Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
By the way, I don’t even think Putin was offended when Biden called him a killer by replying “yes” to the interviewer’s question. (But then I don’t think Putin’s feelings are central to this story – Biden’s message is.) In…
The Congo, I Presume? is a sculpture group by Tom Frantzen in the garden of the AfricaMuseum in Brussels. Zoey Poll writes in Lapham’s Quarterly: It’s hard to imagine that a passerby would pick up on the work’s supposed anticolonial…
Alice Cherki, a friend and colleague of Frantz Fanon, writes in her memoir: Fanon went to Moscow in mid-January 1961. He had put on some weight, and his white cell count was substantially lower… [Dr. Michel] Martini remembers that Fanon…
Thomas Meaney – a contributor to the London Review of Books among other things – writes about Frantz Fanon’s last journey and the CIA’s sympathies for independence movements in Africa and the Third World, more generally. In 1961, Fanon was…
Late in April, Rwanda’s Supreme Court struck down a law criminalizing “defamation, insults and cartooning public officials” but upheld the clause that made insulting the president a crime. (In addition, the court refused to decriminalize adultery.) Specifically, Article 154 criminalizes…
Black Brazilians and Americans come to Benin to join Voodoo worshippers: At a ceremony in the southern town of Ouidah, Voodoo high priestess [of what god?] Nagbo Hounon Gbeffa sacrificed a goat, a rooster and a chicken as divine offerings…
I did not know January 10 was Voodoo Day in Benin. According to AP, The religion was repressed in Benin, then banned during incumbent President Mathieu Kerekou’s first 18-year stint in power, which ended in 1991. Kerekou’s Marxist regime believed…