"Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. You can be that great generation."
Johannesburg – At the Bioscope Independent Cinema in Johannesburg’s trendy, gentrifying Maboneng neighbourhood last week, the two-day HER Africa Film Festival showcased films and web series from across the globe, including Mali, the U.S., Burkina Faso and elsewhere. Hosted by the International Association of Women in Radio and Television (IAWRT), it was the first ever all female film festival in Africa.
In 2012, the star architect Kunlé Adeyemi unveiled his “floating school” in Makoko, one of more than 100 slums in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital. Most of Makoko’s residents, who are estimated between 40,000 and 300,000, live in makeshift structures built on stilts on lagoon water.
For a black film and media student at the University of Cape Town, Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing” was a revelation. I watched it first on a DVD one afternoon with my friend Frank in one of the damp tutorial rooms in the Arts Block on Upper Campus, only a few steps away from where the statue of Cecil John Rhodes stood.
Rome (Italy) – The Italian Democratic Party (PD) presented on last 28 July at the Chamber of Deputies the ‘Africa Act’, “package of measures to revitalize the relations between Italy and the African continent, in a logic of co-development.” But what does it mean in practice? Lia Quartapelle, deputy and member of the Democratic Party, explains for Afronline.org and its African media partners the reasons of this new initiative based on three pillars: education and culture, employment and sustainable development.
For the last three months, we have been working on the sound design of my first feature-length documentary, Taking Stock, a film about my father and our third-generation family business in Benoni, a city to the east of Johannesburg.
There’s a strong (European) mainstream that is still secretly seduced by the idea that poor black people, especially those in African slums, can’t or won’t make great art or if they do, it’s the exception.
Native of Cape Town, Sean Jacobs lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches in Manhattan. He obsesses about the relationship between politics and popular culture, but the main rationale for his blog is to comment on what passes for media coverage of the African continent.
Sokari Ekine is a Nigerian social justice activist living in Spain, with a background in technology, gender issues and human rights. She is interested in creating a community of grassroots African bloggers as a way for Africans to exchange ideas, share experiences and tell their own stories in our own words.
Rosebelle Kagumire is an experienced Ugandan Journalist. She won the best Journalist blogger English category at the Panos hosted competition in 2009. Currently she is a student of MA. Media, Conflict and Peace studies at University for Peace (UPEACE), Costa Rica.
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Direttore Responsabile afronline.org: Stefano Arduini
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