This is a clip from MSNC, one of the US cable news channels who rarely report actual real news and have wall-to-wall coverage of “debates” between talking heads (back home people call them “analysts”). This time, the host, Contessa Brewster, invited Jesse Jackson to comment on some ludicrous statement by a big time capitalist who’s happy to take government bailouts to up his own salary but doesn’t want to extend any government programs to his poor, fellow citizens. Then, she confuses Jackson with Al Sharpton. Her explanation: It was the teleprompter’s fault. This is suppose to be journalism.

No this is not another white, Western stereotype of Africa, but an amazing photo series of a lioness attempting to kill a buffalo in the middle of traffic; if you call slow moving tourist cars on a public game reserve in the northern part of South Africa, traffic. The buffalo eventually got away. The photos are here and here is also a link to a story detailing the whole thing.

The African king working as a nurse in the U.S..

The new music video for the (Connecticut-based) Cape Verdean Shokanti‘s new single.

The music video for “Camago,” the first single off Cape Town hip hop group, Driemanskap’s new album, “Igqabhukil’ Inyongo.” The song, in Xhosa, is “… about the importance of respecting and celebrating your culture and its traditions, even if you are a modern urban youth.” Reminds of Zulu Boy’s aesthetic and sound.

23 years ago this week, the Nigerian junta (then led by General Ibrahim Babangida; now reinvented as a democrat) in what proved a sordid turn in their attitude to news media, murdered the journalist Dele Giwa. Security policemen dropped off a  parcel bomb sent to his house which exploded as he was opening it. In a moving piece for the Committee to Protect Journalists blog, Dan Agbese, a colleague of Giwa and co-founder of the pioneering Lagos magazine, “Newswatch,” writes on Giwa’s murder and his legacy as a journalist.

Wonder what happened to Vanilla Ice after the reality TV shows stopped calling? He is making TV commercials for South African beer monopoly, SAB-Miller. (Ht Jonathan Faull).

Dripping with hipster irony, Jack Parow does the Afrikaans rap (?) ,”Jy dink jy’s cooler as ekke” (You think you’re cooler than I) in the back of a minibus taxi (the South African version of the matatu) for the video series of taxijam.

And I’ll leave you with this history lesson about Christopher Columbus by Burning Spear.