
Malawian Twitter is not a gentle place
By far the best place to follow Malawian news and politics is social media app, Twitter. It can be relied upon to be the very first place where Malawi’s breaking news gets to the rest of us.
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Fatima B. Derby is a Ghanaian feminist writer and queer activist.

By far the best place to follow Malawian news and politics is social media app, Twitter. It can be relied upon to be the very first place where Malawi’s breaking news gets to the rest of us.

The oppression/resistance model of politics explains some things, but it does not explain everything, and less and less these days on the continent.

In South Africa, there was more activity in solidarity with Pussy Riot than with the Marikana miners killed by police in August 2012.

Israel’s Interior Minister, Eli Yishai basically says Israel was a white country in a debate about African immigrants and refugees.

In Dutch politics, Africa mostly works as a tactic to embarrass and ridicule your opponent.

A South African writer gets invited to the Farafina Creative Writing Workshop in Lagos, Nigeria. Her main takeaway: writing is an act of faith; an ancient form of prayer.


The posters are tied to the Ghanaian and Nollywood film industries that emerged in the late 1980s.

‘Vershtunkende’ is a Yiddish adjective loosely translated as ‘darned,’ ‘exasperating’, ‘maliciously idiotic’. It is not a nice word to use for either a person or thing.


The Angolan singer’s new album deals with war in the widest sense: war with the self, war with family, neighbors, friends.

Makoko, in Lagos, with over 100, 000 residents, is viewed as a shantytown. There’s more to it. This is the destruction of a community.

Kaleidoscope magazine has done an “Africa” issue; it wants to walk a fine line between identity politics and universalism.

Africans can draw uninformed conclusions about what’s going on in their own backyards and on the continent.