After the monuments have been removed
Senegalese writer Mbougar Sarr on how we are actually informed about symbols we want to bring down, and about those we wish to commemorate.
6452 Article(s) by:
Marjorie Ruganda
Marjorie Namara Rugunda is a writer, researcher, and PhD student at the University of British Columbia.
Introducing ‘AIAC Talk’
Africa Is a Country is proud to announce the official launch of the AIAC Talk livestream show.
The violence in Ethiopia
The imminent and existential danger to Ethiopia is not Abiy Ahmed and an oppressive government. It is violent ethno-nationalism.
A ‘simple African’ revolutionary
Amilcar Cabral remains inspirational for Africans and non-Africans challenged by injustice and oppression.
What Chinese people eat
News reports claiming that “wet markets” in Asia are the source of the coronavirus obscure the fact that the consumption of wild animals is common in the West.
Sadio Mané, made outside Africa
The Liverpool striker, Sadio Mane, carries the values of his boyhood home, Bambali, with him. But his football is a product of the European professional game.
Sadio Mane is a Senegalese (Fairtrade) brand
What can the Senegalese Sadio Mane’s story tell us about the marketing of dreams.
More than a two-dimensional African celebrity
A new documentary about Liverpool FC striker, Sadio Mane, is watchable, but suffers from the fallacy that sports and politics don’t mix.
Structural adjustment comes home
Americans could learn a thing or two from Africans’ history of resisting structural adjustment policies.
Carceral feminism is not the answer
We need to reimagine our conceptions of feminist justice in South Africa: Putting people in cages is not liberation.
Nigeria’s faltering anti-corruption war
The recent suspension of Nigeria’s anti-corruption tsar provides an opportunity to re-assess the country’s anti-corruption approach.
Religion outside the law
Some churches in South Africa have become embroiled with criminal economies.
David Graeber, Africanist
David Graeber (1961-2020) started his career as a scholar studying Madagascar, which informed his ideas about anarchism, debt, and globalization.
The exiled writer from Equatorial Guinea
A new documentary about Equatorial Guinea and the exiled writer Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel provides an honest, critical examination of the country’s political, social, and cultural issues.
The Transformation of Bill Freund
Freund was a Marxist historian in method, attentive to political economy and to the material underpinnings of power, while retaining a critical distance to Marxism.
Missing datasets
African societies are failing to systematically capture the true impact of COVID-19.
Seeking refuge in Sahelian cinema
Director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun utilizes the fluid space of the Sahel to demonstrate the power of cinema as a limitless art.
In the jungles of the Congo
The book ‘Emerald Labyrinth’ explores American and Congolese efforts to document species biodiversity.
Race, caste and Kamala
Kamala Harris should be critiqued or celebrated not according to a faulty and disingenuous understanding of her lineage, but on the basis of her actual policy positions and future governing vision.
Utopias, joy, and the law
The director of Kenyan film ‘Rafiki’ discusses leading the struggle against state sponsored censorship in Kenya right now.