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.
Lit
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.
Speaking poetry to power
Amid the turmoil of the Anglophone Crisis in Cameroon, a unique group of individuals has emerged as powerful agents of change.
The puzzle as propaganda
At the height of African decolonization, radical writers turned to interactive features like competitions and quizzes to engage their audiences.
We are producing, they are eating
Nigeria's archives of revolutionary printmaking offers us insights into the dissident voices of the country's old left, which are surprisingly relevant today.
The limits of self-professed hypocrisy
In 'Revolutionaries’ House,' Nthikeng Mohlele explores the moral decay within South African politics through a disaffected politician tortured by his personal indiscretions.
An unfinished project
Christian theology was appropriated to play an integral role in the justifying apartheid’s racist ideology. Black theologians resisted through a theology of the oppressed.
Untangling the roots of Empire
The coterie of billionaires and foreign aid agencies intent on transforming African agriculture have mostly upturned people’s lives.
Writing while black
The film adaptation of Percival Everett's novel ‘Erasure’ leaves little room to explore Black middle-class complicity in commodifying the traumas of Black working-class lives.
And do not hinder them
We hardly think of children as agents of change. At the height of 1980s apartheid repression in South Africa, a group of activists did and gave them the tool of print.
Unearthing Subterranean Knowledge
If the savannas of West Africa are a new corporate mining frontier in the 21st century, it's because it is also home to the world’s longest-standing indigenous gold mining economy.
Yvonne Vera’s gardens
Tadiwa Madenga’s latest book offers us a biographical portrait of Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera written through her love of plants, gardens and nature.
The DRC’s never-ending wars
A new book argues for the centrality of Congolese elites and regional powers in perpetuating domestic conflict, but it too easily lets the West off the hook.
Shadows of coloniality
What does it mean to be Malawian?