Pentacostal churches in Kinshasa have their own TV channels, with religious music videos, talk shows with discussions on the Bible, confessions from former witches, and local drama series. These series work according to a fixed formula, containing three characters: the witch, the lunatic and the pastor.

In 2000, Didier Awadi and other Senegalese rap artists appealed to their fan base to vote for the presidential candidate Abdoulaye Wade, in order to end the decades of socialist rule. These days however, the Senegalese hiphop community remains strikingly silent in the public arena.

In September, Burma commemorates the crush of the uprisings of 1988. Twenty years later, the generals are still in firm control. Sue Tack travelled through Burma and stayed for a couple of months with Burmese refugees in the north of Thailand. She describes the powerlessness of the Kayan.

After the bloody election riots at the end of last year, a proposition was made in Kenya, whereby opposition leader Raila Odinga became the prime minister and his rival Mwai Kibaki remained president. One of the negotiators in the Kenya crisis was the Ethiopian professor Hizkias Assefa. MO* asked this specialist about possible solutions for Zimbabw ...

In September all countries of the world send their heads of state, government leaders or ministers of foreign affairs head to New York where, like every year, the General Assembly of the United Nations is gathering –the diplomatic high mass par excellence.

Ghana has two world famous export products: cacao and gold. Apart from that, bauxite and manganese is mined and recently, off the coast of Ghana, oil and gas has been discovered. The question is: do these resources provide sustainable development? On invitation of the Belgian NGO FOS – within the framework of their upcoming campaign about decen ...

Next October 6th, the European Union (EU) will open a Centre for Migration in Bamako, the capital of Mali. Refugee organizations strongly criticise this “Centre d’Information et de Gestion de Migrations” (Cigem) even before it has become fully operational. They call it an “outpost watchtower of Fortress Europe”.

The assault on Islam by people like the Dutch politician Geert Wilders is obscuring, not helping the debates raging within the communities with islamic heritages and beliefs.

More than 240 million people use Portuguese as their mother tongue, but to gain the global status that she deserves, the language of Pessoa doesn’t have to count on Portugal, but on Brazil.

‘There’s no place like home’, says the manager of a Nigerian videotheque in Antwerp. The homesickness of expats largely explains the attractiveness of Nollywood: Nigerian movies who all take place in traditional villages or towns like Lagos and who all deal with tradition, murder, intrigue and love.

London and Birmingham are the home base of big islamic organizations like Muslim Aid and Islamic Relief. Founded in the eighties they are today established professional relief organizations who can offer help overseas with projects worth millions. Their ideology is based on the ethics of the Koran, their fundraising on methods of experienced market ...

Last year, the horticulture sector issued out 17.000 temporary work permits to foreign workers from the new European member states. Especially the Polish were employed in the fruit sector as pluckers and sorters. The Indian Sikh, who used to do the plucking in the fruit sector in Haspengouw, can’t do anything about it.