Goodbye, Piassa
The demolition of an historic district in Addis Ababa shows a central contradiction of modernization: the desire to improve the country while devaluing its people and culture.
Search Result(s) for: “Ethiopia”
Every nation needs a team kit
An Australian sports apparel company makes shirts for low profile national soccer teams, including a number of African ones.
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.
Italy and the colonialism of others
What foot does Italy’s neo-Fascist prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, stand on to lecture France on its monetary colonialism in Africa?
The legacy of the ‘German Bob Geldof of development aid’
Why don't western friends of Africa not put pressure on their corporate and political elites to do more to combat hunger?
Drones in Somalia
The US, which has misread the political situation in Somalia before, is again pursuing short-term military gains there at the risk of long-term blowback.
Who gets to speak for Eritrea?
A diaspora vote won Snit Tewoldemedhin the People’s Choice Award at Miss World. But the freedom to choose is exactly what Eritreans at home don’t have.
Reading List: Benjamin Talton
The writer, a historian, on scholarly texts, novels, and memoirs that he consulted in writing a political biography of US congressman Mickey Leland and his solidarity politics in Africa.
The view from the factory floor
Industrialization was sought as a panacea to ethnic conflicts, resource crisis, and unemployment. But what prospects does it actually offer to Ethiopian youth?
The cost of care
In Africa’s migration economy, women’s labor fuels households abroad while their own needs are sidelined at home. What does freedom look like when care itself becomes a form of exile?
Mandela’s Black Marxism
Nelson Mandela is deified everywhere. But typically missing is an account of his early years, when he insisted that Marxism be responsive to South African conditions.
The benevolent great power
Opportunities like China’s One Belt One Road Initiative cannot simply be ignored, but should be engaged with critically.
How to write about children in Africa
Children's Radio Foundation's shows are a testament to children’s capacity to be agents for change and to confront critical community issues themselves.
‘Africa Rising’ in Retreat
As the commodity super-cycle’s denouement now makes obvious the need for change, at least it is clear to all that Africans are not lying down.
Music makes the past alive
Africa Is a Country Radio is back with a new season. Each show will be inspired by the work of a different African author. First up, we explore the Ethiopian Tizita with Mukoma Wa Ngugi.
With friends like these
Few places in the world have taken a beating like South Sudan. How did it come to this?
Marcus Garvey’s Africa
The historian Robert Vinson explores Garvey's influence in South Africa in the 1920s and 1930s.