Full length journalistic features
The best thing about drinking wine from a hollowed out ram’s horn is that you can’t put the thing down. You have to keep holding onto to it otherwise it’ll topple over, and if you’re holding it, you might as well carry on drinking. Inevitably, with a ram’s horn goblet in hand, the wine keeps…
“Don’t be surprised if it explodes one day!” When I met Mylmo I knew nothing about him except that he was rapper who was performing on the main stage of the Festival on the Niger that very night. I interviewed him in an empty restaurant on the banks of the great river – most…
In the early years of that epic conflict known as the cold war, an Irishman wrote a funny-sad piece of theatre, a kind of excruciating fairy tale about a pair of old tramps who sat around waiting for this guy called Godot. Except that Godot wasn’t a person of course; he was an idea, a…
“As soon as people say ‘Toure’,” Sidi tells me, “they have a vision of a man with his head in Qu’ranic books.” Strange. For me, the vision is of a man in billowing blue robes dispensing liquid gold from a Gibson, a Taylor or a Takamine.
The black salafist flag that flutters in the hot desert breeze over Timbuktu symbolises the abject failure of western policy in the Sahel over the past decade or more.
Since the accords between the NMLA and Ansar Eddine were rejected by the NMLA political leadership at the end of May, it’s been fascinating, if not painful, to watch the contortions of the NMLA leadership as they attempted to accommodate Ansar Eddine, a movement with which they had plenty in common ethnically, but very little ideologically or strategically.
A few days ago, I managed to reach an MNLA fighter called Intarhia on his satellite phone. He was in a 4×4 that was being driven across open desert, seemingly at top speed. This a transcript of our interview:
Baloji produced his first solo opus ‘Hotel Impala’ in 2007 and is currently limbering up for the worldwide release of his new album, ‘Kinshasa Succursale’. It hits you a bit like Central Africa’s answer to The Beatles’ ‘White Album’
Like the Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley and Eminem, Danyel Waro has taken a style of music that wasn’t his by birthright and fashioned it into something new. The music in question is maloya.
When the record producer Nick Gold traveled to Cuba in the early 1990s he had the genius to perceive the well-spring of love for Cuban music that still flowed through Mali and West Africa and appreciate the strength of their intertwining histories.
