Reading List: Zikhona Valela
The author of 'Now You Know How Mapetla Died,' a book on the murder of a leading Black Consciousness leader, writes about her research.
Culture
Emancipation that costs servitude
Filmmaker Khady Sylla amplifies the voices of and gives visibility to the domestic workers tending to the homes of Africa’s middle classes.
Outside the field of African art
Asking whether white people should curate African art anymore, may be outdated. Instead we should ask: what is African art now and does the category matter anymore?
The people have spoken
In its first few years, the magazine 'Révolution Africaine' opened possibilities for Franco-Algerian cooperation. It was then co-opted by the state.
Why is Egyptian social media against black pharaohs?
The notion that black people were kings in Ancient Egypt is generating a social media backlash. Understanding the racialized legacy of Egyptology can explain why.
The dust, towers and false promises of modern Ethiopia
Successive Ethiopian governments have continued a 'modernizing' project that not only offers people false dreams, but actively dislocates them from the things that gave them purpose in the past.
Porters of colonial legacies
By looking through the lenses of Brussels’ diverse youth, 'The Porters' questions the ways Belgium fails to deal with its colonial past.
Stories as refuge
Rwandan writer Scholastique Mukasonga chronicles life, death, return and grief in her story collection, 'Igifu.'
Reading List: Lesley Nicole Braun
Anyone who has attempted to describe dance in writing knows how difficult it is. These books on dance on the continent and the diaspora gets close.
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.
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.