AfricaIs aCountry

Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani

By
Tom Devriendt

Last year, Chris Abani introduced Ghana-born writer and poet Kwame Dawes (who spent most of his childhood and early adult life in Jamaica) to a Lannan Foundation audience:

And talked with him:

The Lannan archive has enough talks to keep you entertained for a whole week, by the way. There’s Howard Zinn in conversation with Arundhati Roy (and the same Arundhati Roy more recently), there’s J.M. Coetzee, Eduardo Galeano, Octavio Paz, Cornel West, Czeslaw Milosz, Lucille Clifton, Nadine Gordimer, etcetera.

I suggest you browse yourself. — Tom Devriendt

Further Reading

Visiting Ngara

A redevelopment project in Nairobi’s Ngara district promises revival—but raises deeper questions about capital, memory, and who has the right to shape the city.

Gen Z’s electoral dilemma

Long dismissed as apathetic, Kenya’s youth forced a rupture in 2024. As the 2027 election approaches, their challenge is turning digital rebellion and street protest into political power.

A world reimagined in Black

By placing Kwame Nkrumah at the center of a global Black political network, Howard W. French reveals how the promise of pan-African emancipation was narrowed—and what its failure still costs Africa and the diaspora.

Securing Nigeria

Nigeria’s insecurity cannot be solved by foreign airstrikes or a failing state, but by rebuilding democratic, community-rooted systems of collective self-defense.

Empire’s middlemen

From Portuguese Goa to colonial Kampala, Mahmood Mamdani’s latest book shows how India became an instrument of empire, and a scapegoat in its aftermath.

À qui s’adresse la CAN ?

Entre le coût du transport aérien, les régimes de visas, la culture télévisuelle et l’exclusion de classe, le problème de l’affluence à la CAN est structurel — et non le signe d’un manque de passion des supporters.

Lions in the rain

The 2025 AFCON final between Senegal and Morocco was a dramatic spectacle that tested the limits of the match and the crowd, until a defining moment held everything together.