In the Democratic Republic of the Congo conflict, as well as peacemaking, have become ends in themselves, while the fighting is carried forward by its own momentum.
Latest
How we tell the story of African film history
For most outsiders, modern Ethiopian cinema means Haile Gerima and Salem Mekuria. But others, in addition to these, made its rich cinema history.
The skeleton in the closet
The novelist Nadifa Mohamed complicates Britain’s troubled, racist legal history through the personal tale of one otherwise insignificant person, a Somali immigrant to Cardiff in Wales.
Life to the sound of gunfire
Nigerians fleeing extremist violence at home take refuge across the border in Niger among an already fragile population. Together they proceed to carve out a way to live better lives for now.
A big African literature prize in an African language
The Kiswahili Prize works to undermine the marginalization of African languages in literary culture. An interview with one of its founders.
Like a bad rain year
The consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for African food security and the need for greater food sovereignty.
PODCAST
On this week’s AIAC podcast: After an upswing before the pandemic, the global climate justice movement currently looks stuck. What kind of climate politics can appeal to the majority of people?
Culture
We are actually reading
The Radical Books Collective teams up with Africa Is a Country to bring you progressive conversations about books, literature, and publishing on this platform.
The doctor from District Six
The University of Edinburgh will award an honorary doctorate to Joe Schaffers, a working-class educator from Cape Town, South Africa. It will be a new benchmark for this tradition.
Is the academic boycott of Israel a violation of academic freedom?
A decision to rescind an invitation to Israeli academics to a conference in South Africa, revived a tactic of the anti-apartheid struggle. Is it effective?
African liberation and African scholarship
The Sixth International Congress of African and African Diaspora Studies in Accra in August 2023 foregrounds the struggle against African Studies as a form of knowledge production located, for the most part, outside Africa.
Bookends: Khadija Abdalla Bajaber
The author of ‘The House of Rust’ tells us all the little things (from foods to films) that get her imagination going.
Climate Politricks
"Climate Politricks," our series on climate justice, tax justice and extractives in African spaces. Edited by Grieve Chelwa and funded by the Africa Regional Office of OSF.
A new documentary focuses on using the soil’s carbon absorbent properties to solve the climate change problem.
Social policy is essential to creating more just African countries. Why is it not the norm across the continent?
Politics
No amount of foreign currency can justify this
The dire, often fatal, conditions that African, and in this case specifically Kenyan, domestic workers are facing in the Middle East.
The “alternative” money economy of Nigerian students
In Northern Cyprus, African students, many of them Nigerian, study diligently for tertiary degrees while juggling multiple income streams in a peer-to-peer system for collective survival.
Patrick Lyoya’s life mattered
The harrowing execution of Patrick Lyoya, a Congolese refugee in Michigan, and the unfulfilled promise of resettlement in America.
Against the youth fetish in politics
Politics is about effectiveness, and casting youth as a political subject (rather than simply a demographic), is a bad way to do politics.
Democraticizing money
Cameroonian economist Joseph Tchundjang Pouemi died in 1984, either poisoned or by suicide. His ideas about the international monetary system and the CFA franc are worth revisiting.
Russia
Like a bad rain year
The consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for African food security and the need for greater food sovereignty.
Rushing to boycott
The cultural boycott of Russia turns to the flawed precedent of apartheid South Africa for inspiration, while ignoring the much more carefully considered boycott of official Israeli culture by the BDS Movement.
The war in Ukraine may seem far from Africa, but it is not
To compensate for its possible isolation by the West, Russia could turn its attention to Africa, making the continent the next center stage for imperialist struggles.
The politics of imperial gratitude
South African discourse about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continually references Soviet support for the exiled ANC. But the past is more complicated than official Russian and South African statements suggest.