What the Jair Bolsonaro regime in Brazil means for Africa
Brazil’s new President is committed to American-style bilateralism and the violent undoing of the Workers Party’s legacy. The consequences for Africa are bleak.
Black bodies will fall in Brazil
What does the election of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro mean for Brazilians of African descent?
Presidential power and the Museveni state in Uganda
Caricatures aside, how do President Yoweri Museveni and the National Revolutionary Movement state reproduce power? It’s been 31 years.
Mandela’s dreams
Media studies scholar Sharon Sliwinski asks whether dreaming can be recast as a vital form of resistance to political violence. A review of her book.
Homophobic liberals
In Malawi, artists, especially poets—usually associated with progressivism and intellectualism—are the vanguard of a new homophobia.
Africa No Filter
The capacity to decide who can move, who can settle, where and under what conditions is increasingly becoming the core of political struggles.
Harlem rapper Sheck Wes's star rises in the shadow of Dapper Dan and Cheikh Amadou Bamba.
Culture
Sudan in Berlin
“Berlin isn’t Germany. Just like that website you write for—it’s really its own country.” – Mohamed Jeballa, partner in a popular Sudanese restaurant in the city.
How did objects come to be in museums and who is entitled to own them?
The curators of the Weltkulturen museum of ethnography in Frankfurt, Germany trace the origins of objects that ended up in their collections, and ask if they were: COLLECTED. BOUGHT. LOOTED?
The film about nowhere
Invisible City [Kakuma], a film about Kenya’s largest refugee camps, seems keen on making a point but is anchored on unsteady ground (with some shitty translation).
Fanon’s fugitive archive
A new, massive collection of published and unpublished works by Frantz Fanon, reveals his intellectual and political motivations, but also proves him enigmatic and inscrutable as ever.
Arundhati Roy in Johannesburg—An essay on essays
In a world of fake news, shallow analysis and torrid pontificating, combining empirical evidence with emotive expression, is what give Roy’s essays legs.
Football is a Country
Who gets to host future editions of the men’s soccer World Cup is not just big business, but also a bargaining chip in international relations.
Politics
The rebirth of the Nigerian left?
What has the world’s Moët drinking capital and a world leader in global indices of private jet ownership to do with left politics?
What to do about South Africa’s flailing economy?
Any deviation from economic orthodoxy in South Africa is made coterminous with the most extreme cases, like Zimbabwe and Venezuela.
The disastrous road of private prisons
Kenya’s prisons are in serious need of reform. Opening the door to private interests is not the solution.
Young people lead the resistance in Sudan
State repression is no match for innovative forms of activism amongst the country’s youth
How many immigrants live in South Africa?
The UN and South Africa’s Statistics Service are exaggerating immigrant numbers and playing with people’s lives in South Africa.
Africa is a Radio
In INTL BLK episode 5, deejays Chief Boima and Francesca Harding take a look at race and cultural difference in Latin America through the lens of trap music.