How is Kenya’s “new middle class” contributing to a pervasive low-quality oppression that leaves Kenyans feeling hopeless?
Latest
What’s Left of the South African Left?
This week on AIAC Talk, we’re debating whether the moment is right for South Africa’s left to form a new party. Watch it live on YouTube.
South Africa’s Left needs a new party
Assuming today’s socioeconomic crisis benefits the Left is folly. That will only happen if we have the political vision to make class the fault line of social polarization, and for that we need to face the challenge of constructing a new party.
The king is dead
The death of the Zulu king highlights the unresolved issues that continue to shapes lives in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa.
The unforeseen threat
Many of Nairobi’s apocalypse merchants and prophesy peddlers have disappeared in the past year. Reflections on how COVID-19 has re-shaped the city and residents’ lives.
Essentialism and the making of African refugees
African “refugeeness” in the media, policy, and academia is an essentialist physical image conflating material deprivation and multiple victimhoods.
AIAC RADIO
This month on AIAC Radio we talk with Marissa Moorman and Paulo Flores to see how a music culture born in the quintals of Luanda helped birth a nation. Listen on Worldwide FM.
Culture
The transcendence of boundaries
What kinds of radical emancipatory futures are being imagined in Africa’s speculative fictions?
Equatorial Guinea’s ‘American Dirt’
A novel and Netflix film about Spanish colonialism in Equatorial Guinea raises questions about appropriation and storytelling.
A compassionate take on an invisible struggle
A new film by South African director Nomawonga Khumalo represents the contradictions and nuances of black women’s interior lives.
Representation that sells us shoes
Adidas and other private, for-profit companies that are embracing corporate queerness are never going to contribute to our liberation.
What is decolonization for?
Scholars Archie Mafeje and Cedric Robinson challenged Eurocentrism. Their ideas are becoming more widely known. They’re the focus of AIAC Talk this week.
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.
Drug use among young people in Nairobi's slums is on the rise. Youth also face arbitrary arrests by the police, resulting in jail time which turns them into hardcore criminals in a vicious cycle.
I’ve lived a good part of my life in Mathare 4A, part of the larger Mathare slum in Nairobi. Decent housing remains a pipe dream for the majority of the city's residents.
Politics
The reluctant scientist
The late Tanzanian president, John Pombe Magufuli, was initially lauded for his no-nonsense approach to corruption. But the cracks began to appear within months of his presidency.
Food and the struggle for Africa’s sovereignty
How early post-independence clarity on the link between food self-sufficiency and national sovereignty offers lessons for contemporary efforts.
Border wars
The Joint Boundary Commission that Lesotho and South Africa have revived, gives hope that some sort of border deal might be possible between the two countries.
Why the tree is producing bad apples
Corruption is South Africa’s pandemic—one that has been disenfranchising and killing people long before our transition to democracy.
COVID-19
The unforeseen threat
Many of Nairobi's apocalypse merchants and prophesy peddlers have disappeared in the past year. Reflections on how COVID-19 has re-shaped the city and residents' lives.
The reluctant scientist
The late Tanzanian president, John Pombe Magufuli, was initially lauded for his no-nonsense approach to corruption. But the cracks began to appear within months of his presidency.
Why the tree is producing bad apples
Corruption is South Africa’s pandemic—one that has been disenfranchising and killing people long before our transition to democracy.
The pathology of economics
COVID-19 exposes the deadly dominance of neoclassical economics in Africa.