Was Monday's Globe and Mail Africa issue, "guest-edited" by Bono and Bob Geldof, merely an exercise in drawing celebrity power to the dying world of newspapers?

Portraits of mental health in Somalia's post-civil war breakaway republic.

This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s followed the rise of K’naan, M.I.A. and grime MCs like Tinchy Stryder, but there’s been some pretty exciting, forward-looking music coming out of the developing world and its diasporas over the past few years. Stuff like eight-bit Afrikaaner rave-rappers Die Antwoord.

Check out BA contributor Tyler Stiem's awesome essay on Liberia, "Goodbye, Babylon King", in the current issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

TRAVEL | Into Ethiopia's Ogaden, where ethnic Somalis are fighting a doomed war of secession.

RELIGION | The rise of the 'Third World Preacher' and how the increasingly global reach of African Pentecostalism is proving there are many ways of being modern.

Ada Aden Hussein lives in the Mental Health Ward of Hargeisa Hospital, where she has worked for five years as an attendant. Ada took the job so she could take care of her daughter, who suffers from bipolar disorder, and her granddaughter. Hargeisa, Somalia. 2007. Akaiyu, twenty-one, on a visit to a health clinic. Her infant [...]

While in Ghana researching my article on African Pentecostalism now in The Walrus, I also spent time observing and interviewing people involved in African traditional spirit worship. In particular, I visited the Black and White Powers Shrine in Kumasi several times, and spoke with its founder and fetish priest, Nana Abas.

[Photo: Digging for scraps of metal ore in a mountain of mining waste, Daily Mail Online] More from the China-Africa symposium at IU: The general outlook of most speakers is reservedly optimistic about the prospects of China’s engagements in Africa. If the last fifty years of Western-sponsored development on the continent have borne so little fruit—and [...]

(Photo: Chinese boss hollerin’ at his ditch diggers in Kabwe, Zambia) Presently at Indiana University in Bloomington, attending an academic symposium on China’s rapidly expanding investments in Africa, and the implications it will have for the continent’s long-term development. I am also buying buckets of fireworks. Or seriously considering it. Indiana has some of the laxest fireworks [...]