In Northern Cyprus, African students, many of them Nigerian, study diligently for tertiary degrees while juggling multiple income streams in a peer-to-peer system for collective survival.
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We are actually reading
The Radical Books Collective teams up with Africa Is a Country to bring you progressive conversations about books, literature, and publishing on this platform.
Patrick Lyoya’s life mattered
The harrowing execution of Patrick Lyoya, a Congolese refugee in Michigan, and the unfulfilled promise of resettlement in America.
The doctor from District Six
The University of Edinburgh will award an honorary doctorate to Joe Schaffers, a working-class educator from Cape Town, South Africa. It will be a new benchmark for this tradition.
Against the youth fetish in politics
Politics is about effectiveness, and casting youth as a political subject (rather than simply a demographic), is a bad way to do politics.
Is the academic boycott of Israel a violation of academic freedom?
A decision to rescind an invitation to Israeli academics to a conference in South Africa, revived a tactic of the anti-apartheid struggle. Is it effective?
PODCAST
On this week’s AIAC podcast: After an upswing before the pandemic, the global climate justice movement currently looks stuck. What kind of climate politics can appeal to the majority of people?
Culture
African liberation and African scholarship
The Sixth International Congress of African and African Diaspora Studies in Accra in August 2023 foregrounds the struggle against African Studies as a form of knowledge production located, for the most part, outside Africa.
Bookends: Khadija Abdalla Bajaber
The author of ‘The House of Rust’ tells us all the little things (from foods to films) that get her imagination going.
World Refugee Day from the US-Mexico border
For World Refugee Day, Africa Is a Country Radio visited Tijuana, Mexico to talk with Josiane Moukam about what life is like for African migrants at the US border.
Punks of the Witwatersrand
The Rise and Fall of National Wake, South Africa’s first multiracial punk band at the height of apartheid, that sang about state violence and political freedoms.
The institution of Alex Magaisa
Magaisa, who died this month, set agendas, and demanded the highest standards from the political and intellectual classes in Zimbabwe.
Climate Politricks
"Climate Politricks," our series on climate justice, tax justice and extractives in African spaces. Edited by Grieve Chelwa and funded by the Africa Regional Office of OSF.
A new documentary focuses on using the soil’s carbon absorbent properties to solve the climate change problem.
Social policy is essential to creating more just African countries. Why is it not the norm across the continent?
Politics
Democraticizing money
Cameroonian economist Joseph Tchundjang Pouemi died in 1984, either poisoned or by suicide. His ideas about the international monetary system and the CFA franc are worth revisiting.
The Mexico option
Mexico is fighting to regain sovereignty over its energy future, and African Leftists would do well to look to it for some answers.
A new politics, from the ground up
Cape Town-based activist Axolile Notywala wants to bring people from different backgrounds together to build a movement on what it means to be free in South Africa.
Land grabs and conservation propaganda
To preserve biodiversity, protected area lands should be returned to African indigenous communities who play an essential role in conservation.
The promise of platinum
Platinum holds promise for a net-zero future. But the promise of platinum cannot be founded on the broken promises endured by those who live in its spaces of extraction.
Russia
Rushing to boycott
The cultural boycott of Russia turns to the flawed precedent of apartheid South Africa for inspiration, while ignoring the much more carefully considered boycott of official Israeli culture by the BDS Movement.
The war in Ukraine may seem far from Africa, but it is not
To compensate for its possible isolation by the West, Russia could turn its attention to Africa, making the continent the next center stage for imperialist struggles.
The politics of imperial gratitude
South African discourse about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continually references Soviet support for the exiled ANC. But the past is more complicated than official Russian and South African statements suggest.
Ukraine and the left’s imperialist economism
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has highlighted the narrowness of the crude anti-imperialist positions that are silent about the actual invasion of an independent country.