The Dar es Salaam years
In the early 1970s, Walter Rodney, expelled from Jamaica, took a post in Tanzania. In Leo Zeilig’s new book, he captures those exciting, but also difficult years and how it formed Rodney.
6135 Articles by:
Karen Chalamilla
Karen Chalamilla is a culture writer and researcher based in Dar es Salaam.
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.
Where is black feminism?
The first book collection dedicated to contemporary Black South African feminist perspectives has seen the light. One of the editors breaks down the content.
Soccer capitalism
Soccer academies in Africa sprang from European club interventions with varied success, but, as examples in Ghana prove, they can be sites of local, entrepreneurial spirit.
Sanitizing the Kenyattas
Why are Kenya’s ruling family trying to reinvent themselves as friends of Mau Mau so many years later?
The party question
Marcel Paret’s book, “Fragmented Militancy: Precarious Resistance in South Africa after Racial Inclusion,” tries to make sense of politics in South African urban informal settlements.
The longing to belong
Why would African Christians in the West, discriminated against in Europe and the United States, embrace views that marginalize not only others but also themselves?
The missing pieces
Between melancholy, terror, and disillusion, Petit Pays is a groundbreaking and eye-opening take on one of the darkest pages of African history, one that is often misunderstood in the West.
Paulo Lara and Angola’s anticolonial war archive
The death of Paulo Lara warrants an appreciation of his and his family’s contribution to preserving the documented history of Angola’s liberation struggle.
Hope and optimism howled at full volume
A people’s history of Zimbabwe’s first mbira punk band, Chikwata 263, who wanted a soundtrack for the country’s post-post colonial blues.
Integrity always pays
On justice, impunity and ridicule: the historic outcome of the 2022 trial in Burkina Faso against Thomas Sankara’s killers.
Art and the struggle for Ambazonia
Artist Adjani Okpu-Egbe, interrogates sovereignty and solidarity in southwest Cameroon, for what is known as Ambazonia, and beyond.
An independence revue
This month on Africa Is a Country Radio, taking inspiration from the work of Chinua Achebe, we take a listen to the music of the post-independence era on the African continent.
Sanctioning the regime in Senegal
After defying the state apparatus in March 2021, Senegalese voters sent a strong message of disobedience and sanction via their ballots in January 2022 and signaling their readiness for another regime change in 2024.
This is appropriation that’s acceptable
The French Ethio-groove group Akalé Wubé has dissolved. For over a decade they have shown how cultural outsiders can considerately engage in music that is not theirs.
A question of color
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s novel “The Theory of Flight” may be the first to take seriously Zimbabwe’s complicated race politics, beyond the obvious black vs whites.