Random Thoughts: Africa’s Wikipedia Problem?

In April this year, an American author, Amanda Filipacchi, wrote a piece titled Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female Novelists, on the New York Times website in reaction to the discovery that women were being moved from the American Novelists category to a sub-category American Women Novelists. Following that James Gleick, an American author, journalist and biographer, shared his thoughts expanding on this on the New York Review of Books blog, with his opinion piece, Wikipedia’s Women Problem. Early this year, in the Freakonomics Radio Podcast Women Are Not Men, there was a discussion on how...

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STR.CRD 2012 – Urban Youth Culture

When it comes to hip hop and its influence on culture and lifestyle, the story of how Run DMC got – the first for a rap group - $1million endorsement deal from Adidas which eventually included their own line is legendary. In the book, The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip Hop, Dan Charnas talks of how Lyor Cohen convinced Angelo Anastasio, Adidas US marketing executive, to come see Run DMC perform at Madison Square Garden during their Raising Hell tour. One of their great hits was the homage to the shell-toe, My Adidas (for the young ones reading this) Charnas writes, “The...

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The Future of Africa

What is Africa’s future? A group of 2011 Archbishop Tutu Leadership Fellows – part of a programme under the auspices of African Leadership Institute – created 2 scenarios of Africa in 2025. They explored how the continent would turn out depending on what Africans and their leaders do today.

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Museke Online Africa Music Awards

Museke, an online portal for African music, started the Museke Online Africa Music Awards (MOAMAs) in 2010 and, in 2011, they have worked to improve the reach, size and administration of these awards as part of the journey to become the pre-eminent Africa music awards.

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The Media Decides? (CP)

The influence of the media and entertainment on society is unquantifiable even as those sectors endeavour to reflect society. They guide the discussions through what they put out. In Africa, we have often talked of how it is the West that determines the perception of us. This is not totally the case. The power bases on the continent – like South Africa and Nigeria – do so as well through the programming created on and for channels like MTV Base and Channel O. Because these spaces, based in SA, determine what is put out as being representative of Africa, can we comfortably say, this is the full picture?

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Soundtrack to a Lifetime (CP)

Written on September 22nd, 2009 Do you ever sit and wonder what music will sound like in 10 years from now? 20 years? With all the talk that television and cinema are going to dwindle in popularity, do you ever wonder what you will be watching in the future? Do you ever look at your parents and wonder what they really think about the music you are passionate about today? If your parents are over 50 years of age, they were probably born into an Africa with no (or very few) cars, no television, no telephones (let alone cellphones), no computers, no electricity, no running water in homes, etc....

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