As stolen artwork and artifacts slowly make their way home, the next question is about what kind of future African countries will create through their displays of heritage and history.
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Mozambique’s borders
The dynamics of refuge-seeking in southern Mozambique between 1895 and the 1980s.
The regulatory chill
The shadowy world of bilateral investment treaties urgently needs African alternatives, especially if we want to combat climate change.
Freetown’s musical soup
The first episode of the new season of Africa Is a Country Radio, our monthly music show, focuses on the port city of Freetown, Sierra Leone. Listen on Worldwide FM and follow us on Mixcloud.
Christianity and the alienation of Africans
At a time when Evangelical Christianity frequently goes against the interests of African people, is it time for us to re-make Christianity?
How to think about Ethiopian politics today
Social science and the ghosts of “the nationalities question” in Ethiopia today.
Culture
Tupac is alive in Africa
How Tupac Shakur endures for urbanized and alienated African youth.
Academic reparation and stepping aside
Reflections from a former President of the African Studies Association (ASA), the largest African Studies association globally, on the future of the discipline.
History class
What might Black Lives Matter learn from Africanist scholars who have studied inequality outside the US, especially in Africa?
The hip hop president?
Hip hop and the Black political mainstream more broadly, continues to have hope in the promises of American capitalism.
Achille Mbembe’s decolonization
Mbembe’s work serves as a guide to understand our fragmented global present and the urgent matter of charting ways out of our shared dark night.
COVID-19
COVID-19 and cultural rites
In a Kenya coping with COVID-19 restrictions, circumcision season presents an impossible choice between tradition and civil obedience.
Preparing for the long struggle ahead
COVID-19 has been a blessing to the ruling classes in Algeria. However, the popular Hirak movement has not said its last word yet.
When Americans took a global health crisis seriously
Recalling its Ebola hysteria would help the US better confront COVID-19.
Not waiting for a savior
The African response to the coronavirus pandemic displays innovation and ingenuity.
Politics
The passing of Jerry John Rawlings
Lessons on radical politics from a 1970s political-cultural icon. Rawlings also dominated and shaped Ghanaian politics through the 1980s and 1990s.
Congo’s white ‘refugees’
After the fall of colonial rule, some whites fled from their African countries of residence and sought refuge in apartheid South Africa.
The price of contamination
Legal cases against foreign multinationals in the Central African Copperbelt seek justice for decades of pollution. But activists should also investigate the historical legacies of colonial mining companies.
Ethiopia’s war of narratives
The current political conflict, now a civil war, in Ethiopia partly has its roots in disagreement among elites on how to narrativize Ethiopian history.
From the Niger to the Nile
In the late 1890s and early 1900s, a number of West African Muslims migrated east, settling in Sudan and Mecca, to seek refuge from European colonization.
Reclaiming Africa's Early Post Independence History
Nkrumah, Nyerere and Senghor were acutely aware of the need to displace the epistemic conditions of colonization in order to transcend it.
How managing COVID-19 and other crises necessitates Africa’s structural transformation, and what we can learn from the early post-independence development projects.