Where laws and guns cannot reach
South African poet Don Mattera, who died in July, was the real deal—preferring to throw his lot in with the ignored and the undervalued. Unsurprisingly, his monumental life and work is undervalued too.
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Sheila Adufutse
Sheila Adufutse is a feminist activist and trained as a project manager.
Put your crown on your head
A new exhibit of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s life and work explores the influences of his family and the African world on his visual sensibilities and identity.
Reading List: Ari Gautier
Writer Ari Gautier owes his own blend of mythology, Dalit consciousness, and surrealism to literary stylists such as Amos Tutuola, Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo.
Police and power in South Africa
South African policing is a tool of social control and repression. Are democratic and humanistic alternatives possible? This week on the AIAC podcast, we discuss.
The story of depression and how we treat it
A new book weaves science, history, philosophy and personal narrative in a refreshing and more globally inclusive look at depression.
Africa holds up a mirror to India
Shobana Shankar’s new book, ‘Africa, India and the Spectre of Race’ (Hurst/Oxford, 2021) explores this complicated history.
Fight club
On this month’s Africa Is a Country Radio, we soundtrack traditional martial arts and combat sports across the African continent.
The politics of pathology
By using healthcare to attack immigrants, xenophobic political movements in South Africa echo long-standing right-wing obsessions.
Crossing the Red Sea
Salafism is across Ethiopia. While Saudi Arabia has played a role, Ethiopian Muslims themselves are playing a bigger one.
Afrobeat futures
In the first of five articles on Afrobeat in South America, Simon Adetona Akindes discusses Abayomy Afrobeat Orquestra and Bixiga 70 from Brazil.
We need to talk about wage theft
South African companies can afford to pay their workers a living wage—if not for their commitment to profit shifting, as the case of Lonmin and Marikana showed.
So that the victims do not die a second time
To put an end to general indifference about the 25 years of political violence in DR Congo, filmmaker Thierry Michel chooses to show the worst atrocities and to name the war criminals.
Memories are to be shared
It will have to be the Algerian diaspora inside France who will eventually have to mainstream the truth of France’s colonial legacy.
The structural adjustment of education
Why the COVID-19 pandemic is the easy culprit of the global learning crisis—and why that is only half of the story.
Apartheid of a special type
The Israel/Palestine system meets the definition of apartheid in international law, but presents different challenges for the campaign against it than was the case for the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.
The Bisho March and the Leipzig Option
Revisionist histories of South Africa’s transition to democracy are overdue, like on the deadly march on Bisho in the Ciskei homeland on 7 September 1992.
Denouncing the reader
Zoë Wicomb thinks she knows why black South African readers appreciate Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize-winning novel ‘The Promise’ (2021) whilst many white readers were turned off by it.
A bracing form of political cabaret
‘Neptune Frost,’ written and co-directed by Saul Williams, knows that extraction is everyone’s problem.
A case for a labor party entryism in Nigeria
Peter Obi’s campaign for president points to new possibilities for a politics that represents Nigeria’s poor and working classes.
Flowers for Jimi Solanke
Jimi Solanke, now 80, was one of the key shapers of Nigerian theater and television in the second half of the last century. He is finally getting his due.