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I remember the first one. I was about six years old or so and innocently used to bop to it without paying too much attention to the lyrics. But as I got older and Christmas swung around again, I actually started to feel increasingly irritated when the song came on air.  Image © of Anthony London @ EbolaPhone If you've not heard the 'Feed the World' lyrics , let me recount some of them for you in all their shameful glory. I will also provide you with the asides I would add when the song would play.....   "Well there won't be snow in Africa this Christmas time"   (well duh! There's never any snow unless you are in the southern part of the continent) "The greatest gift they'll get this year is life" (how condescending we are not all starving, diseased and poor) "Where nothing ever grows" (yep nothing ever grows but the rest of the world still manages to source a hell of a lot of fruit and veg from there) "...

I know of three films produced by Guinean Mohamed Camara – each of which tackle the taboo subjects of incest and child suicide from an African perspective. Dakan (meaning destiny) is his third, which I watched at South London Gallery as part of Film Africa 2014, and it did not disappoint. Camara's film Dakan shows that love endures © Film Africa 2014 The opening scene is arresting. Two lovers in passionate embrace, lips locked and gripped by desire. The pair are in a red car – the colour of passion – enveloped by darkness except for a chink of light. We only see one face, the other is hidden, forcing us to focus on the intimacy and not the gender. It is only when the camera draws nearer that we realise that they are BOTH men. Brave. Brave. Brave! At this point in the film I was giving Camara a mental standing ovation.  Pushing boundaries Dakan is thought to be the first gay film from West Africa and premiered at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. It is also a...

N: The Madness of  Reason – a docu-drama co-produced by Peter Kr ü ger and award-winning Nigerian writer Ben Okri - left me suspended between discomfort and awe. ©  Berlinale archive - N: The Madness of Reason Discomfort because such scenes as a woman performing fellatio on a man; the ritualistic slaughter of an ox and the display of bare-chested women jumping – if filmed in the UK – would most probably be censored.  And yet in this 102-minute film, these real - and at times graphic scenes - were interwoven between absolutely exquisite images across west Africa. The solitary caterpillar, the colourful butterflies housed among acres of forest, the booming ocean waves and most of all the myriad of faces. The film is complex but the premise so simple. The story unfolds telling the tale of a Frenchman man who leaves the turmoil of Europe in the 1920s. He is in search of adventure and falls in love with and ends up spending 40 years of his li...

An African City creator Nicole Amarteifio © MisBeee Writes For those of you that have been living under a rock since 2 March 2014, African TV just got sexier with the arrival of YouTube web series ‘An African City’ , ( see MisBeee Writes 18 May 2014 : Reasporans: New African returnees ).  The 10-part series, which was the brainchild of Ghana-born Nicole Amarteifio, charts the experiences of five successful and professional women who return to Ghana from the West to settle. The cast includes journalist Nana Yaa, Harvard graduate and marketing manager Sade, Ngozi, who works for an international development agency, entrepreneur Zainab, and Oxford graduate and lawyer Makena. As with the five leading characters in the show, Nicole was schooled and worked in the US before deciding to return to Ghana. Her inspiration for the web series came from feeling tired about the single story told about Africa and its people, and wanting to challenge these stereotypes....