When you’ve achieved the truly sublime, trying to recapture it can be bittersweet. Cymande, for the mere three years they existed in the early 1970s, were one of the very best bands on the planet: a unique mixture of Rasta spirituality and African-inspired percussion with Curtis Mayfield conscious funk plus a particularly British melancholy and melodic hooks for days. It got them a brief flush of fame in the US, but nothing at home and they broke up disillusioned, before being gradually revivified by getting sampled by the biggest names in hip hop.

As something of an immigrant to the capital myself in the long hot summer of 1984, I gobbled up Absolute Beginners, Colin MacInnes’s novel of an outsider embracing the temptations and dangers of London.

RaMell Ross’s feature debut follows his poetic documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) in again observing black Southern teenage boys, this time in Sixties juvenile prison the Nickel Academy, where beatings and unmarked graves await the unluckiest. It faithfully adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys (2019), whose writing’s loving warmth made its horrors bearable, his hope for his characters outlasting their fates.

I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them.

I live in Brixton, south London. To get to the tube, I have to cross Windrush Square. Since 2021, I go past the Cherry Groce memorial, which honours the woman who was wrongfully shot by the Met in 1985, an event which sparked the riots I remember so well from 40 years ago. Amazingly enough, I have now seen her sister, Sutara Gayle AKA Lorna Gee, performing a gig theatre piece on the main stage at the Royal Court.

Cryptocurrency is like the myth of El Dorado – a promised land made of fool’s gold. Despite its liberatory potential, it frequently attracts sharks or, as the title of Beru Tessema’s new play indicates, hungry wolves that gobble up defenceless sheep.

Mati Diop’s “speculative documentary” reverses the transatlantic journey of her feature debut Atlantics’ ghost Senegalese migrants, as plundered Beninese artefacts are returned from France. Dahomey is about African displacement and despoilment, and Diop chooses to give these ancient, ritually charged statues of men and beasts the sonorous voice of some alien god found floating in an sf space-capsule, an Afrofuturist deity speaking across centuries.

“The street I grew up in had no name and is in a country that no longer exists,” director Milisuthando Bongela begins her meditation about growing up in Transkei, a semi-fictional black nation which helped facilitate apartheid yet felt like a utopia.

Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is not only the first play by a black woman to premiere on Broadway, back in 1959, but it’s also a cultural goldmine. So powerful is its depiction of the postwar African-American experience that it has inspired at least two other recent dramatic responses: Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park (2010) and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Beneatha’s Place (2013).

This album only has one serious flaw: LL COOL J didn’t open it with “OK you can call it a comeback”. Sorry, cheap joke (if you didn’t know, his classic hit “Mama Said Knock You Out” starts with the lyric “Don’t call it a comeback!” and this, his 14th album, is his first in 11 years).