Faith in native consciousness
The writings of Ugandan lawyer David Mpanga are both literary and legalistic, rooted in African conceptions of storytelling and self-determination.
Culture
Bua Komanisi
Despite its proud history, the South African Communist Party has recently taken a backseat in South African politics. Understanding its roots helps us understand how it got here and what it will take to be rejuvenated.
Forms of woundedness
The intergenerational traumas of an anti-Black world in August Wilson's Fences are only too familiar to South Africans.
Where the spirits conquer her
The Senegalese director, Safi Faye’s classic 1996 film, Mossane, is a love tragedy and a spiritual quest in Sereer land.
Western media is missing the point
The excessive reporting of the interplay between non-African powers in the Sahel—however crucial it may be to understand regional dynamics—betrays a Western-centric bias in international news coverage.
Group therapy
South African jazz drummer Tumi Mogorosi’s latest project is a call to black people to share the questions that render our condition one of deep ache.
The colonial wounds of Senegal’s girlchild
In ‘Black Girl’ (1966) and ‘Cuties’ (2020), M'Bissine T. Diop is a cautionary figure who warns of colonialism's wounds and afterlives for Black girl belonging in the present day.
Reading List: Hugo ka Canham
On the publication of his book on black life on the margins, the South African author reflects on work that expand the meaning of being black on the world.
You couldn’t breathe until the trees were gone
A new film by documentarians Sara Newens and Mina T. Son shows yet another way in which nature is enlisted to marginalize Black communities.
Stop paying attention to Jonathan Jansen
The South African professor is under fire for suggesting life under apartheid was better than life under democracy. Stop giving him so much airtime.
Dreams of freedom
A historical novel by Sudanese writer Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin narrates an unusual love story between a slave and a princess.
Those who make homes in dark buildings
In his new book ‘The Blinded City,’ Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon takes readers into inner city Johannesburg not as it was or could be, but as it is.
Dreams of highfalutin philosophies
If an author writes with empathy, precision and authenticity about experiences foreign to their own, they're a good writer and not a cultural appropriator.
Taper salam
For African women passing through Morocco en route to Europe, begging on the streets becomes a way to support themselves, but also reinforces humiliation and shame.
A picture’s worth
Mabel Cetu is considered South Africa's first Black woman photojournalist and documented the everyday lives of Black communities in the 1950s.
Greed has fiercer allies than justice
Libyan writer Ibrahim Al-Koni’s latest novel is a philosophical retelling of the story of Amazigh queen Al-Kahina.
The media of the useable past
Revisiting the papers of left, anti-colonial revolt from the continent can remind us of messy, rich alternatives.
Museveni’s goons are polite
Uganda’s rulers don’t get that clobbering words is impossible. The pen will escape every hammer, and cross borders to haunt oppressors, even if the authors are no longer around.
Faster than the ashes of a burning fire
Hausa poetics of compassion and resistance in northern Nigeria in the age of pandemics and neoliberal democracy.
Making meaning in Johannesburg
Documenting an urban housing crisis and how tens of thousands of informal workers and unemployed people struggle to reshape Johannesburg.