Divided by the word
Why languages, particularly black African languages, have become a battleground in postapartheid power and identity politics in South Africa.
6135 Articles by:
Karen Chalamilla
Karen Chalamilla is a culture writer and researcher based in Dar es Salaam.
The Stay At Home Strike
Before the Soweto Uprising in 1976, students and workers organized one of the largest strike actions in South Africa’s history.
Reading List: Nicky Falkof
What happens to the contemporary explosion of moral panics, urban legends, and other paranoid narratives when they manifest in a place like South Africa?
On the track and in the field
This month on Africa Is a Country Radio, we continue our theme of sports and music, and look at the history of Olympic success in athletics of various African countries.
An uncompromising criticism of the CFA franc
The CFA franc, pegged to a strong Euro, penalizes African economies as well as regional trade and facilitates the development of Western multinationals.
Did dependency theorists really ignore culture?
Must indigenous knowledge be science to be valid? Philosopher Paulin J. Hountondji shows that we must ask why Africa is scientifically and technologically dependent in the first place.
Nelson Mandela and the revolutionaries
The ANC and Nelson Mandela’s turn to violent anticolonial struggle in the early 1960s, is the subject of a new book by historian of South Africa, Paul Landau.
Instrumentalizing migrants
From Operation Fiela to Operation Dudula, xenophobia in South Africa is bent on protecting the interests of politicians.
Resisting petty apartheid
The historian Premesh Lalu’s film about an apartheid-era cinema on the Cape Flats also offers a glimpse of a future beyond racism for South Africa.
Suffering from a similar fate
Neoliberal policy in Sri Lanka has triggered a massive socioeconomic crisis. The way out is not through the IMF, but through redistributing wealth.
Reading List: Véronique Tadjo
To address a difficult and traumatic subject like Ebola, the writer Véronique Tadjo turned to oral literature for inspiration.
Talking down on speaking up
Beyond the social media firestorm over journalist Trish Lorenz’s book about #EndSARS, it is worth engaging in the debate about wider representation in movement building and protest.
Panthers in Congo
The film ‘Congo Oyé,’ pulled from the archives of a New York City library a decade ago, explores different interpretations of revolution, Black sovereignty and liberation.
The war that doesn’t say its name
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo conflict, as well as peacemaking, have become ends in themselves, while the fighting is carried forward by its own momentum.
How we tell the story of African film history
For most outsiders, modern Ethiopian cinema means Haile Gerima and Salem Mekuria. But others, in addition to these, made its rich cinema history.
The skeleton in the closet
The novelist Nadifa Mohamed complicates Britain’s troubled, racist legal history through the personal tale of one otherwise insignificant person, a Somali immigrant to Cardiff in Wales.