• Wamuwi Mbao

Almost 30 years since South Africa’s first democratic elections, apartheid can sometimes seem like a distant past. However, three new films interrupt both the temptation to forget and to selectively remember.

• Khanya Mtshali

Noni Jabavu was one of South Africa’s most trailblazing writers. Her commitment to elite ambivalence makes it difficult to hail her as a black feminist icon.

• Edith Amoafoa-Smart

For Binyavanga Wainaina, writing about Africa means to to write honestly, benching any attempts to categorize our lived experiences in language that could never accommodate them.

• Chérif Keïta

On Father’s Day, an ode to Namballa Keïta, a nurse, soldier, and seemingly ordinary man, who worked tirelessly to promote education in newly independent Mali.

• Paul S. Landau

Nelson Mandela is deified everywhere. But typically missing is an account of his early years, when he insisted that Marxism be responsive to South African conditions.

• Ismay Milford

Ismay Milford’s new book takes us into the world of anticolonialism, giving us a rich account of the struggles of a cohort of activists from east and central Africa.

• Alex Park

The ultra-conservative American televangelist Pat Robertson has died. As poisonous as his influence on American politics was, Robertson’s legacy in Africa is even more cynical.

• Anne Gulick

Writer, filmmaker and activist Tsitsi Dangarembga entwines the troubled story of herself and her country Zimbabwe in the book of essays, 'Black and Female.'

• Pedro Monaville

Pedro Monaville selects key texts that helped shape a new book on Congolese student-driven left nationalism in the aftermath of Patrice Lumumba’s assassination.

• Anna Wood

What peanut trading in late 19th century Senegal tells us about the fine line between slavery and freedom.

• Jean Allman
• Benjamin Talton

A project - helmed by historians Benjamin Talton and Jean Allman - to archive post-independence African revolutions, including Kwame Nkrumah's personal and professional papers.

• Ayomide Bayowa

Nigerian Canadian poet Ayomide Bayowa discusses the influences behind his latest poetry collection.

• Tinashe Mushakavanhu

Zimbabwean founding father, Ndabaningi Sithole, has largely been edited out of the country’s history. But thanks to the tremendous archive of writing Sithole left behind, we can edit him back in.

• Eric Burton
• Katharina Föger

Many know Frene Ginwala, the iconic anti-apartheid activist, as democratic South Africa’s first speaker of parliament. But few know of her time building pan-African media in Dar Es Salaam.

• Marilene Felinto

Who is the black John Kennedy? A Brazilian footballer.

• Kristof Titeca

In Kampala, Nasser Road has become an iconic site of entrepreneurial printing, most famously, its ubiquitous posters of notorious political figures like Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.

• Amber Bal

Fatou Cissé’s directorial debut meditates on the uncertain fate and importance of Malian cinema amidst the growing dismissiveness towards the humanities across the world.

• Job Tapera

From the enormously influential megachurches of Walter Magaya and Emmanuel Makandiwa to smaller ‘startups,’ the church in Zimbabwe has frightening, nearly despotic authority.

• David Tonghou Ngong

A new Brazilian film shows the role memory plays in African spirituality and dreams of liberation.

• Fungai Machirori

Zimbabwean cricketing legend Heath Streak’s career mirrors many of the unresolved tensions of race and class in Zimbabwe. Yet few white Zimbabwean sporting figures are able to stir interest and conversation across the nation’s many divides.