Reading List: Kwasi Konadu
On telling stories through the evocative and varied moments in which humans live, rather than through the predictable and artificial plots historians devise.
Ghana
The pathology of economics
COVID-19 exposes the deadly dominance of neoclassical economics in Africa.
Ghana’s moral panic
Enough of the ignorance: LGBT+ rights are Ghanaian and human rights, not an attempt by Westerners to impose their values or culture.
Pioneers in Black Studies
Kwame Nkrumah’s ideas about pan-Africanism and African liberation inspired many young scholars to explore global linkages around race and power, to uncover historical connections and forge new ones.
Unfinished liberatory agendas
How Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere’s approaches to gender politics, help reshape feminist visions for reclaiming a developmental state.
The passing of Jerry John Rawlings
Lessons on radical politics from a 1970s political-cultural icon. Rawlings also dominated and shaped Ghanaian politics through the 1980s and 1990s.
Looking disenchantment in the face
The history of Africa involves navigating utopian visions and brutal realities as the recent work of Egyptian filmmaker Tamer el-Said's and before that, Ayi Kwei Armah show.
Dismantling and transcending colonialism’s legacy
Nkrumah, Nyerere and Senghor were acutely aware of the need to displace the epistemic conditions of colonization in order to transcend it.
Lessons from Africa’s past to cope with COVID-19
How managing COVID-19 and other crises necessitates Africa’s structural transformation, and what we can learn from the early post-independence development projects.
Pan-Africanism begins at home
Official Ghanaian pan-Africanism is now less motivated by African liberation and solidarity and more by profit incentives. Ghana’s Year of Return is the best example of this.
Ghana’s retrogressive Public Universities Bill
Ghana’s ruling party has proposed a new law to control the country’s public universities. The country’s academics are fighting it.
GMOs for Africa?
Rather than addressing food scarcity, genetically modified crops may render African farmers and scientists more, not less, reliant on global markets.
Des OGM pour l’Afrique?
Plutôt que de pallier l’insécurité alimentaire, les cultures génétiquement modifiées risquent de rendre les agriculteurs et les scientifiques africains plus, et non moins, dépendants des marchés mondiaux.
Artists help us leap into the unknown
When the usual rules no longer hold, like in a pandemic, we might find inspiration in the collectivities and working principles of artists.
COVID-19 and teacher education in rural Ghana
The coronavirus shutdown in Ghana exposes the weaknesses and inequities in the country’s education system.
Representing northern Ghana
A hierarchy exists against indigenous film industries in the Ghanaian film industry.
The bedroom adventures of African women
Talking to other African women about sexual experiences, desires, and fantasies without feeling judged.
Ghana responds to the coronavirus
Demolishing homes of poor residents in Accra while under lockdown, tells us all we need to know about the Ghanaian state's treatment of working class people.
Skewing sexuality
The use of Evangelical Christianity to oppose progressive policies on sexuality education in schools is another example of Ghana’s march to the right.