Tag Archives: culture

Beijing, China | AFP | In China, where children are often saddled with a packed schedule of extracurricular activities before they even enter grade school, some parents are making room for a surprising pursuit: hip-hop dance classes. Inside a dance studio in central Beijing, a group of kids bopped up …

Kinshasa, DR Congo | AFP | It is a conflict at once cultural, generational and political: rap music in DR Congo is staging a frontal assault on rumba, accusing its ageing stars of only singing of love and other banalities. DRC’s growing army of rappers say their urban lyrics reflect …

  Riyadh, Saudi Arabia | AFP | Saudi Arabia hosted its first public film screening in over 35 years on Friday, two days after US movie giant AMC unveiled the kingdom’s debut theatre in Riyadh. Clutching prized tickets for the sold-out showing of Hollywood blockbuster action film “Black Panther”, men …

Dublin, Ireland | AFP | Pubs in Ireland were open on Good Friday for the first time in almost a century after the repeal of a law banning sales of alcohol on the Christian holiday. The Intoxicating Liquor Act, passed in 1927, prohibited sales in shops and bars on three …

Banská Štiavnica, Slovakia | AFP | In a small medieval Slovak town, couples are getting ready on Valentine’s Day to make a “deposit” about their romance in a place dedicated to love stories. The “Love Bank” is the main attraction of an exhibition commemorating the world’s longest love poem, “Marina” …

Makerere gallery features explorations of ancient culture through paintings Kampala, Uganda | DOMINIC MUWANGUZI | Turkey has a rich cultural heritage. It is largely known as part of the cradle of civilization in Europe with recorded history stretching back over 15,000 years ago. It remains a dominant influence on contemporary European social, …

Lagos, Nigeria | AFP | Mention Nigerian literature and the first names likely to spring to mind are Chinua Achebe, the author of “Things Fall Apart”, or the venerable Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka. But Africa’s most populous nation has a new crop of writers whose work is a far cry from …

How failure to share family cultural history endangers symbols that represent common ancestral origin COMMENT | NATHAN KIWERE | Writing on page 137 of his book, ‘The Baganda’ (Macmillan and Co., 1911), John Roscoe, a British colonial historian, states that when animals were becoming scarce, Kintu, with the general consent of …

All about art mentorship, not teaching Kampala, Uganda | DOMINIC MUWANGUZI | What can an average art graduate do with twelve bottle-tops? Perhaps, they will look at them idly and think that they’re useless. However, this is not the case with one art graduate who used the twelve bottle-tops to sculpt a …

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia | AFP | Saudi Arabia on Monday lifted a decades-old ban on cinemas, part of powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s far-reaching liberalisation drive that is shaking up the ultra-conservative Muslim kingdom. The government said it would begin licensing cinemas immediately and the first movie theatres are expected …