A legacy beyond the vintage records
The late Alemayehu Eshete, and musical contemporaries like Mulatu Astatke and Girma Beyene worked around huge obstacles to create a unique Ethiopian sound and make it global.
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Miguna Miguna
Miguna Miguna is a Kenyan activist and lawyer.
Even dogs are racist
A vernacular attempt at a social anthropology of dogs across three countries: Nigeria, South Africa and Canada.
Jivin’ in Joburg
Africa Is a Country Radio continues its season focused on African club culture. Our next stop is Johannesburg with South African journalist Sean O’Toole. Listen here and on Worldwide FM.
A different sort of truth
Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s fiction rebukes the Orientalist images of the Muslim world that provided a rationale for the war on terror.
On Safari
Every year, around this time, we take a month long break from publishing. We need it.
Christianity and new queer African imaginations
The leading African writers and creative artists who are reimagining Christian thought and the several Christian-inspired groups who are transforming religious practice.
No two elephants are alike
The July riots in South Africa felt similar to those by Peronists in Argentina in December 2001. But Zuma’s people are moving from a much weaker position.
Sound Sultan’s political music
Sound Sultan, who died of cancer in July 2021, battled with the cankerworm of bad leadership and outright violations of rules of law in his homeland, Nigeria, through his songs.
It’s never just about the music
Vinyl reissues are about engaging in a fight against forgetting much more than music. Gideon Nxumalo and Spirits Rejoice’s music is transcendent of repressive daily conditions.
The exilic geographies of the South
Dugmore Boetie was part of a wave of South African writers who fled Apartheid. His exile and future literary notoriety, however, took a different path to some of the more classic refugee peregrinations.
Israel’s actual relationship with apartheid South Africa
Learn more about historical relationship between apartheid South Africa and apartheid Israel in this short video.
Wolf in shepherd’s clothing
Kenya’s elites, including the church, use ponzi schemes for predatory accumulation and Kenyans will continue to see their dreams deferred if the law doesn’t change.
Freedom and the struggle for dignity in South Africa
Within a context of spiraling poverty and inequality in South Africa, the lessons of uprisings in the 1980s are well worth revisiting. For millions of people, their socioeconomic demands remain unfulfilled.
A terrifying vision of South Africa’s future
If South Africa’s Left can’t find a way to channel popular discontentment into the building of mass progressive movements, it will instead morph into anarchy, nativism and, inevitably, authoritarianism.
South Africa’s fatigued, narcissistic nation-building discourse
Springbok rugby projects itself as progress, but preserves the way things are in the popular consciousness of South Africans.
Appeasing disgruntled critics
Israel’s success in getting observer status at the African Union is also a sign of the growing lack of interest among African leaders in the Palestinian issue altogether.