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Best writing and photography

TalkingGig: Songhoy Blues

Songhoy Blues in Bamako, 2014 Photo: Andy Morgan

TalkingGigs marry stripped down musical performance with conversation, stories, lyrics, anecdotes, images and video – a kind of musical theatre that engaging, insightful and entertaining.

Zanzibar – Behind the veil

Siti Amina Omar play oud with the Tausi Women's Taarab Orchestra, Sauti za Busara 2019, Zanzibar. Photo: Andy Morgan

It’s embarrassing to admit how easily the exotic pull of these islands hacks into your main frame and takes control of your cognitive faculties and critical discernment. Fact is, to a pasty-faced subject just off the plane from some wintry destination in the northern hemisphere, Zanzibar is, on first appearances, irresistibly exotic. No argument. Exotic and graceful and slow and warm and easy…Falling in love at first sight with it all takes no great effort. But there’s a nagging part of you that knows that this pretty, sunny face is a deception, and that behind it must lie a very human mess of light and shade. Seeking it out feels almost perverse.

BLICK BASSY: Simonobisick’s Letter

Simonobisick is a character from Blick Bassy’s novel ‘Le Moabi Cinema.’ This letter from the novel, which Simonobisick writes to his mum, reads like a statement of Africa’s frustrated youth.

TINARIWEN – Guitar poets in Nueva York

Ibrahim ag Alhabib on stage at the Highline Ballroom, New York, July 2011. (c) Andy Morgan

Ibrahim battles through the show, smiling only once. His grave immobile presence is like a challenge to the hip bubbling New York crowd. To do what? To imagine a simplicity and a silence that their city will never know.

MALI RAP – Talking rhymes with Presidents and Putschistas

Sidiki Diabate and Iba One at the Diabaté house in 'Ntomikorobougou

  “Don’t be surprised if it explodes one day!” When I met Mylmo I knew nothing about him except that he was rapper who was performing on the main stage of the Festival on the Niger that very night. I interviewed him in an empty restaurant on the banks of the great river – most…