After the digging, who remembers?
In the aftermath of the Stilfontein mining tragedy, South Africa must confront not just policy failure but a deeper amnesia: the erasure of women, memory, and indigenous ethics from its extractive economy.
Informal
Mining, murder, and the machinery of exploitation
The massacre of artisanal miners in Stilfontein exposes the South African state’s violent allegiance to corporate interests and a long legacy of extraction and dispossession.
The gig economy’s false promise
Touted as a path to empowerment, Africa’s gig economy is a digital twist on old patterns of labor exploitation—but workers are fighting back.
Feeding fear and prejudice
In South Africa, a spate of food poisoning incidents has ignited another round of xenophobic scaremongering.
Nairobi’s disastrous flood response
Days before mass protests broke out across Kenya, the national government enacted a mass, unjustified forced removal campaign across Nairobi.
Who is greening Nairobi?
For some years now, the people of Eastlands in Nairobi have been remaking the city in their own image of green development.
Goodbye, Piassa
The demolition of an historic district in Addis Ababa shows a central contradiction of modernization: the desire to improve the country while devaluing its people and culture.
When economists shut off your water
Access to water in Nairobi is horribly unequal. The World Bank, Nairobi Water Company, and development economists exploited this unjust context to treat poor Kenyans like guinea pigs.
Who is Addis Ababa for?
The planned demolition of one of Ethiopia’s most vibrant cultural centers forms part of an urban planning trend where African cities are re-designed to serve elites.
The dust, towers and false promises of modern Ethiopia
Successive Ethiopian governments have continued a 'modernizing' project that not only offers people false dreams, but actively dislocates them from the things that gave them purpose in the past.
Those who make homes in dark buildings
In his new book ‘The Blinded City,’ Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon takes readers into inner city Johannesburg not as it was or could be, but as it is.
Dispossessing to deliver
In South Africa, land occupiers are evicted from their homes in the name of housing delivery. On the Africa Is a Country Podcast this week, we attempt to understand why.
The party question
Marcel Paret’s book, "Fragmented Militancy: Precarious Resistance in South Africa after Racial Inclusion," tries to make sense of politics in South African urban informal settlements.
Nairobi’s incendiary displacements
Urban displacements greatly diminish the living conditions of already desperate populations living on the brink of poverty in Kenya's capital.
The earth below the surface
The film, 'We are Zama Zama,' about illegal miners in South Africa, is a social commentary on the failures of post-colonial liberal democracies in Southern Africa.
Gangsters as people’s champions
In a country like South Africa where government trust is low, gangsters and criminals who provide assistance to their communities are seen as the people’s champions.
Organic intellectuals
In the last video for our Nairobi edition of Capitalism in My City, we meet the Organic Intellectuals Network.
Excavating Kazi Mataani
In the second video from our Capitalism In My City project, Dennis Esikuri talks to everyday Nairobians about the current employment opportunities in the context of the COVID-19 epidemic.
Dispossession in the name of democracy
South Africans fight for “adequate housing,” freedom from eviction, and a government that will progressively realize both of these goals.
The hustlers of Nairobi
Why is Nairobi's government terrorizing hawkers and hustlers around the city? An anthropological perspective.