Troubling times in Burkina Faso
Burkina Faso’s current crisis will test the resilience of its political institutions.
The imperial legacy in scholarship
What censorship about articles in a French journal tells us about the state of France-Africa relations, imperial legacies and the impact these have on the production of knowledge about Francophone Africa.
African migration and the charade of ‘return to safety’
The UNHCR and African Union’s policy of returning migrants to their countries of origin, suggests that Africans should be grateful to just stay alive, and are only—theoretically—entitled to anything beyond that on their own continent.
The façades of liberal democracy
Once we dismiss the fiction that Enlightenment liberalism and liberal democracy will inoculate western society from fascism, we can begin the project of actively combating right-wing extremism.
Cape Verde’s culture of recalcitrance
The island nation’s celebrated political system was never a gift bestowed, but seized through sheer agency and hard-fought autonomy.
Culture
Reading John Mbiti from Uganda
The late Mbiti is praised for indigenizing Christianity. However, his veneration of “African” tradition also served as theological justification for authoritarian rule.
The voice of the Republic’s forgotten
The film BACK UP! and important conversations about state violence, racism, global imperialism, and, crucially, the internal workings of social movements.
The resistance music of the Ugandan people
The pop star turned Member of Parliament, Bobi Wine, is only the latest in a long line of music-as-politics in Uganda.
“Converting Eviction”
A reflection—by one of the group’s artists—on a Swiss-South African art project exploring eviction and extraction.
The ship from Cameroon
The fate of Cameroon’s women’s national football team, like much else in the country, is a reflection of the sorry state of its politics.
Politics
The poverty of poor economics
The winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics experiment on the poor, but their research doesn’t solve poverty.
Eyes on the Prize
Does the peace deal between Ethiopia and Eritrea—now rewarded with a Nobel Prize—bring the kind of cooperation between the two countries that it aspired to do a year ago?
Self-devouring growth
In Africa, the consequences of the growth-at-all costs model are starting to reveal themselves, and they’re not pretty.
No country for poor men
Rwanda is juking its development statistics as the international community turns a blind eye to the human rights abuses of Paul Kagame’s authoritarian rule.
Is the nation state the best we got?
What lessons can we draw from 1960s and 1970s anticolonialism and pan-Africanism to rethink the nation state today?