Music Break
I like this video for Sayon Bamba’s song ‘L’excisée’ (from her album Dougna). Born in Guinea she resides in Brussels these days. A message doesn’t come much clearer than this.
Further Reading
Between M23 and electric vehicles
With regional and global powers keen to take advantage of the DRC’s mineral wealth, it is hard to see how things can get better for the country in the short and medium term.
Whose Biennale is it anyway?
The theme for this year’s Venice Biennale, the ‘olympics of the art world’ is ‘Foreigners Everywhere.’ But beyond representation, what are the barriers to participation?
Post-Afcon blues
Who else sorely misses the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations? Re-live the excitement from the stands in a short video by the AIAC team.
When a black viking meets a black slave trader
What do computer generated images tell us about the evolution of coloniality and racialization in the AI era?
Border politics
Right-wing populists in South Africa have started copying their American counterparts by calling for a border wall.
Allez Les Grenadières
When Haiti’s national women’s team take to the field for ninety minutes, they allow the Haitian people to dream.
Speaking as one African to another
South African anti-apartheid revolutionary Robert Sobukwe is often understood as a black nationalist. So what should we make of his close friendship with a white liberal?
The people’s coup
Incoming Senegalese president Bassirou Diomaye Faye is as much outgoing President Macky Sall’s creation as he is Ousmane Sonko’s.
Goodbye, Piassa
The demolition of an historic district in Addis Ababa shows a central contradiction of modernization: the desire to improve the country while devaluing its people and culture.
The limits of international solidarity
The failure of South African universities to call out Israel’s genocide challenges the assumption that South Africans have a deep appreciation of injustice in Palestine given their similar experiences under apartheid.
House of stone
Roy Guthrie was a refrigerator salesman in South Africa before he moved to Zimbabwe and established its largest sculpture park.
Congo beyond the hashtags
While social media has amplified calls for social justice in long-ignored parts of the world, it should only be the beginning of our activism.
Lessons from Lesotho
With a coalition government likely after South Africa’s elections in May, many are looking at the West for examples of coalition politics. South Africans, however, should look next door.
From Salt River to the sea
When the the Palestinian Men’s National Team played an exhibition match in Cape Town, South Africa, it might as well have been a home game.
Filling in the gaps in the study of African sports
To celebrate 20 years of research on sports in Africa, the SportsAfrica network will publish a series of monthly articles on Africa Is a Country drawing on their members’ research.
Labor pains
Today, the Nigeria labor Congress barely commands the respect of Nigerian workers.
La CAN et la politique des affects
La CAN de cette année en Côte d’Ivoire a montré que ce n’est pas seulement la politique du football qui compte, mais aussi la politique de l’ambiance.
And do not hinder them
We hardly think of children as agents of change. At the height of 1980s apartheid repression in South Africa, a group of activists did and gave them the tool of print.
When I say Africa
Why are stories about African suffering so persistent?
Climate as border
Although little evidence suggests a direct link between climate change and mass migration, Europe is using “climate migration” to militarize its borders.