Back from Safari
If you hadn't noticed, we were on our annual break from just before Christmas 2021 until now. We are back, including with some inspiration.
Search Result(s) for: “Covid”
Out of the fire
Senegalese art historian El Hadji Malick Ndiaye on curating one of the two longest-serving biennales on the African continent.
No one is coming to save us
The government of Zimbabwe has decided it does not care whether Zimbabweans live or die.
The politics of sugar in Tanzania
Sugar has become the new gold in Tanzania as prices for the commodity soar and stocks vanish.
I just want the beach
On the island of Fanon’s birth, French colonial violence persists.
Bring Patrice Lumumba home
The return of Patrice Lumumba’s remains must not be an occasion for Belgium to congratulate itself, but for a full accounting of the colonial violence that led to the assassination and coverup.
Branches without roots
Across Africa, governments are elevating STEM education while sidelining the humanities. But science and technology are never neutral, and technical expertise alone cannot transform society.
The remarkable revival of Ugandan football
Uganda has never qualified for the World Cup, but at a continental level it is making a comeback. So is its club football.
Bloodsports and empire
The UFC White House event looked like the final triumph of the UFC-Trump alliance. But it was actually something more consequential: the first act in a darker chapter of American politics.
The Black Man with the Bible in his Hand
An encounter on a Cape Town bus forces the writer to think about religion, especially Christianity, and queerness.
Always searching
Abdullah Ibrahim was difficult, suspicious, and brilliant. And beneath all of it, he was searching for home.
The music industry and vaccine apartheid
Music’s ingratiating moral mask has withered, revealing a disfigured face whose true ethical philosophy is, as Lauryn Hill once noted, “paper thin.”
Time for an agriculture Green New Deal in South Africa
Land reform should focus on justice and social transformation, not on creating a new class of black commercial farm owners.
A revolution deferred
As we remember the Arab Spring, the starting point should not be that it failed, but that it’s incomplete. Watch it live on Youtube and subscribe to our Patreon for the archive.
Rage as love under duress
To riff off James Baldwin, there will be a fire next time in South Africa. The embers and kindling are in place. What matters is what South Africans do between this fire and the next.
Why the tree is producing bad apples
Corruption is South Africa’s pandemic — one that has been disenfranchising and killing people long before our transition to democracy.
South Africa’s fatigued, narcissistic nation-building discourse
Springbok rugby projects itself as progress, but preserves the way things are in the popular consciousness of South Africans.
Reading List: Cara Moyer-Duncan
Media scholar Cara Moyer-Duncan wrote a book about postapartheid South Africa. Here she gives her book picks for our #ReadingList series.
What is whiteness to a cyborg?
Tracing the digital contours of the settler colony helps us understand how old inequalities will shape a future with artificial intelligence.
What’s Left of the South African Left?
This week on AIAC Talk, we’re debating whether the moment is right for South Africa’s left to form a new party. Watch it live on YouTube.