Turn any homophobic corner in Africa and you’re guaranteed to run into a delirious celebration of “African culture,” but there’s nothing African about homophobia.
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Invisible voices in the production of knowledge
In the Bukavu Series, researchers from two Congolese and two European universities explore how they interrogate violence in the DRC.
After the scramble
It’s time to return Africa’s vinyl records.
In Uganda, posting a poem about Museveni gets you jailed
The charge is “misusing a computer.” Dr. Stella Nyanzi remains incarcerated to this day in Luzira Women’s Prison.
A remarkable celebration of African cinema
At this year’s New York African Film Festival, we saw films united by key thematic concerns, some of them quite unexpected.
Hollywood’s 419 Scam
Africa is apparently hot in Hollywood, but can Hollywood be trusted with African stories?
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.
Politics
Blind to the matatus
The future of Kenya’s matatus (commuter buses) and their inherent place in the capital Nairobi’s culture and society, is all but absent in the government’s neoliberal vision for urban planning.
The crisis of Ghana’s fisheries
Ghana is facing widespread illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing in its coastal waters causing economic hardship in fishing communities.
Pan-African aspirations by neoliberal means
As the African Union embarks on its most ambitious project—creating the largest free-trade area in the world—we have some questions.
Are the Russians forging an ’empire’ in Africa?
In contrast to renewed fears in the west over Russian expansionism in Africa, Russia’s increased presence on the continent is mostly about pursuing lucrative business opportunities.
Senegalese activists persevere despite setback
Beyond national elections, the Y’en a Marre political movement is changing Senegalese civic and political life for future generations.
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.
Culture
Running is work
What a documentary film on running can tell us about Ethiopia’s development trajectory.
We are all Haitians
In memory of J. Michael Dash, the Caribbean thinker and literature scholar.
Scenes from a Dry City
A film about Cape Town’s water crisis raises profound questions about the character and stability of South Africa’s post-apartheid trajectory.
Judgement Day
A commentary on how Egyptian society treats the abandoned, disabled, or those suffering from ailments deemed a risk.
The radical afterlives of Frantz Fanon
A documentary film takes Fanon’s ideas out of the past and tracks the ways in which his ideas are resonating with today’s young across the planet.
Football is a Country
When Ruud Gullit won the Ballon d’Or in 1987, he dedicated the award to the imprisoned Nelson Mandela. Then Gullit made a reggae song about Apartheid.