Reading Africa, Africans reading
This week on AIAC Talk: 2021 has been declared a great year for African literature, but what does that actually mean?
6439 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.
Gangsters as people’s champions
In a country like South Africa where government trust is low, gangsters and criminals who provide assistance to their communities are seen as the people’s champions.
Kenya is Europe’s dumpsite
On the back of a failed COP26 climate conference: how e-waste dumping by European countries in Africa contribute significantly to climate change.
Organic intellectuals
In the last video for our Nairobi edition of Capitalism in My City, we meet the Organic Intellectuals Network.
You came here on a fucking boat
Xenophobia and questions of belonging haunt Indian South Africans. What does that mean for solidarity with Black South Africans?
« ce que font deux hommes »
La longue histoire du classisme et de l’homophobie dans les espaces publics et médiatiques au Cameroun.
‘What two men do’
The long history of classism and homophobia in public and media spaces in Cameroon.
Colonial accountability in transition
The mass atrocities of the 1899 French invasion of what is Niger today are finally being treated with the gravity and consequence they deserve in Western popular histories.
If only these walls could talk
Street names are political weapons. They produce memories, attachment and intimacy—all while often sneakily distorting history.
Policing the colony
We have to become more open to the possibility that what our society needs is not better policing, but less. And ultimately no policing at all.
Zimbabwe’s second innings
In November 2017, Robert Mugabe was toppled in a coup. Amid this epochal change, life—and cricket—simply went on for Zimbabweans, who are still in search of a better future.
The war in Ethiopia
Will Ethiopia’s civil war blow up its dream of a single state, and in the process, blow up Western notions of statebuilding?
Musically, Congo is the mothership
The documentary, Rumba Kings, offers a commendable and tireless argument for both an intangible cultural heritage case and a centering of the Congolese way.
Haiti’s fire this time
On this week’s AIAC Talk: Haiti is not down on its luck, it is deliberately under-developed by Western powers.
African indigenous religions and queer dignity
Colonialism should take a lot of blame for anti-queer attitudes in Africa. But missing is a frank engagement with how African indigenous cultures also fuel anti-queer attitudes.
Sudanese women on the front lines of the resistance
Sudanese women took part in the revolution in large numbers for the same reasons they are now part of the resistance against this treacherous coup: Their human rights are at stake.
Darra
The writer, from Cape Town, reflects on the life of her working class father, who like her friends’ fathers worked tough jobs for low pay and hid his vulnerabilities.
Criminal justice for the rising middle class
A new book on policing in South Africa wants to go beyond the usual call for reform. But adapting literature tuned for reform to the task of abolition is a difficult needle to thread.
Power to the People
This week’s episode of AIAC Talk is a replay of the launch of the latest issue of Amandla! magazine, a South African publication advancing radical left perspectives for change.
Qu’est-il advenu des accaparements de terres en Afrique?
Plus d’une décennie après la vague mondiale d’acquisitions de terres à grande échelle, elles ont toujours des conséquences néfastes pour ceux qui dépendent de la terre comme fondement de leur vie.