The Adventures of Cosmic Yoruba
& Her Flying Machines too
I have a new essay up on Beyond Victoriana looking into the history of Ganvié, a village built entirely on a lake in Benin Republic that was built by people from several ethnic groups that are now known as the Tofinu. Ganvié is a water town situated on the northern edge of the Lake Nokoué…
Date Wine (1998) is a movie directed by Radwan el-Kashef. I only caught the movie halfway through but I enjoyed it thoroughly because it reminded me of Almacita, Soul of Desolato. Date Wine explores the effect on an Egyptian village when all the men abandon home in search of greener pastures leaving behind the women…
Hyenas (Hyènes) is a movie directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty, a.k.a "the most paradoxical filmmaker in the history of African cinema", "the African Dionysus," "the prince of Colobane." Hyenas is part of Mambéty’s trilogies about the ‘power of craziness’; [It] tells the story of Linguere Ramatou, an aging, wealthy woman who revisits her home village…
I’ve got a new guest blog over at Beyond Victoriana on African wax fabrics, specifically on their ‘untold’ history. “A picture of a pipe isn’t necessarily a pipe, an image of “African fabric” isn’t necessarily authentically [and wholly] African”. These above words are quoted by Yinka Shonibare, a Nigerian-British contemporary artist known for his amazing…
Just because, a slightly NSFW black and white image of a young woman from Djibouti. Notice that her hair is not in plaits, braids or twists and is free. I’m going to be putting up or linking to images like these just to show that in the past some African women left their hair free…
I wrote this post last year immediately after I finished reading the book. I sat on it because I wanted to reread the book. I’m halfway through reading New Dawn a second time and, yeah, my opinion is pretty much the same. While reading keep in mind that I enter sarcasm mode quite often in…
I spent the Christmas holidays in Ghana and wrote about it! Our next guided tour was to the Kakum National Park and Cape Coast which is home to several colonial castles. Once more we woke up really early in the morning and got into a bus with other Nigerians and off we went on our…
I don’t want to neglect this blog in 2011. Thus, I’ll be crossposting more stuff here to save anyone the trouble of going to subscribe to my DW. Happy New Year! I encountered Kimpa Vita last year in a few paragraphs while reading When We Ruled and those few paragraphs were enough for me to…
Zheng He’s 7th expedition was his last and after years of moving back and forth between the East African coast and China, all contact seized. Some people may look at this and say that the Chinese turned their backs on Africa but if you look at the situation within China in that time, it sheds…
In 1414 a Chinese fleet heralded by the Muslim Grand Eunuch of the Three Treasures, Zheng He (also known as Cheng Ho) sailed into the western Indian Ocean for the fourth time since his journey to the East began in 1405. In previously, that is between 1405 and 1414, Zheng He and his ships had…