• Njuki Githethwa

Binyavanga Wainaina was cremated in a private ceremony in 2019. In his final year, the writer kept returning to a colonial chief’s grave beneath a sacred fig tree in Nairobi — as if contemplating what remains of a life.

• Ikenna Edwin Madunagu

From the Nigerian Civil War to decades of Marxist organizing and scholarship, Biodun Jeyifo’s life traced a tradition of commitment — one that now passes to a new generation.

• Ayodele Ibiyemi

Honored in Yorubaland as “one who repairs the world,” Jesse Jackson’s life bridged civil rights, pan-Africanism, empire, and contradiction — leaving behind a legacy as expansive as it was imperfect.

• Muriam Haleh Davis

The Marxist historian Mohammed Harbi spent a lifetime dismantling the myths of Algeria’s national movement and warning that anticolonial victories could harden into bureaucratic rule.

• R.M. Anyona
• Brian Mathenge

The death of Kenya’s most enduring opposition leader invites a reckoning — not only with his contradictions, but with what his long struggle reveals about the unfinished work of liberation.

• Lynne Brown
• Desiree Lewis

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.

• Dami Ajayi

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

• Herbert Jauch

Namibia’s founding president led the fight for independence with unwavering resolve, but his legacy is complicated by economic compromises and political dominance.

• Atiyyah Khan

Rashid Vally, the visionary behind South Africa’s iconic jazz label As-Shams, forged a legacy of revolutionary jazz that defied apartheid and continues to inspire new generations of musicians, activists, and music lovers.

• Julie MacArthur

Decolonial African feminism and the revolutionary lives of three mothers of Kenya.

• Sean Henry Jacobs

The musician Mac McKenzie, who passed away in April 2024, helped pioneer a sound that captured the Mother City’s Creole heritage.

• Tinashe Mushakavanhu

Roy Guthrie was a refrigerator salesman in South Africa before he moved to Zimbabwe and established its largest sculpture park.

• Michael Burawoy

The life of Edward Webster, one of South Africa’s most distinguished sociologists, can be compared to a windmill — taking in the winds of change and turning them into a prodigious intellectual engagement.

• Khanya Mtshali

Peter Magubane was one of South Africa’s foremost resistance photojournalists, exposing the world to the cruel spectacle of the apartheid regime.

• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

A tribute to the late Kenyan poet, playwright and activist, Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo (December 12, 1942-June 30, 2023).

• Sean Henry Jacobs

Gladys Nzimande-Tsolo, who died on 27 September 2023, was a South African freedom fighter. Why has she been forgotten?

• 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.