Empires, trade routes and the rhythms that half the world's popular music came from.
Ko Sira is Oumou Sangaré’s 1993 album, recorded in Bamako and released internationally as Ko Sira and domestically in Mali as Bi Furu. It uses traditional Wassoulou instrumentation — kora, balafon, ngoni, calabash — with Sangaré’s voice leading tightly arranged, rhythmically insistent songs. Its themes are local and urgent: marriage, village loyalty, female agency. It makes no concessions to global pop form or production. It is cohesive, unwavering, and rooted.
Made in Lagos is Wizkid’s fourth studio album, released 30 October 2020 after postponement from 15 October due to the End SARS protests. It fuses Afrobeats and R&B with mid-tempo production, rich local African percussions as its core, casually Auto-Tuned melodies, and meticulously complex beats. Themes include love, focus, goodwill, gratitude, and grace. It achieved commercial success and critical acclaim, reaching number-one on the Billboard World Albums chart. Its single 'Essence' featuring Tems became the first Nigerian song to chart on the Billboard Hot 100.
Recorded in 1975 out of the Kalakuta Republic compound, Expensive Shit compresses Fela Kuti's long standoff with Nigeria's police into two extended Africa '70 tracks: a title piece built from a real, absurd arrest, and Water No Get Enemy's gentler appeal to a Yoruba proverb about nature's staying power. Short in length, it is unusually complete for a Kuti record.
Made on tour in London rather than at home in Lagos, Fela's London Scene pairs Fela Kuti and Nigeria 70 with a second drummer, Ginger Baker, for five extended tracks built on horn riffs and dense percussion. Lighter on political narrative than Kuti's mid-seventies work, it is best heard as the sound of a band finding the architecture it would spend the rest of the decade refining.
Assembled after three increasingly abstract Mwandishi records, Head Hunters strips Hancock's sound down to bass, drums, reeds and Clavinet, turning a fifteen-minute groove into jazz's best-selling record of its era.
Made across studios in Nassau and New York with producer Brian Eno in mid-1980, Remain in Light grew out of instrumental jams built on African polyrhythm rather than finished songs, with David Byrne adding scattered, half-improvised lyrics only once the band returned to the United States. Extra musicians, a struggling frontman and a near-collapse in the writing process all shaped a record now widely treated as the band's finest hour.
Built around the crossover single already circulating a year earlier, Manu Dibango's Soul Makossa sets Cameroonian makossa rhythm against jazz and funk phrasing across seven tracks. The title track's hook became the most sampled fragment in African popular music, a legacy the album now carries alongside the record's own, less-discussed range.
Beasts of No Nation (2015) follows Agu, a West African boy forced into a rebel militia during civil war. Directed and written by Cary Joji Fukunaga, it adapts Uzodinma Iweala’s novel with fidelity to its Krio-inflected voice and narrow psychological focus. Abraham Attah stars alongside Idris Elba as the charismatic, violent Commandant. Shot in Ghana, edited with deliberate duration, and scored with restrained unease, the film avoids spectacle in favour of sustained, intimate horror. It premiered at Venice, where Attah won the Marcello Mastroianni Award, and marked Netflix’s first global feature release.
Ahmad Baba became one of Timbuktu's most prominent Islamic jurists before Moroccan forces invading the Songhai empire deported him to Marrakesh in 1594, where he remained until 1608. He continued writing throughout his exile and after his return, authoring more than forty works, including a nuanced treatment of slavery that historians still interpret differently. His career and library form part of the much larger Timbuktu manuscript tradition, whose survival was tested again in 2012 when local families and archivists evacuated the bulk of the collection ahead of an armed conflict.
Askia Muhammad seized the Songhai throne in 1493 by framing a succession dispute as a defence of proper Islamic rule, then built the empire into West Africa's largest state through provincial administrative reform and a lavish pilgrimage to Mecca that reinforced his religious legitimacy. His reign is known chiefly through two Arabic chronicles compiled in Timbuktu generations later by scholars sharing his own religious culture, making his portrayal as an exemplary Muslim ruler somewhat self-reinforcing. Even his family origins and the source of his royal title remain genuinely disputed among historians.
Portuguese traders reached Goree Island off Senegal in 1444, and the island passed through Dutch and then French control before Senegalese independence in 1960, developing a reputation as a major hub of the Atlantic slave trade that UNESCO's own heritage listing still describes as the largest on the African coast. Historical research has since challenged that framing directly, estimating no more than five hundred people were traded through the island annually, a small fraction of regional slave exports, and finding that the famous House of Slaves building itself lacks archaeological evidence of large-scale trans-Atlantic trafficking, complicating a narrative that took shape largely through one influential curator's account from the 1990s onward.
Mansa Musa ruled the Mali Empire from around 1312 to 1337, a reign later chroniclers regarded as its golden age, and became widely known in the Islamic world after his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, during which his gold spending reportedly depressed the metal's value in Cairo for years afterward. He annexed Timbuktu and Gao, recruited scholars including the poet Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, and helped establish Timbuktu's Sankore as a centre of Islamic learning, though the precise scale of his wealth, drawn from a handful of Arabic chroniclers writing after the fact, cannot be independently verified.
Between roughly 1881 and 1914, European powers moved from controlling about a tenth of Africa's territory to claiming roughly ninety per cent of it, a process regulated but not caused by the 1884 to 1885 Berlin Conference and driven by a combination of economic interest, strategic competition and new technology that made the continent's interior newly accessible. The human cost varied enormously by territory, with the Congo Free State under Leopold II of Belgium responsible for a documented mortality catastrophe whose exact scale historians still dispute, and the resulting arbitrary borders persisted through decolonisation to shape conflicts long afterward.
Timbuktu grew from an early twelfth-century settlement into a major trans-Saharan trade and Islamic scholarly centre, its rise accelerated after Mansa Musa's famous visit around 1325, reaching a population of roughly fifty thousand by the 1500s with three madrasas educating some twenty-five thousand students. A Moroccan invasion in 1591 killed or scattered many of its scholars and triggered a long decline, though hundreds of thousands of manuscripts documenting its intellectual life survived, some housed in libraries into the twenty-first century despite recent conflict-related threats.
Far Cry 2 is a systemic shooter where every choice carries weight—and every weight pulls you deeper into the war’s inertia.
Red Dead Redemption is a third-person, open-world action-adventure game developed by Rockstar Games using the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE). It is set in fictionalised versions of the Western United States and Northern Mexico—specifically the regions of New Austin, West Elizabeth, and Nuevo Paraíso. Players control John Marston through linear story missions, then his son Jack in the epilogue. Core gameplay revolves around horse travel, Dead Eye–enhanced gunfights, a morality-based Honor/Fame system, dynamic random events, and a bounty mechanic triggered by crimes. An online multiplayer mode supports up to 16 players in cooperative and competitive modes set in a recreation of the single-player world.
