Ba Captain

Ba Captain ("Ba" with a soft B is the Bemba honorific) aka Christopher Katongo, captain of Zambia's national football team, was voted the 2012 BBC African Footballer of the Year this week.

Bond, Zambian Bond

Zambia sold its first ever dollar-denominated bond to international investors last week. It was a stunning debut.

Chinese traders in Africa

The Brenthurst Foundation has recently published a fascinating study of Chinese traders in five African countries.

Rafa's analysis

Rafa Benitez analyses the final of the 2012 African Cup of Nations.

Happy Endings

This past weekend I took my son, the aspiring filmmaker, to see Martin Scorcese's Hugo. He loved it. And so did I. It's a wonderful (literally wonder-full), tender and lovingly made story. And an homage to early filmmakers and filmmaking. Scorcese's best in my opinion. It's certainly a radical departure from his normal work which, as we all know, never gets rated PG (like Hugo). The entire cast is superb. (Well, almost the entire cast. Sorry Sacha.) The performances of Sir Ben Kingsley, Asa Butterfield and Michael Stuhlbarg are especially good, excellent even. At one point, Georges Méliès, Ben Kingsley's character, expresses his deep disaffection with the way his life has turned out: "My life has taught me one lesson: Happy endings only happen in the movies." Without giving away too much, the whole story is about how Monsieur Méliès is cured of this cynical view of life through the efforts of the eponymous Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) and Prof. Rene Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg).

I remembered this later on in the weekend when I watched a second happy ending: