood sacrifice is a displacement of mystical forces made possible by God himself, thanks to the intercession of a spirit, divinity or ancestor and the mediation…
The military juntas of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have signed the Liptako-Gourma Charter, establishing the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). The objective is to establish an architecture of collective defence and mutual assistance against common challenges. The unknowns. On 16 September Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger signed an agreement by signing the Liptako-Gourma Charter…
For some years now, the Nigerian and Ghanaian Afrobeats music scene has taken on global dimensions in terms of reach, acceptance and impact. Increasingly, the yardstick for measuring the success of an Afrobeats artist is the level of international success he or she enjoys. It means not only collaborating with leading music superstars from around…
The World Bank continues to finance the upgrading of the ports of the Comoros islands, where China has put its eyes on for years in search of a new safe haven for its military expansion strategy in the southern Indian Ocean. Fifteen million dollars to upgrade the three main ports of the Comoros islands. This…
In Burkina Faso, the ‘Mother of the Sahel’ brings education and hope to forcibly displaced children.
As conflict forced thousands of children to flee to the…