Hope and optimism howled at full volume
A people’s history of Zimbabwe’s first mbira punk band, Chikwata 263, who wanted a soundtrack for the country’s post-post colonial blues.
Culture
Art and the struggle for Ambazonia
Artist Adjani Okpu-Egbe, interrogates sovereignty and solidarity in southwest Cameroon, for what is known as Ambazonia, and beyond.
An independence revue
This month on Africa Is a Country Radio, taking inspiration from the work of Chinua Achebe, we take a listen to the music of the post-independence era on the African continent.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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?
The promise and peril of the digital economy
How digital capitalism, despite often being framed as potential growth engine, exploits the already marginalized and reproduces inequalities and power-relations between Africans.
Tram 83, a soundtrack
Fiston Mwanza Mujila's debut novel is painted by the music of a nightclub in a fictional central African city-state. On this month's AIAC Radio we imagined what it might sound like.
Silencing the past of Egyptian football
The 10th anniversary of the tragedy at Port Said passed without much notice in Egypt. Have Egyptians forgotten, or are they just trying to move on?
Hard times never kill
Gonora Sounds’ music gets at what it means to be a Zimbabwean: We might be crying, but we are also dancing.
Two women, two stories, both winners
The documentary film Mane about two women—a rapper and a wrestler—is a much-needed boost of fresh air in the male-saturated tale of the “Generation hip hop” of Senegal.
Letters of recommendation
On the South African-born anthropologist John Comaroff and the political economy of silence in academia.