My delicious ‘Afrigasm’
White Euro-Americans are drawn to Sub Saharan Africa by an urge to explore, do good or by a more existential desire for an encounter with radical difference.
Search Result(s) for: “apartheid”
News from Nigeria
The writer, who lives in the U.S., travels with her teenage son back to Nigeria just as the country proposes a new law to criminalize same sex love.
Not an African Christmas
If the image of the starving black child has been deemed obsolete, then so has the Western “we” that claimed so much power for itself in the late 1980s.
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.
Reading List: Luke Sinwell
Once associated with socialism, the language of participation has been co-opted. How was this radical idea depoliticized?
Shifting the guilt
Even though Israeli novelist Agur Schiff’s latest book is meant to be a satirical reflection on the legacy of slavery and stereotypes about Africa, it ends up reinforcing them.
The Steve Biko Party
What has Steve Bantu Biko got to do with partying and spring in the Netherlands?
Archiving pan-Africanism
A project - helmed by historians Benjamin Talton and Jean Allman - to archive post-independence African revolutions, including Kwame Nkrumah's personal and professional papers.
The bittersweet pursuit of liberation
Ismay Milford’s new book takes us into the world of anticolonialism, giving us a rich account of the struggles of a cohort of activists from east and central Africa.
A worldly Nubian energy
The music and art of Lauryn Hill and Chiwoniso Maraire combined sexiness with political consciousness, offering Black women a way out of rigid categorization.
Against exceptionalism
Although visibility is important, contemporary queer African literature reveals how easily representation privileges narratives of the resourceful and upwardly mobile.
The Airbnb’fication of Cape Town
AirBnb is making the idea of a liveable, walkable city unattainable, while deepening inequality and decimating local industries.
What is the United Nations for?
Israel’s assault on Gaza has shown, once again, that the UN Security Council is ineffective when it comes to preventing wars and protecting the human rights of all people.
Black literary surrealism
In doing the intellectual activist work of editing and supporting cultural production, literary magazines have been crucial for Black cultural renaissance.
The Lord’s Chief Justice
Mogoeng Mogoeng, South Africa’s chief justice from 2011 to 2021, is midwifing the conservative turn in South Africa’s public life. From retirement, he may also eye public office.
The roots of toxic masculinity in South Africa
In South Africa and elsewhere, toxic masculinity is an outcome of modern individualism rather than tradition.
Defund the police
Policing in postcolonial Kenya is at an impasse. What is needed is disinvestment from this system of repression and reinvestment in communities.