• Wamuwi Mbao

While there is much to mourn about the passing of legendary American singer and actor Harry Belafonte, we should hold a place for his bold statement-album against apartheid South Africa.

• Brooks Marmon

Tommie Sankange was the first black American public figure permanently residing in Zimbabwe who was not a missionary. Why don’t we know more about her?

• Wamuwi Mbao

South African poet Don Mattera, who died in July, was the real deal—preferring to throw his lot in with the ignored and the undervalued. Unsurprisingly, his monumental life and work is undervalued too.

• Tom Slater

The University of Edinburgh will award an honorary doctorate to Joe Schaffers, a working-class educator from Cape Town, South Africa. It will be a new benchmark for this tradition.

• Francisco Perez

Cameroonian economist Joseph Tchundjang Pouemi died in 1984, either poisoned or by suicide. His ideas about the international monetary system and the CFA franc are worth revisiting.

• Tinashe Mushakavanhu

Magaisa, who died this month, set agendas, and demanded the highest standards from the political and intellectual classes in Zimbabwe.

• Jeanne-Marie Jackson

The greatest achievement of Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu was to recast African knowledge from something lost to something gained.

• John Githongo

Late Kenyan President, Mwai Kibaki, could be a political heartbreaker and a great disappointment when he moved smoothly on from a cause.

• Justin Pearce

The death of Paulo Lara warrants an appreciation of his and his family’s contribution to preserving the documented history of Angola’s liberation struggle.

• The Fees Must Fall Collective

Oupa Lehulere, revolutionary teacher and mentor, died on November 29. His approach to theoretical study and struggle was the same: there are no shortcuts.

• Nana Ampadu

Renowned Ghanaian highlife musician, Nana Ampadu, died on September 28, 2021. In this interview from 2007, historian Jennifer Hart talks with him about the music that made him famous.

• Rasaq Malik

Sound Sultan, who died of cancer in July 2021, battled with the cankerworm of bad leadership and outright violations of rules of law in his homeland, Nigeria, through his songs.

• Akin Adesokan

Lateef K. Jakande, also known as Baba Kekere, was the first civilian governor of Nigeria’s Lagos State.

• Henning Melber

South African singer Sibongile Khumalo (1957-2021) was a musical giant. She also launched her own label and advocated for women's rights.

• Mary de Haas

The cruel and lonely COVID-19 death of the South African land and rural women’s activist, Siza Ngubane.

• Jesse Weaver Shipley

Lessons on radical politics from a 1970s political-cultural icon. Rawlings also dominated and shaped Ghanaian politics through the 1980s and 1990s.

• April Zhu

To those who did not know Emma Gama Pinto, she was just “the wife of Pio Gama Pinto,” the Kenyan anticolonial fighter, but to those who knew her, she was fearless in her own right.

• Myra Ann Houser

The Indian activist ES Reddy led the fight against South African apartheid at the UN. More importantly, his life reflected the best of left internationalism.

• Christopher J. Lee

David Graeber (1961-2020) started his career as a scholar studying Madagascar and that informed what became his popular ideas about anarchism, debt, and globalization.

• Shireen Hassim

Bill Freund was a Marxist historian in method, attentive to political economy and to the material underpinnings of power, while retaining a critical distance to Marxism.