Development aid and promoting the foreign interests of Dutch businesses like Shell and Heineken are coupled in the world’s fifth poorest nation. Critics aren’t convinced it’s a good deal.
Poverty, inequality and virtuousness in South Africa
The inadequacy of charity in tackling the legacies of apartheid and colonialism.
Zionism and global African studies
Delegates to a conference on Global Africa at Oxford University write about how Zionists and their apologists are targeting the academy.
Fanon forever
Fanon is your revolutionary’s revolutionary. His life and work continue to inspire and empower a new generation of dreamers and fighters against despotism and nihilism.
Neoliberalism and the march of impunity in Equatorial Guinea
How does the world’s longest serving autocrat remain in power?
Apartheid, anthropology and Johnny Clegg
All that French marketing schtick aside about “the white Zulu,” Johnny Clegg was a real one.
Binyavanga Wainaina
Celebrating Binyavanga Wainaina’s queerness
Binyavanga's fashion sensibility (the caftans, the dresses, the hats, the dyed hair) and his choices in his memoir, and his essays, will have a lasting impact.
There are no bees in Dakar
Dedicated to the memory of the writer’s friend: the rebel and genius, Binyavanga Wainaina.
Our man of the people
Binyavanga Wainaina was a writer who not only produced seminal work, but also contributed to and shaped the African literary tradition into what it is today.
We are angels, victims of everybody
Looking inside ourselves and working on the dark hearts of our colonial crap.
Culture
Algerian football success is a double-edged sword
Algeria reached the African Cup final for the first time in 29 years after defeating Nigeria. It can’t be divorced from politics back home.
Africa’s first UNESCO city of literature gets a new literary festival
What happens when ike’s, a legendary bookstore in Durban, South Africa, creates a literary festival? For one, synergy.
How not to change a curriculum
One of South Africa’s most important universities, the University of Cape Town, recently released a curriculum change framework in response to protests. This is a critique by two alum.
A very American story
The long and wondrous life of Hassan Ouakrim, the “Cultural Ambassador” of the Maghreb to the United States.
Quietly queer in Senegal
How do queer women in Senegal navigate the simultaneous desires of same-sex intimacies, family life, societal expectations, and urban success?
Before Fallism
The popular myth holds that most South African major resistance leaders come from its coastal regions. That's not been the case since the mid-1970s.
The post-independence fates of Zimbabwean student activists who fought the Rhodesian regime.
Politics
Justice in the Sahel
How local conflicts in the Sahel-Sahara over justice, or rather its absence, get dragged into tensions between outsiders.
What role for the Black American Left on Sudan?
The American website Black Agenda Report commented on the protests in Sudan and got it completely wrong.
Demystifying the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Technological change is not simply a neutral and inevitable process—it is shaped and driven by existing social relations.
What is universal about the Algerian national ‘Hirak’?
The peaceful nature of the massive protests against Algeria’s undemocratic regime signals the universal reclamation of the people’s right to perform who they are and who they want to be.
All of them must go
The Hirak, how the current contemporary liberation movement is known, gives Algerians a renewed sense of purpose.