The short, white woman with a South African accent
Urdang reflects her long friendship with fellow political exile Jennifer Davis, the anti-apartheid activist and changemaker.
Ancestors
Reenchanting Teju Olaniyan
Among the many legacies of Teju Olaniyan’s teaching and writing would be a project to not only speak in the ideological name of Africa, but to redistribute the power of speaking in that name.
Ben Turok’s commitment to liberation, non-racialism and equality
Turok, who died at 92, was committed to fighting for the ideals of the left in South Africa. It is worth reviewing what his contribution to these ideals were in the final chapter of his life.
Jennifer Davis: Fearless and visionary
Davis, who died at 84 on October 15th, was a prominent leader of the anti-apartheid movement in the US and an analytical thinker and visionary.
Reading John Mbiti from Uganda
The late Mbiti is praised for indigenizing Christianity. However, his veneration of "African" tradition also served as theological justification for authoritarian rule.
A living monument of the struggle
The passing of American economist Ann Seidman has again spotlighted the impacts of committed scholarship on Africa.
The beautyful ones
A personal reflection, by the daughter of a fighter in Zimbabwe's Second Chiumurenga, on the death of President Robert Mugabe.
Mugabe and the tradition to not speak ill of the dead
What is the proper way for young Zimbabweans to remember Robert Mugabe's legacy?
How Africa shaped Immanuel Wallerstein
Africa and its peoples were central to the great Immanuel Wallerstein's intellectual development and political activism.
The emptiness of an ending
With Mugabe's death, might there be space for a new self-definition as a nation in Zimbabwe, as a broad family of nationals, with a shared national project?
The Coloured Gangster
In Cape Town, gangs have come to dominate social and economic life for the city’s mostly coloured working class.
Apartheid, anthropology and Johnny Clegg
All that French marketing schtick aside about "the white Zulu," Johnny Clegg was a real one.
We are all Haitians
In memory of J. Michael Dash, the Caribbean thinker and literature scholar.
Celebrating Binyavanga Wainaina’s queerness
Binyavanga's fashion sensibility as well as his choices in his memoir, and his essays, will have a lasting impact after he is gone.
There are no bees in Dakar
Dedicated to the memory of the writer’s friend: the rebel and genius, Binyavanga Wainaina.
Our man of the people
Binyavanga Wainaina was a writer who not only produced seminal work, but also contributed to and shaped the African literary tradition into what it is today.
The Joe Miller model
Remembering Joe Miller, a historian of eastern Angola and central Africa, who died at 79 on 12 March 2019.
An African film manifesto, forty years later
Med Hondo (1936-2019) was Morgan Freeman and Eddie Murphy in French. His first film premiered at Cannes in 1970. And in 1979 he wrote a manifesto: “What is the cinema for us?”
Bisi Silva: Time Remembered
Bisi Silva's constant movement was a form of unlearning; in her awareness of artists and cultural production on the African continent.
Mahmood Mamdani on Marxist intellectual Samir Amin
Samir Amin's life resembled that of Karl Marx: a man without a homeland, but one whose home was a chosen commitment to a historical project.