Entries, exits, permits
A reflection on traveling through the globalized walled city.
6370 Article(s) by:
Rita Nketiah
Rita Nketiah is a feminist researcher, writer and activist living in Accra, Ghana.
Zoë Wicomb’s local universalisms
The passing of the pioneering South African writer and critic leaves behind a body of work that challenged racial mythologies, unsettled identity politics, and grounded transhistorical vision in the particulars of place.
Reading List: Brooks Marmon
The writings of Edson Sithole, Zimbabwe’s forgotten nationalist thinker, reveal both the promise and perils of pan-African politics in the independence era.
Repoliticizing a generation
Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.
The king of Kinshasa
Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.
Drip is temporary
The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.
Making space for the ordinary
MADEYOULOOK’s ‘Dinokana’ debuted at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Now back home, Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho reflect on sound, place, and why their work is always meant for South African audiences first.
Cameroon’s last election
The outcome of the October 12 elections may make or break the resource-rich Central African nation.
Armed with October
From Sudan to Toronto, a revolutionary poem echoes across time, showing how people’s movements confront militarism, mining, and imperial order with the enduring force of collective struggle.
Rethinking the boundaries of blackness
South Africa’s visual culture reveals that its racial categories were never fixed, while the history of indenture complicates the terms of solidarity and exclusion.
Reading List: Olufemi Terry
What does it mean to imagine a city with no fixed essence, only shifting histories and unstable forms of power?
Energy for whom?
Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.
Framing otherness
Rungano Nyoni’s latest film challenges audiences to confront the collective complicity that sustains abuse.
The mourning of a man, the mirror of a nation
Charlie Kirk was not a household name in South Africa. Yet, as evidenced by the local outpouring of grief that followed his death, South Africans must confront the truth: his ideas were already at home.
Who pays for Africa’s food future?
A new movement is challenging the financial stranglehold of agribusiness and foreign lenders, arguing that Africa’s future lies not in extractive monocultures but in agroecology, sovereignty, and collective resistance.
Back on track
A Johannesburg-Cape Town high-speed line could turn apartheid’s corridors of extraction into a green spine of connection, industry, and justice.
The poetics of protest
From rooftop beginnings to open mics that echo on the streets, Kenya’s newest literary collective shows how art can archive struggle and energize dissent.
Nepal’s Gen Z reckoning
On the AIAC podcast, we speak with Feyzi Ismail about Nepal’s Gen Z uprising that toppled the ruling establishment.
The sound of revolt
On his third album, Afro-Portuguese artist Scúru Fitchádu fuses ancestral wisdom with urban revolt, turning memory and militancy into a soundtrack for resistance.
O som da revolta
No seu terceiro álbum, o artista afro-português Scúru Fitchádu funde a sabedoria ancestral com a revolta urbana, transformando memória e militância em uma trilha sonora para a resistência.