During Guinea-Bissau’s war of liberation, women filled key positions on the frontline. That is often forgotten in the mythology of the struggle for independence.
Latest
Uganda’s most controversial and disruptive politician
A new book revisits the career of Uganda’s first elected prime minister, Benedicto Kiwanuka, his followers, and political ideas.
Tweeting apartheid sport
What if the social media conditions of 2021 existed in 1981? A group of New Zealand writers tweeted the damned 1981 Springbok rugby tour as if it was happening now.
Corruption is a class project
Different factions of South Africa’s ruling elite are implicated in looting and profiting from the state. South Africans should take an attitude of a plague on both their houses.
Swallowed by the archive
53 years after it was first made in 1968, the Ghanaian filmmaker King Ampaw’s short film ‘Black Is Black’ celebrates its inconspicuous premiere.
Abdulrazak Gurnah and the afterlives of German colonialism in East Africa
Gurnah’s Nobel Prize invites us to ponder Germany’s colonial past between the Scramble for Africa and the First World War in what is now Tanzania, Burundi, and Rwanda.
AIAC RADIO
Africa Is a Country Radio is back with a new season. Each show will be inspired by the work of a different African author. First up, we explore the Ethiopian Tizita with Mukoma Wa Ngugi.
Culture
The ultimate end of decolonization
Islamic scholarship in Africa and the meaning and end of decolonization in the work of religious studies scholar, Ousmane Kane.
AFCON is decolonization
On this week’s AIAC Talk, Will Shoki and Sean Jacobs discuss the history and politics of the African Cup of Nations football tournament.
Against a willing amnesia
Two books, by art historian Bénédicte Savoy and journalist Barnaby Phillips respectively, detail how we got to this point in the restitution of African heritage.
The earth below the surface
The film, ‘We are Zama Zama,’ about illegal miners in South Africa, is a social commentary on the failures of post-colonial liberal democracies in Southern Africa.
A new star in the southern sky
The impressive debut album of the Malcolm Jiyane Tree-O marks the arrival of a unique genius in post post-apartheid South African jazz.
Capitalism in My City
The Mathare Social Justice Centre has partnered with Africa Is a Country to produce a series of posts and videos to document everyday capitalism in Nairobi. The project is funded via the Shuttleworth Fellowship awarded to Sean Jacobs.
In the last video for our Nairobi edition of Capitalism in My City, we meet the Organic Intellectuals Network.
In the third video for our Nairobi edition of Capitalism in My City, Gacheke Gachihi visits a site of environmental injustice.
Politics
What does China want in Africa?
On this week’s AIAC Talk: China’s engagement with Africa is much debated. What exactly does it want on the continent?
Bring Patrice Lumumba home
The return of Patrice Lumumba’s remains must not be an occasion for Belgium to congratulate itself, but for a full accounting of the colonial violence that led to the assassination and coverup.
Back from Safari
If you hadn’t noticed, we were on our annual break from just before Christmas 2021 until now. We are back, including with some inspiration.
South Africa’s morbid symptoms
In South Africa, the old endures and the new is nowhere to be seen. What is to be done? Public intellectual Steven Friedman helps us make sense.
Ignorance, denial and insurgency in Mozambique
A new and different state is necessary to manage the complex problems in the region, but is it possible under the current regime that has fed the conflict?
Technology
Nigeria’s Twitter ban and the resistance politics of VPNs
Anyone who cares about civil society, free speech, and human rights should find the state’s digital silencing of its citizens deeply troubling.
WhatsApp and anti-capitalism: should you stay or should you go?
Facebook and its “family” of services are a one-way street towards greater integration, data exploitation, and erosions of privacy by an increasingly monopolistic company.
More widespread than we think
Today's social movements rely on tech collectives to organize safely. But few know the history of other technologies used by earlier liberation movements.
What is whiteness to a cyborg?
Tracing the digital contours of the settler colony helps us understand how old inequalities will shape a future with artificial intelligence.