In the last post, I described some African blogs to keep track of for stalking information about Africa. Here are some of my favourite places online for listening to African news and music and a list of books I liked.

The best part of African culture is the music. I stumble upon some amazing bands through these podcasts:

• Afropop Worldwide has a good mix of West/South African music. But, I think it is too short and has less music and more commentary.
• Radio Freetown plays choice hits of West Africa. They have not updated for the past 5 months, but the archives are well worth a listen.
• World Passport, is mostly African music spiced with songs from other countries (mostly US). Pity they don’t update it anymore. The archives are great!

These days though, I listen to songs on Grooveshark.The songs stream quickly and are of good quality.

The only non-music podcast I listen to is the BBC’s Africa Today has a round up of African news and tries to be unbiased. I heard about Charles Taylor’s conversion to Judaism first here, before it made front pages elsewhere.

Books

I have not read that many books about Africa, but I really liked the these:

• The Famished Road — Fascinating mix of legends with the story of a young boy growing up in poverty.
• The Yacoubian Building: A Novel and Cairo Modern tread almost the same path. They both present similar facets of Arabic Africa. The Translator has a slightly different viewpoint — that of a Sudanese muslim woman who works as a translator.
• The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is a very insightful look at Kenya from the time of the struggle for independence to current times — through the eyes of a Kenyan of Indian origin.
• What Is the What (Vintage) is the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a child refugee from South Sudan. This is a heart wrenching book. I took days to recover from reading this story.
• John Le Carré’s The Mission Song is a gripping thriller based on fictitious events in Kivu (though it seems not far from the truth).

The full list of books I have read about Africa is here.

That completes my African journey! Any podcasts or books you recommend?