After Mandela
Nelson Mandela would recognize himself in young protesters for whom freedom has been postponed and view South Africa's government as an obstacle.
Politics
Actual questions from a South African journalist
The long-held and widespread attitudes some South African journalists share about the struggle for liberation.
Luanda Can Cook
In a rapidly changing city like Luanda, it is important to be able to catalogue all of its eating establishment, or at least those that our wallets and stomachs allow.
The Poo Fighters
Townships and informal settlements are not dump grounds but living breathing communities where the residents are tired of being treated like shit.
Our colonial torturers
Even after the Mau Mau case the British will never stop kidding themselves about the crimes of empire.
The battle over the 27th of May in Angola
Why the ruling MPLA wants to control how we remember the murder of dissidents killed right after independence.
Germany’s African “Big Five”
Germany's a new campaign to educate Germans about what development policy is, has little to do with Africa and more with local electoral politics.
Malawi’s Festival of Forgetting
As Malawians blur the lines of their past, it becomes more and more difficult to understand the country's present.
The Cartography of Bullshit
The specialty of foreign-affairs blogging is explaining the outside world to uninformed publics The result, however, is mostly pseudo-analysis.
How to Please Your Man “Zambia Style”
A Dutch filmmaker travels to Zambia to find out what "liberated, spoiled, but also insecure" Western women can learn from their African counterparts.
Football Referee of the Year
My knowledge of European club football doesn’t stretch much further beyond what gets posted here on
The Minister of Earth and Sky
Does the arrest of Karim Wade, the former president's son, mean “the time when one could pillage public goods is over” in Senegal?
Aristide Zolberg and African Studies
A political scientist, Zolberg wrote two ground breaking books on West Africa politics in the 1960s and was key to formation of African Studies.
Did Britain’s MI6 put a hit on Lumumba?
When a member of the UK's House of Lords (a few months before she died) told another Lord, over tea, that she'd organized Lumumba's abduction and murder.
People in glass houses
South Africa's news media's much vaunted editorial independence.
The case of Ethiopian journalist Reeyot Alemu
Last Friday, May 3, was World Press Freedom Day. Perhaps you may have missed it? On
Is Italy Ready for an African-born Government Minister?
A large part of the challenge for Italians to get used to a black Cabinet Minister is the role Italian media plays. They're particularly bad when it comes to race.
In Search of the “African Middle Class”
Who would guess that a little over a decade ago Africa was mostly described as "the hopeless continent"?
Why France doesn’t want to let Aminata Traoré in and Germany allowed her only inside Berlin’s city limits
Malian writer, activist, former member of government Aminata Traoré is unwelcome in France, and, thanks to
Freedom Day
The ways in which Nelson Mandela’s image as a referent of South Africa's recent past has been appropriated, signified and transformed into material form as commemoration.