Tricky coalitions
The challenge presented by Argentina: What is the best way to deal with global fiscal pressures in a local context of high expectations and public demands?
6437 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.
We are all potential advocates
Director Shameela Seedat’s film about trainee lawyers provides a sort of celebration of youth on this continent and a vision of the next generation of Africans.
Lula can set the bar higher for a new presidency
Lula’s challenge in Brazil: To be successful with proposed reforms, he’d need to take back the anti-systemic appeal stolen by the far-right.
AMLO’s way
Mexico’s president has a mandate for radical change, but this change must be negotiated within a context of limits produced by the neoliberal period itself.
Bookends: Chinelo Okparanta
The Nigerian-American author of the novel “Harry Sylvester Bird” talks to the Radical Books Collective ahead of her appearance at their book club.
The ground has shifted
Western conservation NGOs condemn violence against Maasai, but also don’t want herders or subsistence hunters on land they want to control and profit from.
A post-neoliberal road to socialism in Chile
While Chileans have defeated the post-authoritarian neoliberal regime, they face major obstacles on the road to a post-neoliberal social democracy.
Killing the collective
We know an enormous amount about what precipitated the 2012 Marikana massacre, but relatively little about what is behind the violence there since.
A new phase of struggle in Honduras
Xiomara Castro’s leftist government must create capacity for self-determination in a state vulnerable to US pressure and constructed to serve monopoly capital.
Warsan Shire’s prayer for the unmourned
The British-Somali poet Warsan Shire’s audacious yet uneven volume of poetry captures the quiet loneliness of African immigrant lives in the West.
What does it have to do with Marikana?
The Marikana Massacre changed democratic South Africa forever. It can also catalyze resistance to the current order.
Vivir Sabroso!
The left’s win in Colombia signals that after more than six decades of war, people just want to live with dignity and in peace.
New dawn or false dawn?
South Africa’s ruling party’s devotion to its policy of cadre deployment is an indication that it values its own power more than the public interest.
Reading List: Patrice Nganang
The novelist on 3 books he returns to: by Wole Soyinka, Ibn Khaldun, and a third on the history and the system of writing of an early 20th-century Cameroonian king.
Detained and deported
Journalism has become a risky and dangerous business in Benin.
Cosmopolitan Africans, before colonialism
Africa’s engagement with the world before European colonialism holds unexpected episodes of un-colonial power relations.
Divided by the word
Why languages, particularly black African languages, have become a battleground in postapartheid power and identity politics in South Africa.
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.