Hello and welcome to the first edition of our new weekly newsletter dedicated to Black life and culture around the world. I’m Nesrine, and I’m excited to bring you all the best stories, features and reports from the diaspora. For our first issue, I want to tell you about how The Long Wave came about, for which I’ll be taking you way back to my childhood in Sudan. But first, here’s our roundup of top stories.
Weekly roundup
Jamaica watches Harris campaign | As the US prepares to head to the polls, the Guardian’s Caribbean correspondent, Natricia Duncan, finds out what people in St Ann’s parish, Jamaica, where Kamala Harris visited as a child, think of the historic prospect of a US president of Jamaican origin.
New Commonwealth chief named | On Saturday, Commonwealth members appointed Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey, who has served as Ghana’s foreign minister since 2017, as the new secretary general. Botchwey has consistently supported movements for reparations for transatlantic slavery.
Britain’s first Black voter | The composer and abolitionist Charles Ignatius Sancho was previously thought to be the first Black voter in Britain, casting a ballot in the 1774 Westminster election. But as our community affairs correspondent Chris Osuh reports, a “blackamoor” pub landlord named John London cast a vote 25 years earlier.
Rosana Paulino wins Munch award | After exhibitions across the US and Europe, the Afro-Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino has received the inaugural award for artistic freedom from the Munch Museum in Oslo. As our South America correspondent Tiago Rogero reports, Paulino is farther on the rise – with a 9-metre-tall mural at New York’s High Line to be revealed in November.
DJ AG takes music to the streets | Since last year, DJ AG has been pitching up on the streets of London livestreaming sets and inviting performers to join him – leading to a viral moment with the Jamaican ragga vocalist Daddy Freddy, and most recently the British grime brothers JME and Skepta. Lanre Bakare reports on the significance of these pop-ups within a difficult industry landscape for Black artists.
In depth
For the 10 years that I have been a writer, I have grappled with the question of where I fit, both as a journalist and audience. Growing up in 1980s Sudan, we had only one television channel, imaginatively named Sudan TV. After school, I would watch the only cartoon, a Japanese animation voiced over in Arabic. At 11pm, after the evening news, the channel shut down for the night after playing the national anthem and then there was only static. That was when I knocked on my parents’ bedroom door and my father, in what became a nightly ritual, handed over his old radio for the evening.
I would stay up late fiddling with the dials until I got a clear transmission to send me off to sleep. The strongest signal was BBC World Service but others sometimes burst through. Voice of America drawled with dry news of Ronald Reagan and the Iran-Contra affair. The Christian Science Monitor and Radio Monte Carlo, crackled with static into my bedroom in Khartoum. With them came an education and integration into a foreign world centred on London, Washington and Paris. For years, my consumption was an incoherent diet of pop music, western politics, gossip and comedy that I rarely understood.
I never once noticed that there was no one like me on those airwaves, or that none of what I was listening to reflected – or was interested in – the world I lived in. If there was any mention of Sudan, Africa or Black people, it was in passing or in crisis – famine, war, climate catastrophe, racism and discord. I internalised that erasure and diminishment – I didn’t believe there was anything about my existence, culture or social life that was worthy of global media coverage.
Then, seemingly overnight, the radio with a bent aerial was replaced with screens and apps and podcasts and websites. As I grew older and work and life took me from Khartoum to Nairobi, Cairo and London, and as conflict, love and financial need displaced family and friends, a good internet connection was all I needed for me to feel as if I could be anywhere.
For me, the Black diaspora is like a large, sprawling family. But I also feel I have so many unanswered questions about those family members: how we passed our food and culture and habits down and across the world, how we mixed recipes, languages, shared music, and picked which national sports teams to cheer on. I wanted more. The only way I can describe this yearning is a sort of constant state of homesickness.
I had left the country in which I was born and raised, but there was a global community, a home, that I knew was out there.
To me, identity is an intersection not a terminus – a part of the mainstream, rather than a sealed-off corner of it. If I hadn’t been lucky enough to be able to turn down endless requests asking me to write “as a Black woman”, with set ideas of what that meant, I wouldn’t be here at all. In a way, that worked out too well – now I write about whatever I like but the space for all that I like seems too small.
And so we – a team of writers and editors from various backgrounds – sketched out a dream scenario. If we did have that space, if we could decide what we wanted to talk about and how to talk about it, if we could reach anywhere in the world and explore and highlight Black life, what would that look like?
The answer was The Long Wave. Our newsletter where, from Europe to the Caribbean, life is shown in all its texture. Where we are not restricted by the template of what is considered newsworthy. Where we profile interesting people doing interesting things, highlight music, sport, film and literature, and explore hot topics that are so often contained to the group chat.
It will be brought to you by me and my editor, Jason Okundaye, who, despite being from a younger generation, shares the same frustrations about how Black life around the world is covered. He has never actually used a radio – but we won’t hold that against him.
This time, the frequency is ours. I no longer want to experience the world in the style of the old-school radio transmissions – I want to reclaim those centres of broadcasts. Long-wave frequencies travel across the world, piercing mountains and crossing vast distances to reach their destination, as we hope to reach you wherever you are. What I can promise you is that, above all else, we will be curious.
What we’re into
The French-Senegalese director Mati Diop is back with a fantastic documentary about the return of the Dahomey treasures of Benin, part of the art works seized by French troops in the late 19th century. Nesrine
Cook these recipes for Nigerian shawarma and jollof pasta from the Flygerians, featured in Feast this month. Jason
I’m loving the British-Ghanaian R&B artist Kwaku Asante’s new track, Natural. His EP from last year, Blue Solstice: Volume 2 is also worth a spin. Jason
A group of young Sudanese artists fleeing the war to Nairobi have set up a small but thriving community producing beautiful and haunting images. Check out my favourite, Bakri Moaz. Nesrine
Black catalogue
It’s spooky season, so I’ve been watching the 1940 film Son of Ingagi, the first sci-fi horror film with an all-Black cast. Written by the pioneering African American film-maker Spencer Williams, a newlywed couple inherit a house with a monster hiding in the cellar. It’s a vintage comic kafkaesque nightmare. Catch it on YouTube. Jason
Signal boost
Now, over to you. From attending Essence Festival of Culture in New Orleans, to the “pop the balloon” ad, we want to know what you have made of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, particularly her pitch to Black American voters.
Send your thoughts by hitting reply or emailing thelongwave@theguardian.com, and do let us know what you’d like to see in future newsletters.
