Jacques Bongoma was a young Congolese progressive who became a close advisor to Joseph Mobutu after the country’s 1965 coup.
Latest
Tiptoeing across the minefield of neutrality
Recent US-South Africa relations appear to be firmly stalled in the cul-de-sacs of imperial or sub-imperial diplomacy.
Reading List: Duncan McEachern Yoon
The author’s new book wants to clear away some of the misunderstandings that dog Africa and China relations. Here, he catalogs the books that guided him.
The land and the sea
Communities whose land is being targeted for exploration by oil and gas companies are increasingly using the courts. South Africa points to good lessons for social movements about allying with the law.
The gossip bros
The age of the podcasters as thought leaders—think #PodcastandChill and The Hustlers Corner—is upon us.
Resistance and commodification
A scholar of Black Brazil discusses the past, present, and future of the antiracist movement, in the run up to this year’s presidential elections.
Marikana, 10 years on
Six provocations on the Marikana Massacre of 16 August 2012. See also the one-day symposium streamed online here.
South African companies can afford to pay their workers a living wage—if not for their commitment to profit shifting, as the case of Lonmin and Marikana showed.
Why do representative bodies like the union, the party, and the so-called Left seem to fail its constituents during struggles like Marikana?
Culture
Reading List: Mutt_Lon
The books that the author, a Cameroonian novelist, has been reading share an ethics of political engagement, a quest for identity and cultural inventory, and an ear for the voices and harmonies of African languages.
Afrobeat is bigger than Fela
In the second of four articles on Afrobeat music in South America, political scientist Simon Akindes writes about the all women and nonbinary Brazilian band, Funmilayo Afrobeat Orquestra.
Where laws and guns cannot reach
South African poet Don Mattera, who died in July, was the real deal—preferring to throw his lot in with the ignored and the undervalued. Unsurprisingly, his monumental life and work is undervalued too.
Put your crown on your head
A new exhibit of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s life and work explores the influences of his family and the African world on his visual sensibilities and identity.
Reading List: Ari Gautier
Writer Ari Gautier owes his own blend of mythology, Dalit consciousness, and surrealism to literary stylists such as Amos Tutuola, Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo.
PODCAST
On this week’s AIAC podcast: After an upswing before the pandemic, the global climate justice movement currently looks stuck. What kind of climate politics can appeal to the majority of people?
Politics
Claim no automatic support
Where can the left look to inspiration in the wake of defeat? Our first letter from our new deputy editor.
Police and power in South Africa
South African policing is a tool of social control and repression. Are democratic and humanistic alternatives possible? This week on the AIAC podcast, we discuss.
The politics of pathology
By using healthcare to attack immigrants, xenophobic political movements in South Africa echo long-standing right-wing obsessions.
We need to talk about wage theft
South African companies can afford to pay their workers a living wage—if not for their commitment to profit shifting, as the case of Lonmin and Marikana showed.
Memories are to be shared
It will have to be the Algerian diaspora inside France who will eventually have to mainstream the truth of France’s colonial legacy.
Academy
Did dependency theorists really ignore culture?
Must indigenous knowledge be science to be valid? Philosopher Paulin J. Hountondji shows that we must ask why Africa is scientifically and technologically dependent in the first place.
The doctor from District Six
The University of Edinburgh will award an honorary doctorate to Joe Schaffers, a working-class educator from Cape Town, South Africa. It will be a new benchmark for this tradition.
Is the academic boycott of Israel a violation of academic freedom?
A decision to rescind an invitation to Israeli academics to a conference in South Africa, revived a tactic of the anti-apartheid struggle. Is it effective?
African liberation and African scholarship
The Sixth International Congress of African and African Diaspora Studies in Accra in August 2023 foregrounds the struggle against African Studies as a form of knowledge production located, for the most part, outside Africa.