Fina Linga is a beauty therapist who has created an eponymous cosmetic company offering a makeup line for women with deeper skin tones. Her company is based in Johannesburg (South Africa) and also offers personal consultation to customers. Women can learn the correct use and application of beauty products. Check her website to learn more.
Source: finalinga.com
African Nobleman
17th century painting of the dutch painter Albert Eckhout showing the nobleman Don Miguel de Castro from the Kingdom of Kongo during a commercial trip to the portuguese colony of Brazil
I’m really intrigued by this painting and by Don Miguel de Castro. I’d like to learn more about him and his trip….
(via dynamicafrica)
Source: diasporicroots
Trevor Ncube shares the lessons he learned through his life and encourages us to embrace life challenges. His message is that words can build or destroy someone. We all have a responsibility when we are talking to someone younger to build them and not destroy them.
Trevor Ncube is a journalist from Zimbabwe. He is the chairman of Alpha Media Holding.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on love, race, culture, immigration and hair - some of the central issues in her latest novel Americanah.
What she says when she expands on her statement, ‘I like America but it’s not mine…Nigeria is home to me…but I like that I can leave home’, is incredibly central to the experience of those of us who bounce between the diaspora and Nigeria, those of us who are constantly pulled between two very different worlds that can simultaneously feel like home and a foreign place, all at the same time.
I can’t wait to read her book. It sounds really interesting.
(via africlecticmagazine)
Source: dynamicafrica
Lebohang Masango (aka King Nova) first performed this piece at the Word N’ Sound series. It won her the Queen of the Mic title.
When asked why she wrote “The House That We Built,” this was her response:
“I remember being annoyed with my class-privileged friends saying that I ‘worry too much about poor people’ and that I wasn’t around when Apartheid happened. This poem was written in response to the overwhelming ignorance that prevails around the South African condition and, really, the lack of compassion shown by people who are not directly affected by the sort of issues that actually imprison the daily lives of others.
This poem is a house. And in building it, I hoped that the audience would understand that South Africa belongs to all who live in it and therefore, we are all responsible for what becomes of it in future. We can only move towards better when every citizen is willing to acknowledge the role played by themselves and their ancestors in the creation of our current situation.
That means: an end to Apartheid denialism and all the denialism around white and male privilege and also for People of Colour to love themselves again without subjecting themselves to a self-imposed white supremacist gaze.”
“The violence that was then sown is the poverty that we now reap.”
Powerful!!
(via dynamicafrica)
Source: isthisafrica
The Supreme Price | dir. Joanna Lipper
The Supreme Price is a feature length documentary film produced and directed by Joanna Lipper coming soon to cinemas everywhere.
The film traces the evolution of the Pro-Democracy Movement in Nigeria and efforts to increase the participation of women in leadership roles.
Following the annulment of her father’s victory in Nigeria’s Presidential Election and her mother’s assassination by agents of the military dictatorship, Hafsat Abiola faces the challenge of transforming a corrupt culture of governance into a democracy capable of serving Nigeria’s most marginalized population: women.
More here
(via dynamicafrica)
Source: studioafrica
How Cuban Villagers Learned They Descended From Sierra Leone Slaves*
They were adamant about going all out. People who sing the village’s songs—melodies and rhythms that tie them to this inaccessible chiefdom — are considered family. “Our grandparents who told us the stories about our people going as slaves, we know now that they didn’t lie,” says Joe Allie, an elder of the village and Pokawa’s uncle.
“These must be our people,” says Solomon Musa, a young man who works as a teacher in the village, “when we saw the people who practice the same things we used to do, we were so happy, we are full of joy.”
Read more. [Image: They Are We]
*Sierra Leonean enslaved peoples.
Source: theatlantic
Black people in England and Wales are 7 times more likely to be stopped by police than white people. Asians are twice as likely. The vast majority are ordinary people guilty only of being the wrong color.
What are the stories behind the statistics?
Learn more about the human cost of stop and search.
http://osf.to/ethnicprofilingBut I thought England was the beacon of anti-racism. This just can’t be.
