Who are Boko Haram, and how did they come to be?
This is currently Boko Haram’s structure: a cellular structure, and no centralized command, and seemingly no unity of purpose.
6453 Article(s) by:
Golda Gatsey
Golda Gatsey is a freelance writer and customer relationship manager.
The hands played by themselves
Basil Breakey’s photographs serves as an important recording of South Africa jazz music in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Sonic Geography of Cartagena
The strong local identity of Colombia’s most African big city is slowly being erased. But not all its artists, especially musicians, are giving up without a fight.
A Short History of the Slave Trade in Nigeria
A public service as a response to Nigeria’s removal of history from its school curriculum
More than blankets, mountains and horse rides
The film “Forgotten Kingdom” has become one of the most powerful representations of Lesotho. Does it get it right?
Belonging—Why South Africans Refuse to let Africa in
Most South Africans have at least one thing in common: their hatred of other Africans coming from the rest of the continent.
The Slave Ship Theme
The Cape Town company that designs and markets “slave ship” ironing boards and aprons.
The last space of cultural dynamism in Luanda’s baixa is no more
Angolans protest as the state threatens to tear down an historic building.
Films to fall asleep to
Are development agencies derailing the film industry in Tanzania?
The African Cake
Last week a bunch of smartly dressed activists, myself included, made a visit to the UK's Department for International Development (DfID) offices in London pretending to be representatives of large food corporations and offering them a cake in the shape of Africa. This, we said, was to celebrate the help that the UK government is giving to big business’s efforts to mount a new scramble for Africa. Watch what happened:
Chris Hani’s political legacy
Chris Hani should not be made into an ideal type or used to settle political scores in the present.
Where were you when Chris Hani was killed?
Chris Hani, a prominent ANC and Communist Party leader, was murdered on April 10, 1993, by white racists. The writer remembers hearing the news.
The Edutainment Industrial-Complex
The ONE organization (it counts one of Warren Buffett's sons as well as Bono, Sheryl Sandberg, Condoleezza
Europeans ‘rescuing’ African art from obscurity again
For years Bisi Silva, Nana Oforiatta-Ayim and others have been active players in the art world. Why are they being written out of the story?
Jazz as Tradition in Cape Town
“Jazzing” on the Cape Flats, almost similar to salsa as developed in New York City. It’s the dominant sound of parties in Cape Town.
What’s it like to be Somali in Kenya
Kenyans employ all kinds of crude and unconscionable fascist statements towards anything Somali.
Sunday night on Twitter with Binyavanga Wainaina
We sometimes joke that often when we're online the only other person who's consistently awake and on Twitter (no matter where he is in the world) is Binyavanga Wainaina. It's like, if you blink, you miss out on some pronouncement by him. Though he has been an active social media user for a while now, it was after he came out on January 18th, that he has gone into overdrive. And you can't look away. No one else we know, talking about Africans and their relations to the West (not on Western terms), is in such blistering form right now. Take Sunday night when--from a hotel balcony in Dakar; he was in town to give a lecture--he just went in
Boxing lesson
Our video department went to train at the Hillbrow Boxing Club in downtown Johannesburg.
Old Money’s mothership is here to save us all
The musical groups perhaps setting the pace for a new idea of liberation for people of African descent in the Americas.
Weekend in Stellenbosch
The writer went for a visit and found Stellenbosch, a Western Cape town that is home to one of South Africa’s universities, strange, interesting and also very sad.