When discussing war is taboo
Dieudo Hamadi’s film 'Downstream to Kinshasa' is a powerful antidote to the DRC's collective amnesia around the Six-Day War and its aftermath.
conflict
The liberation stories of Guinea Bissau
Amilcar Cabral is a household name. But what happened to the young women like Joana Gomes who helped lead Guinea Bissau’s independence struggle?
The Pearl of the Indian Ocean
Exploring the different neighborhoods within Mogadishu raises the question: who is this city really for?
Angola’s veterans
Recent changes affect the daily lives of ex-combatants and other soldiers who struggle to reintegrate into society a decade after the end of the war.
Ethiopia’s war of narratives
The current political conflict, now a civil war, in Ethiopia partly has its roots in disagreement among elites on how to narrativize Ethiopian history.
How not to write about the Rwandan genocide
How Rwandan history is told—and who does the telling—is important as it determines who is able to participate in conversations about the past.
The violence in Ethiopia
The imminent and existential danger to Ethiopia is not Abiy Ahmed and an oppressive government. It is violent ethno-nationalism.
A murder in Congo
What does the decade-old “Congo-case,” involving two Norwegian mercenaries, tell us about residue coloniality in Scandinavia?
This is my country
The Liberian academic and writer talks about citizenship, belonging, and what unites her fragmented nation.
Decolonizing the Lens
Because of the 1994 genocide, Rwanda occupies a complicated place in the world’s imagination. A new film, about the preceding 1973 pogrom, wants to demystify that view. Does it succeed?
The undeclared war in Somalia
The United States’ military operations in Somalia are not well known because they'e carried out secretly or via proxies. COVID-19 hasn't slowed them down.
The insurgency in Cabo Delgado
The climate crisis, resource extraction, and the insurgency by a group claiming affiliation to ISIL in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province.
I mourn in deafening silence
Are the international community and the African Union really powerless to stop the fratricidal war in Cameroon, or are they just indifferent?
Cameroon in conflict with itself
The use of a singular narrative to explain the divisions within Cameroon belies the reality that both anglophones and francophones are complicit in the conflict.
Bernard-Henry Lévy in Nigeria
The French philosopher and TV personality favors spectacle over analysis. The result: we don't make sense of political violence in Nigeria.
The best solution is coexistence
War, peace, and cooperation among herder-farmers in northeastern Uganda.
When bad reporting mirrors the thing it wants to criticize
A new film about Kony 2012 is a lesson in how not to fight simplification with more simplification.
Troubling times in Burkina Faso
Burkina Faso's security crisis and its new status quo of permanent military intervention will test the resilience of its political institutions.
Eyes on the Prize
Does the peace deal between Ethiopia and Eritrea—now rewarded with a Nobel Prize—bring the kind of cooperation between the two countries that it aspired to do a year ago?
Justice in the Sahel
How local conflicts in the Sahel-Sahara over justice, or rather its absence, get dragged into tensions between outsiders.