The Nigerian presidential candidate’s claim of ’emi lokan’ (it’s my turn) reveals complex ethnic politics and a stagnated democracy. Most responses to it, humor and rumor, reflect how Nigerians enact democratic citizenship.
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Father of the nation
The funeral of popular Angolan musician Nagrelha underscored his capacity to mobilize people and it reminds us that popular culture offers a kind of Rorschach test for the body politic.
Sembene’s Africa is everyone’s Africa
If someone had to hold the title of father of African cinema, Ousmane Sembéne would be the most compelling candidate.
The haunting draw of the West
To be African means at some point to desire to leave. African cinema can provide solace for our tortured relationship to the West and our own continent.
Watching Naija
Nollywood makes more films than Hollywood and Bollywood. What it lacks is strong marketing and promotion.
A city divided
Ethnic enclaves are not unusual in many cities and towns across Sudan, but in Port Sudan, this polarized structure instigated and facilitated communal violence.
World Cup 2022
The 22nd FIFA Men’s World Cup, held in Qatar, is getting political. This week on the AIAC podcast, we discuss the sport and the politics with Tony Karon and Sean Jacobs.
Uganda has never qualified for the World Cup, but at a continental level it is making a comeback. So is its club football.
Culture
The imperial forest
Gregg Mitman’s ‘Empire of Rubber’ is less a historical reading of Liberia than a history of America and racial capitalism through the lens of a US corporate giant.
Between East Africa and the Gulf
Political encounters between the Arab Gulf and Africa span centuries. Mahmud Traouri’s novel ‘Maymuna’ demonstrates the significant role of a woman’s journey from East Africa to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The remarkable revival of Ugandan football
Uganda has never qualified for the World Cup, but at a continental level it is making a comeback. So is its club football.
The arc of the boomerang
More than class solidarity alone, more than a technocratic climate justice, a reckoning with empire is necessary for our collective survival.
Āfrīqāyī
It’s not common knowledge that there is Iran in Africa and there is Africa in Iran. But there are commonplace signs of this connection.
RADIO
On the last episode of our sports and music series on Africa Is a Country Radio, we visit with Sean Jacobs and Tony Karon of the Eleven Named People podcast to preview the 2022 men’s World Cup football tournament.
Politics
Colonialism and the war in Ukraine
What can historians of Eastern Europe learn from Ghanaian responses to the Russian invasion?
Africa’s next great war
The international community’s limited attention span is laser-focused on jihadism in the Sahel and the imploding Horn of Africa. But interstate war is potentially brewing in the eastern DRC.
The Cape Colony
The campaign to separate South Africa’s Western Cape from the rest of the country is not only a symptom of white privilege, but also of the myth that the province is better run.
Don’t mobilize, organize
To rebuild, the South African left must realize that there are no shortcuts to power.
A generation of seeds
While it is clear that food insecurity threatens the life of millions of Kenyans, lifting the ban on GMOs is not the solution.
Academy
The journey of a thousand steps
How might refugee as well as forced migration studies benefit from the movement to decolonize all aspects of African Studies?
Philosophy for the people
For philosophy to be relevant in Africa, it must democratize and address contemporary social problems.
African joy, joy in Africa
We are usually more attuned to Africa’s pains than to Africa’s pleasures. What would studying African pleasures, beyond censorious judgment, look like?
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.