The News Review:

- Pop CD of the week: Kanye West, Late Registration | Music | The…
- Feature Article of Sunday, 28 August 2005
- Teeling feels African heat from Petra

Pop CD of the week: Kanye West, Late Registration | Music | The…
The Observer – Aug 28, 2005
Tracks like the giddy ‘Celebration’ or ‘Bring Me Down’, which features Brandy and might be a single next year, are out-and-out pop songs, but rich with complex eddies of sound. String sections are normally the last refuge of the unimaginative artist looking for a cheap, classy fix, but West is better than that, never doing the obvious where he can aim higher. The album’s lead single, ‘Diamonds From Sierra Leone’, didn’t just loop a Shirley Bassey sample, it built lush arrangements around it. Hip hop now abounds with West-copyists who speed up soul samples (a trick he first deployed for Jay-Z). West has responded by cutting out the Minnie Mouse-on-helium hooks. The vast majority of his samples and sung hooks here are rich and male, as on ‘My Way Home’ which plays on Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘Home is Where the Hatred is’. Forthcoming single ‘Gold Digger’ even sees actor Jamie Foxx playing Ray Charles, as he did in the Charles biopic…
‘Gold Digger’ is deliriously straight up and bouncy. Jay-Z turns up for a verse on the remix of ‘Diamonds From Sierra Leone’, after Kanye has tackled the deep ironies of rich African-Americans blinging out on the suffering of Africans. As with his debut, West plays up the struggle between conscience and covetousness, the pop mainstream and what can be achieved within the notional boundaries of hip hop. The only thing that really threatens to derail West’s terrific strike rate is ‘Hey Mama’, a good tune whose gushing mother-love contrasts badly with the lyrical tensions elsewhere. And where College Dropout was cheeky, West’s comfy pillow made of laurels means Late Registration can sound a bit smug. Fortunately, though, this album is another high benchmark for hip hop; West has every right to sing his own praises.

Feature Article of Sunday, 28 August 2005
ghanaweb.com – Aug 28, 2005
The virtual and presumed founder of the University of Ghana also alludes to the often ignored fact that British colonial imperialism in Africa predates the official partitioning of the putatively primal continent by several generations. But even more significantly, Danquah notes that whereas the officially stated British colonial policy, since 1865, has been to gradually and altruistically transfer modern state-craft and technology to the colonies, a Manifest Destiny of sorts, the reality on the ground, in the wake of World War I, pointed to something quite execrably different: In 1865 the British House of Commons passed the following resolution: That the object of our policy should be to encourage in the natives the exercise of those qualities which may render it possible for us more and more to transfer to them the administration of all the Governments, with a view to our ultimate withdrawal from all except, probably, Sierra Leone(3). Danquah explains the fact that in 1865 Britain considered Sierra Leone to be part and parcel of the imperial metropolitan enclave, or the British Isle itself, simply because Freetown was British territory, purchased from British funds [of course, for the 1787 resettlement of continental African repatriates from North America, as well as captive Africans bound for enslavement in the so-called New World but rescued by British navy recruits from the high seas]. Interestingly, adds the constitutional architect of modern Ghana, what was officially propagated by Imperial Britain as her civilizing mission to Africa soon turned out to be nothing short of a systematic policy of brutal and unmitigable African exploitation; moreover, whatever appeared to the British imperialist sensibility as approximating the dignity of the proverbial African personality, was promptly earmarked for summary evisceration: And yet again, the dynamic of world events gave no lasting opportunity for the fulfillment of the idea of trusteeship. Under the impact of a brutal war a war in which both the trustee and the ward fell as quickly to the rifle bullet as did the common enemy; a war in which the economy of Europe stood to be shattered unless buttressed with the possessions of Africa; a war in which the metropolitan powers in Africa, or at least some of them, took the fullest advantage of the opportunities to unleash and give full play to their own brand of the very barbarity they had come to Africa to suppress under these impacts the policy of trusteeship became increasingly meaningless(Friendship And Empire 4). Reading Danquahs pamphlet, it becomes grimly and uncomfortably apparent that the virtual neglect of our subject by the history curricula of African schools and colleges has wreaked incalculable havoc on the intellectual temperament of the continents politicians and academics. And this may largely explain why on the threshold of the Fourth Millennium and the Twenty-First century, many African leaders are still unimaginatively poised towards blindly collaborating with leaders of the erstwhile colonial powers in furtherance of the unfettered exploitation of the former and their peoples and polities, under the glaringly specious guise of such covenants a the so-called New Economic Partnership for Africas Development (NEPAD).

Teeling feels African heat from Petra
Times Online – Aug 28, 2005
Used on article pages to rotate the images of a story. Petra Diamonds, a London-listed mining company with operations in Angola, South Africa and Sierra Leone, is believed to have approached Mark Scowcroft and Leon Daniels, two Africa-based shareholders who between them own 18% of African Diamonds’ shares. Petra, which has a market capitalisation of £92m (€134m) and is headed by Johan Dippenaar, is believed to be interested in acquiring Kalahari Diamonds, an unquoted diamond explorer in Botswana, with ground close to African Diamonds’ licences in the Orapa area. BHP, a mining giant, is a key shareholder in Kalahari and is also Petra’s joint venture partner in Angola. African Diamonds would offer potential synergies for the company. De Beers, African Diamonds’ joint venture partner, is likely to block such a move, given Petra’s links with BHP, one of its biggest rivals.