This is appropriation that’s acceptable
The French Ethio-groove group Akalé Wubé has dissolved. For over a decade they have shown how cultural outsiders can considerately engage in music that is not theirs.
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Paul Milchick
Paul Milchik is a pseudonym for the author of this piece. His name has been changed due to his status as an international student in the US during the second Trump administration, in a context where foreign students have been targeted for detention and deportation as a result of expressing pro-Palestinian views.
A question of color
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s novel “The Theory of Flight” may be the first to take seriously Zimbabwe’s complicated race politics, beyond the obvious black vs whites.
People live here
Why are Ngorongoro’s Maasai at risk of being evicted again? Tanzania’s conservation-tourism industrial complex wants them out.
The art of football
Why should people be invested in a football game in a bubble called the art world? “Exhibition Match,” a multifaceted installation, explores responses to this question.
Victory belongs to the tyrants
Basma Abdel Aziz navigates the blurred boundary between dystopian fiction and reality in Egypt, in her new novel, “Here is a Body.”
Countering the narrative
If committed filmmakers want to reach and influence more people, and counter fake news, impact producing may help get us there.
An ethnography for fad diets
Two tourists take a package trip to visit the Hadza people in Tanzania and are so jazzed with what they see, they make a podcast about it. What could go wrong?
How should we struggle?
Lawyerfication discourse in Ghana ignores the operation of power on the ground and conflates legality with justice.
Nairobi’s incendiary displacements
Urban displacements greatly diminish the living conditions of already desperate populations living on the brink of poverty in Kenya’s capital.
Expensive shit
Protracted strikes in Nigeria’s higher public education sector lay bare nefarious efforts by the ruling class to entrench privatization.
Egypt and the Afrocentrists: The latest round
Why did North Africans and Middle Easterners almost overnight go from being comrades-in-struggle to racial intruders in Africa and in African American cities?
The war in Ukraine may seem far from Africa, but it is not
To compensate for its possible isolation by the West, Russia could turn its attention to Africa, making the continent the next center stage for imperialist struggles.
Cursed heirlooms
The legacy of soap operas and state of television in South Africa. Now it is being exported to streaming services like Netflix for everyone everywhere to see.
An election about nothing
The leading political formations in Kenya’s 2022 elections are born of each other, the result of many profound compromises, and this in part explains the blankness.
Does class matter?
Is class still a useful category for understanding capitalism and oppression? We discuss with Vivek Chibber on our podcast. Listen.
The future we’ve promised our girls
We can do more than tell young African girls to work hard in school. We need a real plan for the fully self-actualized people we want them to be.
Copyright is colonialism
On AIAC Radio, DJ Ripley aka Professor Larisa Mann, talks about her new book “Rude Citizenship” on copyright and the colonial legacy in Jamaica.
The politics of imperial gratitude
South African discourse about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continually references Soviet support for the exiled ANC. But the past is more complicated than official Russian and South African statements suggest.
Not so quiet resilience
David Samaai was the first black (and coloured) South African to play at Wimbledon in 1949. He was 21 years old. He did so before the Americans, Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe.
Flawed lenses
How much work do we need to do to see our history and that of the African continent in all its complexity?