What do we want?
In her latest novel, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie examines the contradictions of women’s desires, while leaving her own narrative blind spots exposed.
Lit
The world isn’t broken, it was built this way
From Congo to Gaza, the machinery of empire hides behind the language of aid and development.
Firearms aren’t the only weapons
The writings of revolutionary Angolan leader and intellectual Mário Pinto de Andrade helped galvanize the independence struggle. They are now available in English.
As armas não só de fogo
Os escritos do líder e intelectual revolucionário angolano Mário Pinto de Andrade ajudaram a galvanizar a luta pela independência. Estão agora disponíveis em inglês.
Beyond national liberation
A new book issues both an indictment of South Africa’s failed transition and a call to rebuild the left through climate justice, solidarity economies, and radical humanism.
A powerful storytelling tradition
The last great Fang bard, Eyí Moan Ndong fused myth, music, and sci-fi to create epic performances that defy Western categories—and demand global recognition.
Una tradición literaria poderosa
El último gran bardo Fang, Eyí Moan Ndong, fusionó el mito, la música y la ciencia ficción para crear actuaciones épicas que desafían las categorías occidentales y exigen reconocimiento mundial.
Journey through the afterlives of a colonized Africa
In a hauntingly sincere recollection of her childhood and evolution into the ‘Most Dangerous woman in Africa,’ Andrée Blouin reintroduces herself while taking readers alongside an intimate ‘Africa Tour.'
When Brazil’s African Muslims scared the world
Taking place 190 years ago, the Malê Revolt in Bahia, led by African Muslim slaves, shook Brazil's foundations and echoed global fears of a new Haiti.
Reading List: Adam Hanieh
Materially speaking, oil is simply a sticky, black goo. It doesn’t have any innate power separate from the kind of society we live in—capitalism.
Reading List: Dotun Ayobade
What can the lives of the women behind Afrobeat tell us about creativity, resistance, and the interplay of power and pleasure in 1970s Nigeria?
Reading the present as history
In his debut novel, Thaer Husien remixes genre and takes readers on a psychedelic ride through a dystopian yet disturbingly familiar future Palestine.
More French than Algerian
This week, Kamel Daoud became the first Algerian to receive France’s most prestigious literary honor. Yet, in Algeria, no one seems to care.
Museum of memory
An eye-opening documentary on African literary titan Wole Soyinka wants us to laud his “politics” without ever having Soyinka himself talk about them.
Writers for a new world
The debacle around Ta-Nehisi Coates' latest book shows us that no matter a writer's individual acclaim, the liberal media establishment will never tolerate anything that fundamentally challenges its racist edifice.
African contradictions in the world of science
African contributions to the globalized world cannot be celebrated while the place occupied by African peoples remains on the periphery.
Contradições africanas no mundo das ciências
A contribuição africana no mundo globalizado não pode ser celebrada enquanto o lugar ocupado pelos povos africanos for o da periferia.
Imaginary homelands
A new biography of former apartheid homeland leader Lucas Mangope struggles to do more than arrange the actions of its subject into a neat chronology.
Reading List: Mara Kardas-Nelson
How did microfinance become a craze championed by bleeding-heart progressives to Global South economists, American presidents, and business executives?
Who dreams of sunrise?
Siddhartha Deb’s latest book asks readers to consider incarceration as both a metaphor and fact of life in India today.