Child of Mau Mau
Ethnicity did not simply disappear in Kenya’s 2022 elections. Instead, it was a crucible where both sides mobilized historical claims and ideas to win supporters, in ways that could, at times, elude the eye.
Politics
Tiptoeing across the minefield of neutrality
Recent US-South Africa relations appear to be firmly stalled in the cul-de-sacs of imperial or sub-imperial diplomacy.
The land and the sea
Communities whose land is being targeted for exploration by oil and gas companies are increasingly using the courts. South Africa points to good lessons for social movements about allying with the law.
Resistance and commodification
A scholar of Black Brazil discusses the past, present, and future of the antiracist movement, in the run up to this year's presidential elections.
Claim no automatic support
Where can the left look to inspiration in the wake of defeat? Our first letter from our new deputy editor.
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 politics of pathology
By using healthcare to attack immigrants, xenophobic political movements in South Africa echo long-standing right-wing obsessions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The afterlives of Marikana
Why do representative bodies like the union, the party, and the so-called Left seem to fail its constituents during struggles like Marikana?
Confronting police power
Accountability—insofar as it ever existed within the South African Police Service—has been reduced to a merely theoretical concept. It is time this changed.
Where do trade unions go from here?
In South Africa, the seismic shifts in unionism triggered by the Marikana Massacre have sadly not resulted in a union movement better equipped to tackle the issues that workers face.
Dreaming of the green blanket
The impact of the Marikana massacre on South Africa’s student movement for free education, and an end to outsourcing, has been overlooked.
The new imperialism’s strange bedfellows
Africa's political liberation and economic emancipation can't be one-country affairs, but pan-African combined with international solidarity.
Tricky coalitions
The challenge presented by Argentina: What is the best way to deal with global fiscal pressures in a local context of high expectations and public demands?
Lula can set the bar higher for a new presidency
Lula's challenge in Brazil: To be successful with proposed reforms, he’d need to take back the anti-systemic appeal stolen by the far-right.
AMLO’s way
Mexico’s president has a mandate for radical change, but this change must be negotiated within a context of limits produced by the neoliberal period itself.