Africa holds up a mirror to India
Shobana Shankar's new book, 'Africa, India and the Spectre of Race' (Hurst/Oxford, 2021) explores this complicated history.
Search Result(s) for: “apartheid”
Trump’s beef with Nigeria
Trump’s threats of military action against Nigeria are not about Christian genocide, but are about rare earths, China, and the scramble to control Africa’s mineral future.
What does it have to do with Marikana?
The Marikana Massacre changed democratic South Africa forever. It can also catalyze resistance to the current order.
Reading List: Nicky Falkof
What happens to the contemporary explosion of moral panics, urban legends, and other paranoid narratives when they manifest in a place like South Africa?
Mapping Johannesburg’s wounds
In his latest exhibition, Khanya Zibaya charts the psychic and spatial terrain of a city where homelessness, decay, and human resilience sit uneasily together.
Visiting Ngara
A redevelopment project in Nairobi’s Ngara district promises revival — but raises deeper questions about capital, memory, and who has the right to shape the city.
Where have the Chapungu gone?
What connects Zimbabwe’s chimurenga spirit, the disappearing bateleur eagle, and the stubborn afterlife of colonial capital?
Atayese
Honored in Yorubaland as “one who repairs the world,” Jesse Jackson’s life bridged civil rights, pan-Africanism, empire, and contradiction — leaving behind a legacy as expansive as it was imperfect.
Who speaks for Iran?
Between imperial narratives and state propaganda, debates about the war on Iran often erase the diversity of Iranian society and the voices of its marginalized communities.
Walking through the ruins of French Cameroon
A new documentary revisits how Mongo Beti used literature and political writing to confront the suppressed history of French colonial violence in Cameroon.
Colonial Vice at the Venice Biennale
At the world’s most prestigious art exhibition, all is not well when it comes to relative newcomers from the African continent.
Inhabiting the shapes and sounds and patterns of other people
May 21 marks the anniversary of the writer and commentator Binyavanga Wainaina’s untimely death in 2019. He was 48.
Countering the narrative
If committed filmmakers want to reach and influence more people, and counter fake news, impact producing may help get us there.
The Dar es Salaam years
In the early 1970s, Walter Rodney, expelled from Jamaica, took a post in Tanzania. In Leo Zeilig’s new book, he captures those exciting, but also difficult years and how it formed Rodney.
Corner Shops and Arcade Games
In hoods in 1980s South Africa, 20-cent pieces were used to play the old bootleg arcade games at corner stores. It also inspired a clothing label.
Israel and the geopolitics of a South African dairy strike
On The Africa Is a Country Podcast: Israel's entanglement in a strike by South African dairy workers, and its campaign to acquire accreditation at the African Union.
The humanization of public monsters
Charles Njonjo's legacy is as member of a powerful group of Kikuyu chauvinists who surrounded Jomo Kenyatta and corrupted the state.
Nicholas Kristof can’t find grown-up Africans to pose with him
Also how Call of Duty gets the white South African mercenary accents in its game right. Weekend Special is here.
Zambia turns 50
Zambia - the country its young people fondly call “Zed” - turns 50 in 2014. It was part of the first wave of African countries to gain independence in the 1960s.
We are here
As the slaughter continues unabated in Gaza, it is abundantly clear that both the present and history are often written by the victors.