LIFESTYLE - The African Mirror

Dec

06

2025

Pops Mohamed mixed old and new to reinvent South African music

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

ISMAIL Mohamed-Jan – better known by South African jazz fans as Pops Mohamed – has passed away at the age of 75. His life in music represented a struggle against narrow, oppressive definitions of race, instrumental appropriateness and musical genre. A few days before his death, a remastered version of his 2006 album Kalamazoo, Vol. 5 (A Dedication to Sipho Gumede) had been released on digital platforms ahead of an official launch. Mohamed was born on 10 December 1949 in the working-class gold-mining town of Benoni in South Africa. By his mid-teens, the Group Areas Act – which divided urban…

Dec

06

2025

By ADRIAAN VAN KLINKEN

God in Nigeria: the country’s novelists help us understand the complexity of Christianity

LIFESTYLE

IN African literature, Christianity has usually been shown as a foreign religion brought to the continent by European missionaries and colonisers. But in the past few decades, Nigeria’s writers have dealt with it in a far more complex way as Christianity is rooted in, and transformed by, local realities, ranging from conflict to prosperity. A new open source book by a scholar of African religion, Adriaan van Klinken, sets out to understand these changes through the eyes of Nigeria’s fiction writers. We asked him five questions. What made you decide to use fiction to understand religion? What fiction and religion…

Nov

29

2025

By AMY ROSS ARGUEDAS and NIC NEWMAN

News influencers are reshaping the media – insights from Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

NEWS creators and influencers have become increasingly important sources of news as more people turn to social media and video networks like Facebook and YouTube to inform themselves. By news creators, we mean individuals who create and distribute content mainly through social and video networks and have some impact on public debates around news and current affairs. While traditional news outlets and journalists still tend to dominate attention for news on legacy platforms like Facebook, data from our Digital News Report 2025 show that news organisations face growing competition from creators on other platforms, especially on newer video-heavy networks. In…

Nov

27

2025

By The African Mirror

Congolese activist creates community radio for farmers

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

ON a humid afternoon in North Kivu, a group of farmers crowd into a low, corrugated-roof community hall, passing around basic feature phones as a young facilitator replays a Jambo Radio podcast on shifting rainfall patterns and the economics of oil extraction in Africa. The audio cuts, and the questions begin: a few sharp, several hesitant, many shaped by longstanding myths about who profits from extraction and what it means for their land. Patricia Kasoki listens closely. She asks follow-ups, redirects assumptions, and invites elders to share what past seasons looked like, before the forests thinned, before heavy rains became…

Nov

21

2025

By ERIC BIANTUDI, BIRD STORY AGENCY

Rebecca Zoro: Weaving Ivorian Heritage into Global Fashion

BEAUTY AND FASHION

INSIDE a workshop bordering her family’s rubber plantation on the outskirts of Abidjan, Ivorian designer Rebecca Zoro is busy tapping into her creative roots. Global celebrities such as Beyoncé have worn her clothes under her label Yhebe Design. Currently, she is retreating from attending glitzy, glamorous events to concentrate on her next collection. After studying fashion design at Collège LaSalle Maroc in Morocco, Zoro started Yhebe Design in 2015 to capitalise on an industry with massive economic potential in Africa. With the global apparel market valued in the trillions, Africa’s share of annual textile, clothing, and footwear exports was only…

Nov

18

2025

By ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER

The Magnificent Rebel: Fela Ransome-Kuti

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

SOME musicians entertain. Some educate. Fela Anikulapo Kuti? He declared war—armed only with a saxophone, a relentless groove, and the kind of audacity that made military dictators break out in nervous sweats. Nigeria's most flamboyant revolutionary didn't need grenades when he had a groove. While others whispered dissent in backrooms, Fela was broadcasting his contempt for corrupt authority through thundering horns, hypnotic drums, and lyrics so sharp they could slice through propaganda like a hot knife through butter. His weapon of choice? Afrobeat—that intoxicating fusion of jazz, funk, soul, and Yoruba rhythms that he didn't just create, he unleashed upon…

Nov

12

2025

By IMMANUEL MUASYA AND BONFACE ORUCHO, BIRD STORY AGENCY

Grassroots project keeps Mijikenda music alive

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

THE thatch throws a soft, familiar shadow. A woven fence creaks in the salty wind. Inside a cleared yard in Kilifi, twelve drummers set skins into place like clockmakers fitting gears, a pair of elders sits cross-legged on the grass and sunlight angles through palm fronds onto a scattering of wooden shakers and carved flutes. This is not a concert. It is a salvage operation for sound, careful, urgent and stubbornly human. Baobab Studio’s LUTSAGA project, which Flavour Polle, Baobab Studio’s manager and cultural liaison, described simply as a granary, is acting like one by collecting the rhythms, grooves and…

Nov

08

2025

By TINASHE MUSHAKAVANHU

African poetry is celebrated in a groundbreaking publishing project

LIFESTYLE

FOR 10 years, Ghanaian poet Kwame Dawes and his friend, the Nigerian writer Chris Abani, have sifted through piles of manuscripts looking for Africa’s new poetic talent. Since 2014, the African Poetry Book Fund has been assembling a formidable archive of writing through the New Generation African Poets Chapbook Series. A chapbook – a small publication usually under 40 pages – is an accessible and honoured format for poets to publish focused selections of their work. In this series, each chapbook features an emerging African poet, and is presented as part of a beautifully designed box set of 10 or…

Oct

17

2025

By SETH ONYANGO, BIRD STORY AGENCY

Transforming a little-known Kenyan town into Africa’s film capital

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

THE morning sun falls gently over Kitale, a town where maize fields stretch beyond the horizon. Inside a modest studio, Peter Pages Bwire reviews schedules for the coming week, surrounded by cameras, scripts, and equipment stacked against the walls. He has just returned from Lagos, where he secured a partnership that will bring Nollywood filmmakers to Kitale. Among those coming to Kitale is Dr Inya Lawal, a renowned social entrepreneur and founder of the African Creative Market (ACM), who will bring her experience in bridging creative commerce and empowering African storytellers to join the programme. They will train local film…

Oct

15

2025

By YAKUBU MESSENI, BIRD STORY AGENCY

Trailblazing Ivorian journo inspires next gen

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT, MULTIMEDIA

FOR more than twenty years, M’ma Camara has covered current affairs in Côte d’Ivoire and the region for notable news organisations. A veteran on the security and defence beat, Camara has reported from conflict zones and experienced some of the profession’s harshest realities. Yet, she has found it hard to meet other Ivorian women to trade career stories with. “What’s unfortunate is that in Africa, we women represent less than 1% of video journalists. Some think it’s a job meant for men. But we absolutely belong here,” she told bird. Earlier this year, the Federation of African Journalists (FAJ) said…