Amílcar Cabral and the limits of utopianism
Antonio Tomás’ new book on Amilcar Cabral takes us back to the crucible of decolonization and permits us to assess its aspirations and limitations anew.
Culture
A legacy beyond the vintage records
The late Alemayehu Eshete, and musical contemporaries like Mulatu Astatke and Girma Beyene worked around huge obstacles to create a unique Ethiopian sound and make it global.
Even dogs are racist
A vernacular attempt at a social anthropology of dogs across three countries: Nigeria, South Africa and Canada.
Jivin’ in Joburg
Africa Is a Country Radio continues its season focused on African club culture. Our next stop is Johannesburg with South African journalist Sean O'Toole. Listen here and on Worldwide FM.
A different sort of truth
Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s fiction rebukes the Orientalist images of the Muslim world that provided a rationale for the war on terror.
Christianity and new queer African imaginations
The leading African writers and creative artists who are reimagining Christian thought and the several Christian-inspired groups who are transforming religious practice.
Sound Sultan’s political music
Sound Sultan, who died of cancer in July 2021, battled with the cankerworm of bad leadership and outright violations of rules of law in his homeland, Nigeria, through his songs.
It’s never just about the music
Vinyl reissues are about engaging in a fight against forgetting much more than music. Gideon Nxumalo and Spirits Rejoice's music is transcendent of repressive daily conditions.
The exilic geographies of the South
Dugmore Boetie was part of a wave of South African writers who fled Apartheid. His exile and future literary notoriety, however, took a different path to some of the more classic refugee peregrinations.
Wolf in shepherd’s clothing
Kenya’s elites, including the church, use ponzi schemes for predatory accumulation and Kenyans will continue to see their dreams deferred if the law doesn't change.
Who will start another fire?
An interview with Kate Gondwe, Founder and President of Dedza Films, on a groundbreaking distribution initiative committed to supporting the next wave of emerging filmmakers and communities.
Nighttime in Nairobi
Africa Is a Country Radio continues its season focused on African club culture. Our next stop is Nairobi with Kenyan journalist and radio programmer Bill Odidi. Listen on Worldwide FM.
Postfeminism is only for wealthy Nigerian women
To have—or, at least, claim—a sense of self that is “already empowered” or happily unencumbered by power relations, requires a fair bit of material privilege.
What is whiteness in North Africa?
What happens when we take the study of whiteness from settler colonial contexts into the postcolony?
The longest shadow
We tell our stories when we are ready. This story is about the child sexual abuse I experienced at the hands of Anglican priests in South Africa.
On failed states and the pitfalls of Western commentary
The tendency of Western commentators to dress up African tragedies in the patronizing logic of relativism.
When the spirits of the ancestors call you back
A homage to a true pan-African athlete-activist, Lee Evans, who at the Olympics Games in 1968 broke the 400-meter world record and embarked on a life of political activism.
Decolonize this
To undo the misrepresentation of women of color in global media, we need a historically grounded solidarity.
In the company of coronavirus
What literature can teach us about what happens when the chain that connects human beings to nature is broken.
The most humanistic socialist of our generation
The mathematician Edwin Madunagu, 75 years old in 2021, is one of Nigeria’s foremost socialist intellectuals. Here, his friend Biodun Jeyifo, the literary scholar, pays tribute to him.