Art & Entertainment

Nearly all the big time twentieth century dictators had the writing bug:  Kemal Ataturk, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Idi Amin, Abdul Nasser, Mummer Gaddafi, Nicolai Ceausescu, Kim Il-sung, Leonard Brezhnev, Ayatollah Khomeini, Yuri Andropov, Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein ... All convinced themselves, that no matter how busy they were with running the State, they had to take time to compose words.

On Thursday he picks his American degree. In a week or two he will be back in Africa. The excitement of seeing his parents, his sister, his two brothers, the anticipation was almost more than he could bear.Once in Africa, they will launch a new magazine of culture, politics, and the arts. Black Horizon, they decided to call it. Launch date was set for November 22^nd, just months away

Having a growth spurt at seven years old meant I was the tallest in my age group, taller than all the girls and all the boys who had to stand on chairs so they could be level with me in class photos. Starting puberty at age eight, meant the rest of my body soon looked different from those of the girls around me. 

The main character is a young man who goes by the name Peter Otim. When we first meet him Otim has just sat for a major national school examination. In this land of titles and certificates, the result of this single examination could spell his doom. 

At a corner of the Ahmadu Bello University in northern Nigeria a mud structure crafted in the traditional style of the Hausas encloses a modest open air stage and auditorium. This is the home of theater and the performing arts that campus students playfully call the Mud Theater. Deceitfully simple the place has witnessed many thrilling moments of drama, dance, and music.

Since Hecataeus, Herodotus, and later on, Bartholomew Dias, Livingstone, Stanley and Lugard, Africa’s stories, good and bad, have been written and told by outsiders. Explorers, missionaries, exploiters, adventurers; call them what you will. Each writer, objective or not, had their own agenda and did their own thing.

Whenever and wherever in the world Miriam Makeba took to the stage in performance of the one and only Malaika, the African love song, she first made famous and then help drive to the top of the charts, to become one of the most loved of all love songs, nothing so becomes this delicate and charming Empress of Songs.