What’s wrong with the South African Institute of Race Relations?
Surveys on race by South Africa’s Institute of Race Relations (IRR) are deeply flawed and cynically used. Its influence on mainstream politics is significant and dangerous.
Politics
Another coup in Burkina
September's coup is Burkina Faso's second of the year, and its another one with popular support. Why did it happen?
Rise of the reactionaries
AfriForum is no longer on the political fringe in South Africa, rather it's key in perpetuating increasingly mainstream, right-wing populism.
Obviously, this is not working
Former Africa Is a Country fellow, Dr. Lassane Ouedraogo, based in Ouagadougou talks to Bamba Ndiaye of The Africanist Podcast on the general situation in Burkina Faso the day after the coup there.
En route to the unknown
African women exercise their right to migrate, but also face dilemmas on their way to the unknown. We need policies that protect them.
Straight in the eye
Sahrawis are robbed of their agency by a zero sum game for influence between two regional rivals Morocco and Algeria.
Postcolonial cons, scandals, and fraud
Business fraud and illicit financial flows are not a new problem for Africa — the "Drevici Affair" in Nkrumah's Ghana is instructive.
At the border, on the margins
African migrant women are exposed to intersectional systems of violence but are not simply victims.
Dispossessing to deliver
In South Africa, land occupiers are evicted from their homes in the name of housing delivery. On the Africa Is a Country Podcast this week, we attempt to understand why.
The slow cancellation of the future
Anxious and isolated, living in poverty or financial precarity, we sink into ourselves and adopt self-destructive coping mechanisms.
South Africa’s postcolonial winter is coming
After 29 years of neoliberal failure in South Africa, foreigners are a convenient scapegoat for a national elite that failed to redistribute wealth. This is a pattern common to post-colonial Africa.
Without much sorrow
Queen Elizabeth’s failure to even acknowledge or issue an apology for Britain's colonial legacy, explains why many Kenyans did not mourn her death.
The quiet violence of child maintenance
Humiliation and stigma are companions for women seeking assistance from courts to obtain maintenance in South Africa.
Brazil’s violent caste system
Despite the country’s marker as a “racial democracy,” racism and prejudice still persist in Brazil, often violently and with deadly consequences.
Frantz Fanon unveiled
Although he was a spokesperson for the Algerian National Liberation Front, Frantz Fanon’s ideas often came at odds with that movement’s political demands.
Sleepwalking into fascism
That reactionary politics today lack a mass character is what makes them so dangerous.
Child of Mau Mau
Ethnicity did not simply disappear in Kenya’s 2022 elections. Instead, it was a crucible where both sides mobilized historical claims and ideas to win supporters, in ways that could, at times, elude the eye.
Tiptoeing across the minefield of neutrality
Recent US-South Africa relations appear to be firmly stalled in the cul-de-sacs of imperial or sub-imperial diplomacy.
The land and the sea
Communities whose land is being targeted for exploration by oil and gas companies are increasingly using the courts. South Africa points to good lessons for social movements about allying with the law.
Resistance and commodification
A scholar of Black Brazil discusses the past, present, and future of the antiracist movement, in the run up to this year's presidential elections.