Shooting From Point Blank Range
Moses Serubiri turns on the television and watches the news unfold, in living and often riotous contradiction, in a programme that has viewers from Kampala to Kansas hooked on the hilarity, the spectacle and the harsh reality of Ugandan politics. In an episode of Point Blank, police officers join in watching a carnival of rioting […]
Beneath the Underdog
Fighter, soldier, poet, arguably the PR-unit and embodiment of the Economic Freedom Fighters – he is the current holder of the People’s Poet Chair of South African politics. Kwanele Sosibo meets the Bigg Dogg. In the track “Asijiki Remix”, Bigg Dogg, the Mzwakhe Mbuli of our time, runs through a breathless castigation of the Gupta […]
New Oil Old Lamps
The old Arab adage that “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes and Baghdad reads” is no longer. Instead “the Arab world writes, while Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah and Doha decide who gets the big bucks”. Thus argues André Naffis-Sahely, as he explores the contemporary narrative playing out in the land of petro-dollared development, where an Arab literary […]
Shifting Gulfward
The apparent demise of the millennia-old Arab cultural centres and the rapid growth, in their place and across all genres, of Emirates-based investment are raising some questions. Is oil money alone fuelling the contemporary art boom, and in whose interests is the cash being flashed in the name of Arab cultural renaissance? Marcia Lynx Qualey […]
Life After Oil
Jeremy Weate explores the cultural politics of the petro-based economy in Nigeria, where crude as commodity has perpetuated ethnic divides and the illusion of development and modernity through a national pastime of forgetting. He asks: what culture and what memory will be left of oil, after it has gone? The culture of oil that has […]