We are all potential advocates
Director Shameela Seedat’s film about trainee lawyers provides a sort of celebration of youth on this continent and a vision of the next generation of Africans.
Culture
Bookends: Chinelo Okparanta
The Nigerian-American author of the novel "Harry Sylvester Bird" talks to the Radical Books Collective ahead of her appearance at their book club.
Warsan Shire’s prayer for the unmourned
The British-Somali poet Warsan Shire’s audacious yet uneven volume of poetry captures the quiet loneliness of African immigrant lives in the West.
Reading List: Patrice Nganang
The novelist on 3 books he returns to: by Wole Soyinka, Ibn Khaldun, and a third on the history and the system of writing of an early 20th-century Cameroonian king.
Cosmopolitan Africans, before colonialism
Africa's engagement with the world before European colonialism holds unexpected episodes of un-colonial power relations.
Divided by the word
Why languages, particularly black African languages, have become a battleground in postapartheid power and identity politics in South Africa.
Reading List: Nicky Falkof
What happens to the contemporary explosion of moral panics, urban legends, and other paranoid narratives when they manifest in a place like South Africa?
On the track and in the field
This month on Africa Is a Country Radio, we continue our theme of sports and music, and look at the history of Olympic success in athletics of various African countries.
Did dependency theorists really ignore culture?
Must indigenous knowledge be science to be valid? Philosopher Paulin J. Hountondji shows that we must ask why Africa is scientifically and technologically dependent in the first place.
Nelson Mandela and the revolutionaries
The ANC and Nelson Mandela’s turn to violent anticolonial struggle in the early 1960s, is the subject of a new book by historian of South Africa, Paul Landau.
Resisting petty apartheid
The historian Premesh Lalu’s film about an apartheid-era cinema on the Cape Flats also offers a glimpse of a future beyond racism for South Africa.
Reading List: Véronique Tadjo
To address a difficult and traumatic subject like Ebola, the writer Véronique Tadjo turned to oral literature for inspiration.
Talking down on speaking up
Beyond the social media firestorm over journalist Trish Lorenz’s book about #EndSARS, it is worth engaging in the debate about wider representation in movement building and protest.
Panthers in Congo
The film 'Congo Oyé,' pulled from the archives of a New York City library a decade ago, explores different interpretations of revolution, Black sovereignty and liberation.
How we tell the story of African film history
For most outsiders, modern Ethiopian cinema means Haile Gerima and Salem Mekuria. But others, in addition to these, made its rich cinema history.
The skeleton in the closet
The novelist Nadifa Mohamed complicates Britain’s troubled, racist legal history through the personal tale of one otherwise insignificant person, a Somali immigrant to Cardiff in Wales.
A big African literature prize in an African language
The Kiswahili Prize works to undermine the marginalization of African languages in literary culture. An interview with one of its founders.
Is the academic boycott of Israel a violation of academic freedom?
A decision to rescind an invitation to Israeli academics to a conference in South Africa, revived a tactic of the anti-apartheid struggle. Is it effective?
African liberation and African scholarship
The Sixth International Congress of African and African Diaspora Studies in Accra in August 2023 foregrounds the struggle against African Studies as a form of knowledge production located, for the most part, outside Africa.
Bookends: Khadija Abdalla Bajaber
The author of 'The House of Rust' tells us all the little things (from foods to films) that get her imagination going.