On being queer and contained
There is a disconcerting resemblance between how some Senegalese talk about homosexuality and how they discuss COVID-19.
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Miguna Miguna
Miguna Miguna is a Kenyan activist and lawyer.
Food is power
The World Food Program says COVID-19 will bring about a famine of biblical proportions, so it is a good time to revisit why food has never just been about the simple act of eating. Food is history. Food is identity.
The third brother
A new thriller by Andrew Welsh-Huggins follows a detective investigating the disappearance of a Somali-American teenager in Ohio.
The time to act is now
More than 90 African intellectuals wrote an open letter to African leaders about the continent’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Vagabond reflections on the ‘Year of Africa’
Revisiting the clash of the American-born UN diplomat Ralph Bunche and Patrice Lumumba in 1960 over the terms and timeliness of African colonies’ independence from their European masters.
Unpacking South Africa’s COVID-19 “rescue package”
South Africa’s R50bn ($26bn) rescue package is 10% of its GDP. It is a major step forward, but some warning lights are flashing.
A storm is coming
A post-colonial visual meditation on archive, memory, and colonial violence.
Solidarity under quarantine
Nelson Mandela’s life teaches us that being quarantined is not the end of politics, but for the regeneration of politics.
A democracy of chameleons
Malawi is experiencing a crisis over the legitimacy of the democratic state itself.
Out of sight
In South Africa, social distancing to bring down COVID-19 infections takes a decidedly local shape. In a racialized society, it manifests primarily as white melancholia and black Afro-pessimism.
Locating African agency in Africa-China relations
Relationships between African countries and China are more complex than they appear in the media and academia.
People Power in the age of COVID-19
Will the coronavirus pandemic extend Museveni’s authoritarianism or the lockdown instead provide openings for Uganda’s opposition?
Reading List: Ronnie Close
The author of a book on football and revolution in Egypt gives us a list of must reads on football in the Middle East and North Africa.
The contested narratives of a dead man’s legacy
Kenyans are split about the legacy of president Daniel Arap Moi, who served from 1978 to 2002 and died on 4 February 2020: Vile and reprehensible vs a benign Baba, history suggests the latter.
To remember selectively
How partisanship distorts the construction and narration of public memory about historical events, especially the resistance against apartheid.
South Africa’s one-sided lockdown: coercing the poor, coddling the rich?
The Ramaphosa Presidency has been praised for its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, but the compensating measures that accompany it are inadequate to protect much of the population.