On our annual publishing break, we ask: if the opposite of “weird” is normal, what if normal is equally problematic?
Latest
Zau is a mirror
Inspired by a tapestry of Bantu folk stories, the video game ‘Tales of Kenzera: Zau’ is rich with mythology that many Africans know as our heritage.
The serious side of funny business
Nigerian comedians are getting political.
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?
The mirage of progress in women’s football
Select success stories obscure the intentional underdevelopment of women’s football in Africa.
Spectacles of incompetence
Given his track record of sowing division and making empty promises, South Africans should be wary of treating its new Minister of Sports, Arts and Culture as a lovable buffoon.
PODCASTS
This week on the AIAC podcast we’re talking about #RejectFinanceBill2024 and #RutoMustGo, the youth-led movements against Kenya’s out-of-touch elites.
Culture
Rooting for everybody black
The Olympics, with its provocative patriotism, are the perfect forum for using a broader diasporic focus to push back against hypernationalism.
Rolling with the punches
Removed from the facts, the firestorm around Algerian boxer Imane Khelif is the latest attempt by the right-wing in the West to find fodder for its culture war.
Pretty girl from Soweto
In South Africa, a popular beauty contest is revealing the specter of ultranationalism and anti-blackness.
Food wars
The theft dispute between Onezwa Mbola and Nara Smith reveals the consumerist undertones behind content for women in the online creative economy.
Not an obvious hero
In a new film, former UN-Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld is portrayed as a defender of a fledgling postcolonial state. But his role in the Congo Crisis is more complicated.
Olympics
Rooting for everybody black
The Olympics, with its provocative patriotism, are the perfect forum for using a broader diasporic focus to push back against hypernationalism.
Rolling with the punches
Removed from the facts, the firestorm around Algerian boxer Imane Khelif is the latest attempt by the right-wing in the West to find fodder for its culture war.
When a star dies
On the tragic death of 24-year-old marathon record holder Kelvin Kiptum.
Who are the Olympics for?
Beneath the image of togetherness, the world’s biggest athletic spectacle is still beset by discrimination and exclusion.
Politics
Resisting the new green colonialism
A proposed green hydrogen project in Tunisia prioritizes European energy needs over local sovereignty.
The keyboard warriors are winning
Digital activism is playing a significant role in amplifying the impact of the #RejectFinanceBill2024 and #RutoMustGo protests, but how effective can it ultimately be?
Ending our spectator citizenship
Anti-government protests have spread to Uganda, where ordinary people are tired of passively accepting elite misrule.
Not only kafala
Domestic workers in the Gulf typically face a double bind: as a foreign worker, you are governed by kafala laws, while as a female, you are governed by the male guardianship system.
The mad man
As he loses his grip on power, Kenya’s president is losing the plot.
Revolutionary Papers
A year long series on the archival remnants of African and black diaspora anti-colonial movement materials to retrieve a politics and pedagogy that challenge the contemporary cooptation of radical histories. Guest editors: Mahvish Ahmad, Koni Benson, and Hana Morgenstern from the Revolutionary Papers project (revolutionarypapers.org)
Nigeria's archives of revolutionary printmaking offers us insights into the dissident voices of the country's old left, which are surprisingly relevant today.
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.