Africa Is a Country

African borders don’t stop African people

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

African borders don’t stop African people

By
Anakwa Dwamena

Also meet the man who drove Malcolm X around in New York City and introduced him to Fidel Castro.

'Immigration blues' by Patrick Marioné. Via Flickr CC

People always say Africans blame too much on colonialism. But the wave of secessionist (or independence) movements inside already existing states and how borders can’t divide communities, have brought cause to look at the cultural legacies that came with how the continent was divided.

(2) One of the first resolution of the Conference of African Heads of States in the 1960s called for an African News Agency. What role does the media have in regional integration today, as much thought and policy is devoted to the project?

(3) Many migrant women arrive pregnant in Europe. To understand why, involves looking at the routes and trajectories of women migrants as they make their way from particularly Nigeria to Europe.

(4) As Libya turns ever deadlier for migrants headed to Europe, some are going through Algeria, getting trapped. Here is a look at some of their journeys.

(5) Meet the man who drove Malcolm X around in New York City and introduced him to Fidel Castro.

(6) It is the 500 year anniversary of the Protestant reformation, but you most likely won’t hear about the role of African Christians in any of the essays, articles and op-eds about it.

(7) Corruption is tearing apart South Africa’s ruling ANC, and political killings are sadly become one of the uglier manifestations of this.

(8) It took African archeologists and researchers–going beyond the assumption and the limits of western academics beliefs about what was possible of African antiquity–to discover 1,000-year-old colored glass beads in Ile-Ife in what is now Nigeria.

(9) Of course it is in Zimbabwe that Bitcoin has taken hold and is breaking price records.

(10) Watch: Nigerian-American fantasy writer Nnedi Okorafor on imagining the future of Africa through sci-fi stories.

Further Reading

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.