Africa
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
Priya Hein’s debut novel, Riambel, is an excoriating examination of Mauritius’ socio-political structures and the colonial past from which they have sprung. Centred around Noemi, a young Mauritian girl who lives in the novel’s titular village slum and is forced to give up school in order to work for the wealthy De Grandbourg family, Riambel focuses on the "other" side of Mauritius, the one not depicted on tourist postcards.Intertwined with Noemi’s poignant and beautifully recounted life story are those of other women, former enslaved mothers, daughters, sisters and girls. From beyond the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The work of the double Pulitzer-winning Black American dramatist Lynn Nottage has thankfully become a fixture in the UK. After its award-winning production of Sweat, the Donmar will stage the UK premiere of her Clyde’s next month, and MJ the Musical, for which she wrote the book, arrives in the West End in March 2024.But not to be missed right now is her 2018 play Mlima’s Tale at the Kiln. Out of a magazine article about the ivory trade, Nottage has spun a Brechtian yarn of corruption and mendacity, minus the Verfremdung and with a surprising number of laughs, that suggests a whole world Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The alternative title of Jocelyn Bioh’s 2017 play School Girls, The African Mean Girls Play, might indicate that it’s a super-bitchy account of high-school rivalries, here with a west African accent. Which it is. But it’s much more besides. The school in question is an elite boarding establishment in Ghana’s Aburi Hills. Here two alpha females collide and slug it out for top-dog status. The year is 1986, almost 30 years on from Ghana becoming the first African nation to gain independence and 25 years before the event that inspired the play.In a programme note, Bioh states that what set Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Synths has a special attraction in a world that aspires to modernity. Thirty years ago Algerian Rai, which combined elements of traditional North African music with rock, was characterised by the sweet and slight tinny sound of electronic keyboards. Slightly tweaked they could imitate the harmonics and microtonal universe of Arab music. Now they are all over Africa, as well as in the super-charged dabke wedding music of Omar Souleyman and many other places.Jantra is a star of underground dance music in Sudan. His first album has been pieced together very creatively from existing material Read more ...
India Lewis
Small Worlds, the second novel from Caleb Azumah Nelson, is a delight: a book with a real feeling for sound and dance, and a sense of place from London to Ghana and back again. It’s a story of a first romance, the intricacies of family life, the importance of music, and the difficulties still faced by people of colour in the UK today. While it may not seem like it will set the world on fire, it’s a beautifully observed picture of the twists and turns of life and of love.Our protagonist, Stephen, is a young black trumpet player, destined for great things until he flunks his exams, forcing a Read more ...
Mark Kidel
“Yerimayo Celebration”, which opens Baaba Maal’s brilliant and superbly paced new album, sets the tone: it starts in the mists of time, as it were, drawing deep on the minimal soul of traditional West African music: a plucked ngoni, and a haunting voice. The spirits have been summoned.Then, the song explodes, driven by the rhythmic clatter of the sabar drums, so characteristic of the region, with subtle voice distortions and electronic effects. This is fusion of the ancient and new that works wonderfully.The song celebrates fishermen, the clan from which Baabal Maal comes, rather than from a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Maher (Maher el Khair, an actual brick-maker) works in a brickyard sloshing sticky mud into rectangular moulds with his bare hands. Next the mud bricks are tipped out to dry in the sun, before being fired in a large, wood fired kiln. The same process has been used for centuries, yet this brickyard is within spitting distance of the Merowe Dam, a state-of-the-art hydroelectric dam built across the Nile in Sudan. Ancient and modern technologies collide.After a day spent in the mud, the men all go for a swim, except Maher who borrows a motorbike and rides off into the desert. Driving along a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There’s a moment in the opening stretch of Giles Terera’s The Meaning of Zong where you think the former Hamilton star has written a piece about slavery that’s in much the same idiom as the hit musical. Music will indeed be a strong presence in this piece, but it is crafted around the songs of West Africa, lovingly supported by the playing of a djeli n'goni (a traditional Griot stringed instrument) by Sidiki Dembele. He is playing a drum when the audience enters and soon involves us in mirroring his rhythms with our clapping. This is the tenor of what follows: it’s theatre as an Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Can a play ever be a bit too much like real life? The thought came to me while watching Matilda Feyisayo Ibini’s entertaining new play Sleepova at the Bush. This latest opening is almost a bookend to the excellent Red Pitch, premiered at the same address last year: another intimate piece about teens in transition to adulthood, but this time featuring a sparky female quartet, not a football-mad trio of young men. It has more lightness of spirit, but less grit.Proceedings start before lights down, with the voices of girls chatting behind the scenes and singing along to tracks playing over the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa dies off-screen of an undisclosed disease, suffering “in silence” notes sister Shuri (Letitia Wright), actor and role as one at the end. Lost after one, uniquely iconic full-length film, recasting and digital resurrection was rejected by shocked writer-director Ryan Coogler, even as he ripped his sequel script up.Mourning is intermittent in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, with a ghost-wind whistling over a Marvel Studios emblem given over to Boseman. The strength of Coogler’s initial Afrofuturist vision is shown by T’Challa’s funeral, led by white-robed women Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The Star Feminine Band are from Benin, all of them under 18, the youngest only 12. They hail from a village in the north of their small country tucked between Togo and Nigeria. Their pop-inflected mix of high life, Congolese rhumba and other trans-African styles is as ebullient as it comes, and probably very infectious on the dance floor.Their second album features once again guitars, electronic keyboards and percussion. It’s mostly up-tempo, and as with so much African music, as well as in the musics of the African diaspora, the fun of the dance is inseparable from messages about how to live Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Africa is an endlessly surprising source of new music: sounds that grab you instantly, and combine the wisdom and grace of the ancestors with the creative and playful use the latest technologies. Linda Ayupuka is the latest singer to look out for, as well as her prolific and inventive producer Francis Ayamga.Ayupuka hails from Bongoe Soe, in North Eastern Ghana, close to the border of Burkina Faso. She is deeply involved with the local Presbyterian Church and leads two choirs that travel around the region raising the spirit of young and old. The sound of her very danceable music on this album Read more ...