Africa Is a Country

Manning Marable

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Manning Marable

By
Sean Jacobs

On Monday a new book on Malcolm X by the American intellectual and historian Manning Marable will come out. On Friday night Marable passed away. Though Marable, based until his passing at Columbia University, is less well-known outside the US, he started his career with a PhD dissertation on the South African political leader, John Dube (“African Nationalist: the Life of John Langalibalele Dube“, University of Maryland, 1976) and had an internationalist outlook (I remember interviewing him in Cape Town. I found him compelling and engaging. He was there on the invitation of Idasa (my former employer) for a comparative conference and research on racism in Brazil, the United States and South Africa.) The videos, above, and below were shot as marketing for his book, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (excerpted here), and point to some of the new research uncovered by Marable .  Before his death Marable had also set up a tumbl blog and a website for his Malcom X Project which are worth visiting. Here and here are links to two obituaries. R.I.P.

—Sean Jacobs

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.

Energy for whom?

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.