The legend of flying Africans
The film Uncut Gems, Black American identity politics, and the narrative appeal of Ethiopian beginnings.
6442 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.
Family politics and the supernatural
A new documentary film tells a tale of everyday class, religious, and educational contestations around land in Kenya.
Point of order
How Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters drive political conversations in South Africa.
Decolonization’s borders
Recent restrictions on refugees—and the limited protests against them—reflect the degree to which many South Africans see “xenophobia” as legitimate hate.
Au nom du roi, des roitelets et de la divine providence
Rémanences autoritaire, oligarchique et mâlecentrée de l’espace politique camerounais.
In the name of the king
Authoritarianism, oligarchy, and patriarchy governs the Cameroonian political landscape.
A ditch to climb
In South Africa, the political class use foreign nationals as scapegoats to obfuscate their role in reproducing inequality. But immigrants are part of the excluded.
A people cannot bid farewell to their history
Remembering Marcelino dos Santos, founder of Frelimo and the former Vice President of the People’s Republic of Mozambique.
Twitter and a new criminal type
What might the fascination in displaying and seeing the body of “the criminal” tell us about South Africa today?
Reading List: Benjamin Talton
The writer, a historian, on scholarly texts, novels, and memoirs that he consulted in writing a political biography of US congressman Mickey Leland and his solidarity politics in Africa.
The mysterious death of a UN Secretary-General
Revisiting the events that led to the tragic death of Dag Hammarskjöld, a key UN official in the decolonization of Africa during the Cold War.
A Green New Deal for South African workers?
COSATU, South Africa’s largest trade union federation, has a plan to simultaneously tackle climate change and unemployment.
The end of the CFA franc?
Are plans for ‘reform’ of West African currency, fueled by anticolonial sentiment, merely ‘rebranding’ the status quo?
Bernard-Henry Lévy in Nigeria
The French philosopher and TV personality favors spectacle over analysis. The result: we don’t make sense of political violence in Nigeria.
Excavating forgotten histories in South Africa
Remembering Adelaide Tantsi Dube’s poem ‘Africa: My Native Land,’ first published in 1913, the same year the white government stripped black South Africans of their land.
Reading List: Peter James Hudson
The writer, a historian of capitalism, white supremacy, and US imperialism, on four books he has been reading.
How African is the ‘African Studies Review’?
The journal’s editor acknowledges that it has a long way to go before most Africa-based scholars recognize it as an especially African journal.
Liberal democracy has failed in Nigeria
What alternative pathways are available towards accountable governance in Nigeria?
A question of desperation
Black popular culture has gained two new heroes in Queen & Slim—a film about desperate violence.
The Gig Economy Blues
The precariousness of life for women gig workers—in services like cleaning, driving, gardening, beauty supply, and catering—in Kenya.