Achille Mbembe (the links are to previous references of Mbembe on this blog) gave a lecture at the Birkbeck School of Law in March of this year. You can download an audio recording of the talk entitled ‘Law, Democracy and the Ethics of Mutuality: Notes on the South African Experiment’ here.
Although increasingly celebrated as an asset, Africa’s youth remain locked out of power and decent work.
The language of fiscal consolidation is meant to sound inevitable. But for Kenya’s informal workers, the human cost is anything but abstract.
A new documentary reveals how Ethiopia’s manufacturing push redistributes land, labor, and opportunity—delivering gains for some while displacing others.
Paulo Nazareth’s latest show in Berlin follows the cunning architecture of power, from Germany to Brazil and across continents and epochs.
Eritrea’s recent progress in AFCON qualifying offered a rare feel-good moment, but new player defections underline how fragile that progress remains amid the country’s political realities.
Often in war, language is twisted and used to change meaning, to dehumanize, to invent enemies, and to justify atrocities.
In revisiting her relationship with her mother, Roy shows how intimacy, violence, and love forged the sensibility behind her uncompromising political life.
As Kenya’s Rift Valley lakes expand, swallowing homes, farms, and infrastructure, what appears as a climate anomaly reveals a reckoning with ecological limits, failed planning, and the illusion that water would stay where it was put.
Despite commercialization and elite capture, the world’s most popular sport still generates forms of collective life that resist the logic of capitalism.
In Guadalajara, fans from three continents celebrated football together in what was a taste of a World Cup that most won’t be able to afford or attend.
A Guadalajara, des fans venus des trois continents ont célébrer le football ensemble dans un avant-goût de ce que sera, pour eux, la Coupe du monde : une fête à laquelle ils ne pourront pas assister
Prominent cleric Sheikh Ahmad Gumi’s calls for negotiation reflect practices already in use, but in Nigeria’s polarized digital space, nuance is punished.
Far from signaling a break from the past, the convergence of mining and conservation in West Africa underscores a recurring pattern that stretches back to colonialism.
Paradoxically, conservation efforts in Liberia and Senegal are threatening native ecology.
After years of heartbreak, Congolese fans are guarding their expectations ahead of a decisive play-off for a place at the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
Why does the anti-Black racism of the US president have defenders in Africa’s largest Black nation?
The withdrawal from the port city of Berbera by regional powers distracted by war, marks the end of an external system that managed the Horn of Africa—and the beginning of a deeper structural collapse.
A new history of Mombasa shows how street food, colonial labor migration, and urban capitalism reshaped what—and how—Kenya eats.
An exhibition in Ibadan recovers Nigeria’s buried history of activism, raising urgent questions about access, erasure, and whether archives can inspire new political action.
Israel’s campaigns in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran are not discrete crises but interconnected fronts in a broader project of regional dominance.