Culture

Changing, Exchanging and Transforming African Creativity on the Web

The digital revolution has caught up fast in the world of African creativity! Over the last ten years, the increase in African Internet users has been 16 times greater than that of North American users. Alongside this, a growing number of African organisations and cultural operators are creating and participating in websites and social networks, offering an ever-increasing range of resources to allow people to keep up-to-date with African...
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Uganda Museum under Threat
The Uganda National Museum is one of the most important heritage sites in Eastern Africa, but if all goes as the Ugandan government plans, it could be destroyed. In fact, the government has planned to construct a 60-story ultra modern building in Kampala, at plot 5 Kiira Road, the exact location where the Museum building currently stands. Culture and heritage don’t have big success among the politicians, and those passionate about...
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Jeffry Feeger’s art takes the pulse of PNG
Jeffry Feeger’s paintings are far from the traditional images of Papua New Guinea of the Asaro mud men and the colourful sing songs of the Highlands. He says he is tackling the issues of “a society in transition”. Just 27 years old, this half German and half Papua New Guinean, whose mother is from PNG’s Gulf region, paints with a passion – with both hands and brushes. He put Papua New Guinea on the artistic map...
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The battle of the major powers in terra incognita

Papua New Guinea’s early settlers still live remote lives in the Highlands, yet the country was centre stage during one of the fiercest campaigns of World War II. The country’s past and present are full of paradoxes. New Guinea was one of the first land masses to be populated by modern humans who are thought to have arrived from Southeast Asia 50,000-70,000 years ago, via the Indonesian archipelago. Archaeological evidence suggests...
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Papua New Guinea: An island continent - Exciting prospects but MDGs trail
Papua New Guinea (PNG) could be described as a mini continent. It is a country of extraordinary diversity both on land and sea from its fauna and fauna to its economic potential:  oil, gas, minerals, forests and fish. Lying just south of the equator, 160km north of Australia, the country is part of a huge arc of mountains stretching from Asia, through Indonesia and into the South Pacific. It 5.9 million population is mostly Melanesian....
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Resettling the Carteret islanders, victims of climate change

The Non-Governmental Organisation, Tulele Peisa, is trying to resettle the estimated 1,000 strong population of the Carteret islands, a horseshoe-shaped cluster of islands to the north-east of Papua New Guinea’s Autonomous Province of Bougainville. Climate-change induced sea level rises could completely submerge their landmass by 2015. “If a King Tide occurs people will be swept off the other side”, says Aloysius Laukai, the...
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Stories matter: a glimpse into the world of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The storyteller “Stories matter … stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.” (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, acclaimed Nigerian novelist, the young, gifted storyteller wowing readers worldwide, knows all too well about the power of the story. “Endowed with the gifts of ancient storytellers” is how Nigerian literary giant...
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So much beauty
Athens really has become a very beautiful city since its facelift in the run-up to the Olympic Games of 2004. Among its aesthetic pleasures are the boulevard Vasilissis Sofias, with the beautiful houses of the well off and its modern buildings, theatres and museums, including the Byzantine and Christian Museum, with its glorious courtyard. And Syntagma Square, overlooked by the extraordinary Vouli (parliament), in front of which the Evzones...
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Ancient history, the charms of the islands, and so much more to discover
Rhodes, a medieval town. Suleyman mosque © Hegel Goutier
The world’s attention has recently been drawn to Greece, as a victim of the international financial crisis and, it is true, of a notable lack of transparency and economic mismanagement. No mention has been made of the prosperity that the country has enjoyed since joining the European Union, and neither has its dynamism in certain scientific fields or in the arts, above all theatre, been recognized. And then, of course, there is the country...
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Dismantling the concepts of fetish and of modernity
Interview  with Anne-Marie Bouttiaux Head of the Ethnography section of the MRAC Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren, Belgium), ethnologist and writer* by Hegel Goutier Anne-Marie Bouttiaux is co-curator of the Fetish Modernity exhibition which symbolises the new vision of European museums of ethnography, in particular those involved in various Europe-wide projects such as RIME (Réseau International des Musées...
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From the Althingi to the European Parliament
After 20 turbulent centuries of history, Iceland - an island that came into being just 20 million years ago by virtue of a whim of nature - straddling the rift between the American and Eurasian continental plates - is expected to join the European Union within the next two years. That’s provided its population, shaken by the 2008 financial crisis, gives its approval. The country’s history goes back to the first century AD. Irish...
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Death and Fertility: Haiti’s First Appearance in Italy
The Venice Biennial of Contemporary Art saw four new countries presenting their own official pavilions this year: Andorra, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh and Haiti. The presence of these countries at the Biennial represented their participation in the most important global showcase of the contemporary art world. A year and half after its devastating earthquake, Haiti took up the challenge of asserting its position in the cultural world, alongside 88...
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MobiCINE: A New Initiative for the Distribution of African Cinema
In April 2011, 70 pupils from the Elementary School of the Patte d'Oie Builders in Dakar enjoyed their first viewing of a film on the big screen: Le ballon d’or by Cheick Doukouré. This viewing was one of the first organised as part of the MobiCINE project, which is piloting an innovative system of film screenings in two major West African cities: Dakar and Bamako. In February, 7 “motorcycle units” were equipped with...
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African Films Available on Demand
In Africa, the field of media and telecommunications is set to experience spectacular growth over the coming years. Operators are already investing heavily in the Internet, mobile phones and television, but the field of film production and distribution remains the weakest link, as African filmmakers often encounter problems in accessing both African and potential non-African audiences, who are often unable to easily buy or rent films. The number...
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Fetish Modernity
The exhibition on Fetish Modernity which was held at the Royal Museum for Central Africain Tervuren, Brussels - Belgium from April 8 to September 4,  2011, marks a trend that has been gaining ground for a few years now in this mecca of culture and numerous ethnographic museums in Europe. The Museo de América - Madrid, Náprstek's Muzeum - Prague, the Museum für Völkerkunde, Vienna,  Museum Volkenkunde,...
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