Africa
Peter Culshaw
Congo has been where European adventurers have for generations gone in search of fortune. Probably not making a fortune, historian Dan Snow, an affable, energetic sort, was keen to tell us about this vast country, the size of Western Europe and these days known as the Democratic Republic of Congo, previously Zaire, before that Belgian Congo.The first couple of minutes were edited as though the makers were terrified we might get bored. There was Dan Snow in a speedboat! Dan on top of a train! Dan on a bicycle! Actually, this huge mineral-rich country, is a fascinating place, albeit with a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Bruce Goodison has been responsible for some of the more impressive television of the last decade, sometimes drama, sometimes straight documentary, and sometimes drama-documentary, like his Flight 93: The Flight That Fought Back. He was back in the latter genre in Channel 4’s powerful Siege in the Sahara, bringing the heightened tension of fictional reconstruction to the story of the assault on the Algerian gas plant at In Amenas by terrorists in January this year. The ensuing hostage drama lasted three days, during which the Algerian side refused to negotiate, and left 40 of the Read more ...
mark.hudson
You either get Youssou N’Dour, or you don’t. For millions on his home turf, the Senegalese singer is a major cultural figure: the street urchin-turned-superstar who almost became president. For large numbers of Western fellow travellers he’s the sexiest, most charismatic figure to emerge from the whole world music phenomenon. For everyone else, specifically the 99 percent of the Western public who aren’t into world music and didn’t buy 7 Seconds (and even some of those who did), he’s, well, a bit boring: an average-looking, dull interviewee, whose music floats by in a simultaneous blur of Read more ...
Thembi Mutch
The capital of Mozambique pulls no punches. Parked at the old airport among sheaves of wild grass are old MiG fighter planes, as sculpturally beautiful as the massive monument made from decommissioned weapons a few hundred metres away. The new airport, a multi-million pound effort completed last year with significant Chinese help, has Dom Perignon champagne for $230 a bottle. That’s twice the national annual wage. Sculptures made from decommissioned weaponry are known as war art. Mozambique’s most famous son is the war artist Gonzalo Mabunda, a sculptor in his thirties who has exhibited Read more ...
David Nice
No theatre in London, surely, has offered us more miracles of transformed space than the Young Vic. Small it may be, but its productions often feel big in every way, and none more so than Joe Wright’s total-theatre take on Aimé Césaire’s A Season in the Congo. Enter the auditorium and designer Lizzie Clachan immediately places you – in all but the humidity, which doesn’t seep through from outside – on a street or square in Kinshasa, quickly taking you back to its former status as colonial Léopoldville in 1955 where Patrice Lumumba is selling beer. None of this would work, though, if it weren’ Read more ...
David Nice
Happy truisms first: Paco Peña is still the greatest of flamenco guitarists, he works with a consummate team of regulars in the most vibrant of dance-art and he keeps it fresh by scouring the world for different players or ensembles to complement his own flamencistas. I’ll never forget equal artists Venezuelan Diego Alvarez, creating miracles from the simple plywood box with vibrating strings known as the cajón, and on this occasion the breathtaking Senegalese dancer Alboury Dabo. Contexts, though, bring the compromising dangers of fusion, and Quimeras has more than a few obstacles to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The likelihood of leaving a screening of PARADISE: Love without feeling either queasy or at least a little off balance is low. This realist-styled portrayal of middle-aged Teresa’s excursion to Kenya to seek intimacy and, inevitably, sex is awkward viewing. Some scenes are so uncomfortable to watch that their imprint will be permanent. PARADISE: Love is made all the more an assault on perceptions of acceptability by being entirely unjudgemental. Reactions are entirely up to the viewer. Director Ulrich Seidl offers no helping hand.Teresa (Margarethe Tiesel) is Austrian. She’s 50, a single Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Previous series of Mad Dogs have seen the quartet of middle-aged geezers embroiled with the Serbian mafia and tangled up in drug deals, conspiracies and murder. For this series three opener, the curtain rose on our bedraggled lads caged up in a derelict prison camp. They were wearing Guantanamo-style orange jumpsuits. Having expected to go to Barcelona on a container vessel at the end of series two, here they were banged up under a shrivelling Moroccan sun.Much of the piece was taken up with the quartet being baffled and bamboozled, amid some tight-lipped wiscrackery, as they tried to work Read more ...
Tim Cumming
There have been memorable nights at the Foundling Museum recently, with Alasdair Roberts delivering a superb solo show in April, while on Friday the Nest Collective hosted a double bill of Zimbabwean-born singer Eska and Bristol’s masters of English folk minimalism, Spiro.I’d seen Eska at Essaouira’s Gnawa Festival last year, performing with Soweto Kinch and Hamid El Kasri – she was so good they invited her back with her own band this year – and on the strength of her opening set in the Picture Gallery, the folks in Essaouira have chosen well. She has a powerful, emotive, and mellifluous Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Early on in Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene, John le Carré remembers Greene telling him that childhood provides “the bank balance of the writer”. Greene remained in credit on that inspiration front throughout his life, even while he struggled financially in his early writing days with a young family; later in life, too, he lost everything to a swindling financial adviser – the move to France was to avoid the Revenue.Greene went to Berkhamstead School, where his father was headmaster, and was bullied, not least for the assumption that he was a spy for paternal authority (the spy Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Alexander McCall Smith is Scottish, and writes fiction, but he doesn’t write “Scottish fiction” as most of us understand the term. In his world view there are no used needles and discarded condoms littering tenement stairwells, no spotty hedonists popping pills to a blue-streaked soundtrack of effing and cussing. It seems extraordinary that no other author has hit upon his extraordinarily successful formula for shifting units in bookshops all over the world.Low on dead bodies and high on softly pedalled humour and lightly sprinkled moralising, the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agengy series of Read more ...
Thembi Mutch
A crowd of men and younger women in full burkahs gathers, bewildered by the sight: an African woman, in West African “Mumu” (khaftan) and a covered head, playing Ghazals (Islamic calls to prayer). Accompanied by an acoustic guitar, a clear voice, sitting on a café terrazza, Nawal transports us: until it is broken. “How dare you use the name of Allah in a song?!” cries out a dishevelled street vendor, visibly upset. “But you use keyboards in your praise of Allah” she retorts calmly.It is 1pm, several hours before the Sauti Za Busara festival is about to begin. From the 12th-century Omani fort Read more ...