A people’s history of Zimbabwe’s first mbira punk band, Chikwata 263, who wanted a soundtrack for the country’s post-post colonial blues.
Latest
Integrity always pays
On justice, impunity and ridicule: the historic outcome of the 2022 trial in Burkina Faso against Thomas Sankara’s killers.
Art and the struggle for Ambazonia
Artist Adjani Okpu-Egbe, interrogates sovereignty and solidarity in southwest Cameroon, for what is known as Ambazonia, and beyond.
An independence revue
This month on Africa Is a Country Radio, taking inspiration from the work of Chinua Achebe, we take a listen to the music of the post-independence era on the African continent.
Sanctioning the regime in Senegal
After defying the state apparatus in March 2021, Senegalese voters sent a strong message of disobedience and sanction via their ballots in January 2022 and signaling their readiness for another regime change in 2024.
This is appropriation that’s acceptable
The French Ethio-groove group Akalé Wubé has dissolved. For over a decade they have shown how cultural outsiders can considerately engage in music that is not theirs.
RADIO
On this month’s AIAC Radio we visit with DJ Ripley aka Professor Larisa Mann, and talk about her new book “Rude Citizenship” on copyright and the colonial legacy in Jamaica.
Culture
A question of color
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s novel “The Theory of Flight” may be the first to take seriously Zimbabwe’s complicated race politics, beyond the obvious black vs whites.
The art of football
Why should people be invested in a football game in a bubble called the art world? “Exhibition Match,” a multifaceted installation, explores responses to this question.
Countering the narrative
If committed filmmakers want to reach and influence more people, and counter fake news, impact producing may help get us there.
Victory belongs to the tyrants
Basma Abdel Aziz navigates the blurred boundary between dystopian fiction and reality in Egypt, in her new novel, “Here is a Body.”
An ethnography for fad diets
Two tourists take a package trip to visit the Hadza people in Tanzania and are so jazzed with what they see, they make a podcast about it. What could go wrong?
Climate Politricks
"Climate Politricks," our series on climate justice, tax justice and extractives in African spaces. Edited by Grieve Chelwa and funded by the Africa Regional Office of OSF.
A new documentary focuses on using the soil’s carbon absorbent properties to solve the climate change problem.
Social policy is essential to creating more just African countries. Why is it not the norm across the continent?
Politics
People live here
Why are Ngorongoro’s Maasai at risk of being evicted again? Tanzania’s conservation-tourism industrial complex wants them out.
How should we struggle?
Lawyerfication discourse in Ghana ignores the operation of power on the ground and conflates legality with justice.
Nairobi’s incendiary displacements
Urban displacements greatly diminish the living conditions of already desperate populations living on the brink of poverty in Kenya’s capital.
Expensive shit
Protracted strikes in Nigeria’s higher public education sector lay bare nefarious efforts by the ruling class to entrench privatization.
The war in Ukraine may seem far from Africa, but it is not
To compensate for its possible isolation by the West, Russia could turn its attention to Africa, making the continent the next center stage for imperialist struggles.
Russia
The war in Ukraine may seem far from Africa, but it is not
To compensate for its possible isolation by the West, Russia could turn its attention to Africa, making the continent the next center stage for imperialist struggles.
The politics of imperial gratitude
South African discourse about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continually references Soviet support for the exiled ANC. But the past is more complicated than official Russian and South African statements suggest.
Ukraine and the left’s imperialist economism
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has highlighted the narrowness of the crude anti-imperialist positions that are silent about the actual invasion of an independent country.
The Russians are here
Russia’s war with Ukraine has inaugurated the new Cold War most feared, and some wanted. Which side are you on?