(via africlecticmagazine)
Source: standardtechnique
Alec Lomami’s name popped into the music industry vocabulary as hard and fast two years ago as it disappeared months later. He gained immediate attention from Kinshasa and the track was quickly followed by write-ups in Fader and MTV Iggy as well as the African music (and hipster) bloggerati (including my own AfriPOP! story on him)
The land was fertile with industry insider approval and ready for whatever he would put out. This was after just one song.
Nothing did come out.
Another track followed, Pop Revolution many months later that also caused some excitement. Again months later, a beautiful stop-motion video for a Kinshasa remix (which to his credit, is a completely different song to the original) was released and its creativity was widely acknowledged.
But without a body of work to show for the buzz, we stopped hearing about him.
On his end, self-preservation, self-reflection, self-indulgence and, simply, life took over. Much of this is discussed in a full-length AfriPOP! interview with Lomami tomorrow.
The landscape has also changed in the two years since Kinshasa released, easily comparable newcomers like Petite Noir have filled in the shoulda-woulda-coulda void Lomami left.
And it is in this landscape that he will put out the four-track EP, two of which are remastered versions of Kinshasa and Pop Revolution.
But it is the other two new tracks that will remind those who knew him the first time round of the hints of musical acumen and production finesse that first caused the initial excitement over Lomami.
The first release, Pardon My French samples Miriam Makeba’s signature hit Pata Pata. It is layered with surprising hints of Outkast, Florence Welch and Watch the Throne inspiration flowing through the track. It was produced by Lomami and his two oft-used production partners SoulstarzmuseeQ and Federico Mejia.
“I knew from the jump that I wanted to use a popular African song as the sample,” says Lomami. “I was watching TV and the Miriam Makeba song came on. I knew then it was the one. I called the producer and said I wanted to use the sample.”
Ben Affleck gave a TED talk last week about why the Congo isn’t hopeless. This on the heels of his being awarded some sort of prize from the union he belongs to, and more or less during the same week that the Congolese army, apparently not having heard the news, once again ceded territory to the rebels without putting up a fight.The talk isn’t online yet; I assume that the TED folks are dressing it up with their usual multimedia pizazz. I wonder whether Affleck’s speech is based on Charles’ Kenney’s thoughtful 2011 essay or Prendergast’s tiresome take on the same. I’m glad to see Affleck give the Kinshasa Orchestra a nod; I’d like to think my drum-beating on their behalf helped.It’s terribly easy to make fun of movie stars attempting to do good. They meander into disaster zones like cows wandering through a firing range, secure in the belief that their good intentions will see them through. They are as unable to imagine that they could do anything harmful as that anything harmful could ever happen to them. In the end, generally speaking, they are not so much unhelpful as useless: Did anything come of Nicole Richie’s 2009 intervention in the DRC? Even the more thoughtful celebrities often end up accomplishing little. Several times I’ve seenRogerGeorge Clooney attempt to draw attention to South Sudan by travelling there. Each time, the accompanying camera crew focused entirely on him, all but cropping Africa out of the picture. For celebrities, working with the media must be like costarring with dogs: they’ll follow you anywhere, but the more emphatically you point in the direction you want them to look, the more obsessed they become with your finger.
(via africlecticmagazine)
Source: b-sama
![dynamicafrica:
theatlantic:
How Cuban Villagers Learned They Descended From Sierra Leone Slaves*
They were adamant about going all out. People who sing the village’s songs—melodies and rhythms that tie them to this inaccessible chiefdom — are considered family. “Our grandparents who told us the stories about our people going as slaves, we know now that they didn’t lie,” says Joe Allie, an elder of the village and Pokawa’s uncle.
“These must be our people,” says Solomon Musa, a young man who works as a teacher in the village, “when we saw the people who practice the same things we used to do, we were so happy, we are full of joy.”
Read more. [Image: They Are We]
*Sierra Leonean enslaved peoples.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/4bc00ead7217c62733da6ad83d2b1144/tumblr_mlpr24OnUA1qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)