The 18th-century Omani fort in Zanzibar is silhouetted against a clear African night. Nneka, a bird-like Nigerian female artist in shabby leggings, is hammering out “Vagabonds in Power” on an open-air stage inside the fort, just metres from a sea of entranced faces. The song is a poke at Africa’s leaders, specifically their part in the Niger Delta mismanagement and related death and corruption scandals. With a voice reminiscent of Nina Simone, and the emotional clout of Billie Holiday, Nneka delights the predominantly African crowd attending the Busara festival.

With the subject of the legitimacy of the label “world music” having just had another airing in The Guardian, it seems fitting that Mali’s favourite musical couple should be releasing their least “world music” album to date. For essentially, Folila (which translates as "music" in Bambara) is a blues/rock album.

In the past few decades we've all learnt to pay at least lip service to ecological matters, and millions of people in this country are members of environmental organisations. But perhaps we should also focus our attention on an issue that could be one of the big causes of the 21st century - the disappearance of languages.

Two hundred years ago in Durham taverns you could find men in wooden clogs clattering on the tables, with their mates pressing their ears to the underside of the surface. Meanwhile, at the other end of the world, African slaves with bare feet were shuffling on dirt with metal bottle caps held between their toes. Now picture a Mediterranean gypsy dancing of sorrow and pain with swirling shawls and angrily pounding heels. Three quite different scenes, different places, different eras, but all rooted in one human impulse, common the world over.

Last night was one of those occasions when I found myself looking forward to seeing the support band more than the main act. This wasn’t because Senegal’s sublime Orchestra Baobab haven't delivered a transportive heart-warming set of Cuban and soukous grooves every time I’ve seen them live. It was simply because Belgium-based Congolese rapper Baloji made Kinshasa Succusale - one of my favourite albums of last year.

When I opened my e-nvitation to write up last night’s The World Against Apartheid, I was not expecting it to come bedecked with GoogleAds for hen parties, roller discos, and custom-made birthday invitations (keyword: "part/y", one assumes). Only 20 years ago, any mail on this topic would’ve been stuffed with "End racism NOW!" leaflets, discount book offers by/about Basil D’Oliveira, and pop-up Peter Hains beseeching you to boycott your local fruiterers. Twenty years ago "The World Against Apartheid" would have been a call to arms.

London's Barbican Centre is 30 this year, and with a special Olympics subsidy boost as the world's eyes turn to the British capital this summer, it aims to be as lovely inside as it is famously unlovely outside. Film beauties Cate Blanchett and Juliette Binoche appear live on stage and theatre giants Pina Bausch, Philip Glass and Shakespeare are celebrated in a season of prominent internationalism. Peter Sellars, Toni Morrison, Yukio Ninagawa, Krzysztof Penderecki and Chick Corea are among many other world names invited to EC2 over the season.

The Mayans say 2012 is The End, so this may be the very last round-up of the year. I saw possibly the best Shakespeare I’ve ever seen – a chamber version of King Lear at the Donmar Theatre directed by Michael Grandage with Derek Jacobi as the mad old King, presenting a perfectly credible mix of vanity, vulnerability, craziness and tenderness. The final scenes with Lear and Cordelia were among the most affecting I’ve seen in a theatre.

“It’s cultural imperialism,” a middle-aged gentleman felt compelled to say to me, presumably because I was the bloke with the notebook. “Then all pop music is cultural imperialism,” is what I should have fired back at him, had I not been so immersed in the transcendental racket of tussling brass and distorted guitars that had almost made him inaudible. But instead I took the scenic route of pointing out that this legend of 1970s Ethiopian jazz would hardly have spent the last seven years playing with these white Dutch musicians if he had felt he was being exploited.

Some critics have lazily compared Baloji to Somali rapper K’nann: both are African rappers who had lucky childhood escapes from countries about to descend into war and chaos, but beyond that they seem to have quite different approaches to what they do. K’naan is as much a pop musician and poet as he is a hip-hop artist, firmly concentrating on melody, song structure and hooks. Whereas Baloji, at least on the evidence of this album, seems to want to engage more with roots music while finding ways for his rhymes to fit in with already established musical idioms.