MF GALAXY

LISTEN/DOWNLOAD Marvel’s Black Panther is a global sensation. As of Saturday, March 3, 2018, only two weeks and two days into its release, the Ryan Coogler/Joe Robert Cole film has grossed $US898 million worldwide. Within its first week it had outgrossed what DC’s Justice League took three months to earn, and the entire US runs of Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, The Incredible Hulk, the first Captain America, and the first two Thor films . It had the fifth-highest opening of all time and the third-highest four-day opening ever . Of course, money isn’t everything, but the astonishing success of a film that is 100% obviously Africentric, starring African characters played by African actors, written by two African writers and directed by an African director, is game-changing. It negates in sky-writing every Hollywood executive who ever claimed that US-made movies about and by Africans could not make money outside the US. And this is within the same 12-month period in...

Buk Arop, president of the Edmonton-based South Sudan Development Foundation , says that Emmanuel Jal , the award-winning South Sudanese hip hop artist, activist, and actor, is stoking the South Sudanese Civil War . To hear my interview with Jal, download episode 021. Like Jal, Arop is a so-called “lost boy” --a person who lost his childhood to the Sudanese Civil War. Born in 1981, Arop entered the Pinyudo Refugee Camp in Ethiopia where the Sudan People’s Liberation Army conscripted him as a child soldier. When the Ethiopian regime fell in 1991, ten year old Arop and all the other refugees were forced to leave on foot. He arrived in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp in 1992, where he stayed until the year 2000. Then, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees nearly sent him to Norway, but at the last moment switched his destination to Canada, where Arop earned a BA in International Development Studies and an MA in Cultural Studies. Today Arop speaks five languages and works w...

Imagine starting a country from scratch, a country devastated by war, poverty, PTSD, and crumbling or nonexistent modern infrastructure. Now imagine that your university--the centre for training your country’s leaders--has no library. How do you rate your nation’s chances for stability and prosperity? Buk Arop is facing that conundrum right now, because his countrymen and –women in South Sudan have voted 99% in favour of separating from the North. And Arap knows as well as anybody that without education, his ancient (and also new) homeland has no future. Arop, a tall, 29-year-old Sudanese youth worker with movie-star looks, a baritone voice and a gentle demeanour, is the president of the newly-formed South Sudan Development Foundation. The SSDF’s first major project is to stock—from scratch—the library of the Dr. John Garang Memorial University of Science and Technology , named in honour of the late leader of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army and Sudan’s First Vice ...