Pan-Africanism and the African artist
Meleko Mokgosi’s multimedia works offer complex views of history and powerful critiques of pan-Africanism and the postcolonial moment we are currently living.
#Metoo in Nigeria
In Nigeria, survivors of sexual violence and workplace sexual harassment know that facts are not enough.
Women’s political consciousness in Senegal
A British literature scholar on literary activism in French. This post is part of our series, African Feminisms, edited by Rama Salla Dieng.
The agrarian question in Egypt and Tunisia
It is time discuss food sovereignty in the Middle East and North Africa, again.
Music is the weapon
During Christmas 1980, Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba performed at a concert in Lesotho that deeply challenged and disturbed South Africa’s apartheid regime. The record of that concert is being reissued.
Culture
Difference and belonging
No child should choose between having food, love, and a roof over their head or being their full self.
An injury to one is an injury to all
Historian Peter Cole’s book on dockworkers in apartheid South Africa and San Francisco gets beyond slogans to vital historical truths.
Out of the pigeonholes
A Nigerian play and its leading man confront western misrepresentations.
Greening the Sahel isn’t enough
A UN film pushes an ambitious plan to mitigate the impact of climate change on the Sahel by planting trees across it. But, averting disaster requires even bigger thinking.
Fanon’s mission
The works of Frantz Fanon can be read as architectural renderings of rights, futures, and generations toward a “very different Afro-futurism.”
Football is a Country
Football and neoliberal repression go together in Egypt.
Politics
Carceral colonialism
On the United Kingdom’s attempts to finance the construction of large-scale prison facilities in former colonies, to where it wants to deport undocumented migrants.
Lungu’s Livingstone
Where does the idea that Zambia is a Christian nation come from?
Bottom-up hustling in Nairobi’s slums
Prevailing thoughts on slums stress their transitory character, but the complexity of everyday life in slums, including how people manage survival, is lost in the way they are understood from the outside.
Mauritania’s past doesn’t want to go away
The so-called “peaceful transition” in Mauritania, from colonialism to political independence, isn’t unanimously understood as such inside the country, and it reflects older rivalries.
The (Im)possibilities of Ugandan patriotism
To say we are “allies” would be to delude ourselves into thinking that some of us are safe. We are not safe.