The silences about capitalism in Africa
Many African countries are by now capitalist societies and analytically need to be treated as such when we talk about or study them.
6443 Article(s) by:
Ladan Osman
Ladan Osman is the author of Exiles of Eden (2019) and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (2015). She lives in Brooklyn.
The most powerful currency today
Passport privilege remains an entirely unaddressed, unsustainable inequity, and the most consistently overlooked factor that defines every single immigration debate and “crisis” of movement and migration.
The tyranny of good intentions
Scandals like the one at More Than Me—the US charity that failed to protect school girls in its care from rape by staff—are common in even the most elite aid organizations.
The forgotten kingdom
The links between knowing history, media and political agency in northern Ghana.
The narrative of homophobia in Africa
The identities, liberal or homophobe are cultural and political. They are not a perfect mirror of the narrative of homophobia in Africa.
Everything must fall
Fees Must Fall (#FMF) brought student activism at South Africa’s elite universities into the global media spotlight. A new documentary zooms in on the case of Wits in Johannesburg.
The lady is not for turning
Nigeria’s former finance minister wrote a book about her time in government. It is a thinly veiled attempt to clean up her image.
Mapping the African land rush
The consequences for land grabbing on the African continent could be devastating for the development goals of nations in the long term.
Eritrea and Ethiopia’s economic dividend
What economic gains are in the peace deal between longstanding foes?
The Mandelas at Harlem’s Africa Square
The Mandelas and Africa’s place in African American politics and popular culture.
Cape Town’s Inner Ugly
Patricia De Lille, one of South Africa’s most popular post-apartheid politicians, claims she tried to redress spatial apartheid in Cape Town, but the legacy of her seven year run as mayor is one of violent forced removals and a refusal to upgrade informal settlements.
Student protests and the weakness of democracy in Ghana
Hyper-partisan politics and shallow journalism obscured the implications of the protests at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology.
The emperor has no clothes
South Africa’s most famous monarch holds fast to power and prestige at no cost to himself.
Achille Mbembe’s Fanonian meditations
Mbembe’s ‘Critique of Black Reason’ is useful for our analysis of the postcolonial present.
Double jeopardy
The future looks terrifying for many US-based exiles from Mauritania—facing deportation to Africa’s modern “slave nation” under Trump’s monstrous ICE.
Resources and rape: The DRC’s (toxic) discursive complex
On the emergence and political work of the rape-resources narrative in the eastern DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo).
‘Their champagne party will end’
In the age of renewed tyranny and illiberalism, diverse political repertoires and modes of struggle from the continent of Africa offer inspiration.
The architects of fantasy
Among the Ga people of Ghana, there’s more to a coffin and the rituals of death than meets the western eye.
Only the soil can free us
Why agricultural change is political change. Take the case of farmers in Burkina Faso.
Transitional justice’s glass ceiling
Can transitional justice initiatives achieve their ambitious agenda of combatting gender based violence?