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.

Although it’s never been recognized by the international community, Somaliland broke away from Somalia during the civil war. Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, a bombed-out ghost town only fifteen years ago, is now thriving. But across the border in Ethiopia there’s trouble. Somali Ogadenis are still fighting their own, doomed war of secession.

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 [...]

[Photo: XO Laptop, One Laptop Per Child]
While on the subject of technology and development, I should direct your attentions to a recent post by Jon Evans at his World Fast Forward blog. One of the debates currently raging in development circles has been the relative merits of mobile phones vs. laptops in advancing the economic [...]

[Photo: Tyler Stiem]
As falls from grace go, mine was humbler than that of Dawda Jawara, the president-for-life who’d been overthrown in a bloodless coup a few years before my arrival in the Gambia, but it was also, in its way, pretty humbling.
It was my first time in Africa. I’d accepted a job as a writer [...]