colonialism

Friday, July 12th, 2013

Eating Nando’s in Gaborone

I spent part of last month at the biennial gathering of historians organised by the Southern African Historical Society. The conference at the University of Botswana was fantastic. Gaborone was, well, less so.* I think that the city is best summed up by an exchange between a conference delegate and her husband, who had spent the morning exploring downtown Gaborone.

Monday, May 13th, 2013

Did Britain’s MI6 have Patrice Lumumba murdered?

Africa is a Country readers may not regularly check the London Review of Books, a British literary magazine with a circulation just over 50,000–it’s meant more for Bloomsbury than Bamako or Bloemfontein (though some readers could probably...

Thursday, February 14th, 2013

Africa is a Board Game

While shopping for Christmas presents this past December in a local gaming store, this little number caught my eye. Ticket to Ride: The Heart of Africa is a variation of a popular board game in which players...

Monday, April 30th, 2012

The Adventures of Tintin in a Belgian Court

Jogchum Vrielink, in this guest post, writes about the attempt by a Congolese student to obtain a ban on the comic book ‘Tintin in the Congo.’ A Brussels court rejected their claims. Despite this outcome, the reasoning...

Monday, April 30th, 2012

The geo-branding war

Geo-branding is a serious thing. It is particularly serious when people from other geographic areas decide to brand your geographical area and the people in it, the way they see fit and the way that fits their...

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

Reverse Colonization

NPR’s European correspondent Sylvia Poggioli filed this piece on Friday. Titled “Portuguese Seeking Opportunities in Former Colonies” it takes a breezy look at how the economic crisis in Portugal has sent the Portuguese to the shores of former...