Moving to Wordpress

This blog will go OFFLINE in ONE WEEK.

Ever the traveler, I moved over to WordPress. The many technical glitches of Blogger became too much.

-- Leo

Favorite current person: Elrio van Heerden

Profiled by Belgian TV channel, EEN. In Flemish (close to Afrikaans) and English. He equalized for Bafana against Angola earlier this week in Ghana.

No African ever wrote a good read on the Congo River

That's if you believe journalist Tim Butcher. Tim Butcher's Top Ten Books About Congo, a regular 'Top Ten' list was just published in the Guardian and surprise: it does not include a single African, or even Congolese writer.

Granted it is a subjective list, but I am not surprised and it makes perfect sense.

Tim Butcher worked for The Telegraph (there's a progressive newspaper), his own book about Africa is called 'Blood River,' and the list includes titles such as Five Years With The Congo Cannibals as well as books by such sensible authors (when it comes to Africa) as VS Naipaul, Henry Morton Stanley and Evelyn Waugh. Yeh.

This while the works of Sony Labou Tansi, for example, is available in English. (Thanks Ibn Battutta for noticing it)

Images of Africa / Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe, originally uploaded by Leo Africanus.

Graphic designer Chaz Maviyane-Davies ('the guerrilla of design') lectures in Ann Arbor, Michigan. (To see the whole image, click on the photograph.)

Art / Malick Sidibe and Zwelethu Mthethwa

The photographs of Sidibe and Mthethwa are on view at Washington DC's G Fine Art Gallery as part of an exhibition on "Portraits.' See also here.

My Heart's in Accra

Togo's Emmanuel Adebayor loses his mind this week against Tottenham Hotspurs. Maybe itsbecause he is stuck in soggy London and not in Ghana where all the fun is.

The latter action (in the 2008 African Cup of Nations) continues today when South Africa (one of the teams expected to crash and burn early in the ACN) takes on Angola today. I'm rooting for the homeland of course, but this could be Manucho (and I don't even like Manchester United) and Angola's moment.

Let's hope South Africa's World Cup winning Brazilian coach Carlos Alberto Parreira earns his 1.8 million Rands per month salary (that's about US$250,000) and that leaving Benni McCarthy and Delron Buckley out of the team was not such a bad idea after all. Was Parreira right? Is this Steven Pienaar's tournament? Some of those questions will be answered today.

The Greatest footballers to come out of Africa

I hate 'the greatest players' lists, because they're always subjective. The kind of 'list' I like is something more like the 'My Eleven' feature in FourFourTwo magazine where former players or managers (sadly mostly British, since the magazine is published in the UK of course) pick a fantasy team.

Nevertheless, I had to mention this one list: Caught up in excitement around the 2008 African Cup of Nations in Ghana (since Sunday and lasting till February 10), the editors at the UK Guardian's SportsBlog published a 'Greatest Players to come out of Africa list.'

Eusebio, the Mozambican (known as Pantera Negra or the Black Panther) who played for Portugal (Mozambique was still a colony of Portugal's military junta at that stage) and was one of the stars of the 1996 World Cup in England, gets the nod as the greatest player to come out of Africa. (Unfortunately we only have grainy video images to imagine what he would have done today.)

Second is Algeria's Rabah Madjer, one of my all-time favorite players (his back heel goal for Porto in the 1987 European Cup is still a classic).

Samuel Eto'o of Barcelona and Cameroon (who scored twice for Cameroon as they, surprisingly, lost to Egypt in group play in the Cup of Nations today) is in third place.

For the rest of the list and the partisan debate that usually follow such lists, go here.