Africa’s forgotten refugee convention
In 1969, the OAU proposed its own refugee convention to reflect African values. Why did it not become policy across the continent?
History
Dismantling and transcending colonialism’s legacy
Nkrumah, Nyerere and Senghor were acutely aware of the need to displace the epistemic conditions of colonization in order to transcend it.
The philosopher king
A new biography of Tanzania's first president, Julius Nyerere, reveals a complicated legacy.
Lessons from Africa’s past to cope with COVID-19
How managing COVID-19 and other crises necessitates Africa’s structural transformation, and what we can learn from the early post-independence development projects.
Pan-Africanism begins at home
Official Ghanaian pan-Africanism is now less motivated by African liberation and solidarity and more by profit incentives. Ghana’s Year of Return is the best example of this.
A ‘simple African’ revolutionary
Amilcar Cabral remains inspirational for Africans and non-Africans challenged by injustice and oppression.
Goodbye Annar Cassam
Chambi Chachage’s tribute to Annar Cassam, assistant to late President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, and a key figure in anti-colonial movements.
Reclaiming Africa’s early post-independence history
The task is to recapture progressive thought and policies from post-independence Africa for our times.
Law and disorder
France’s history of violence policing left a legacy of law and disorder, targeting dissidents, in its former colonies.
We are all brothers
Protestors in Algeria, the US, and elsewhere must begin to imagine what a new, grassroots Third-Worldism of the 21st century may look like.
The Che Guevara of the Cape Flats
Ashley Kriel, murdered on 9 July 1987, embodied a kind of politics that people feel are missing from South African politics today: tireless commitment and sacrifice.
A plagued history of Kampala
The parallels between COVID-19 and the 1910s in Kampala, when the colonial regime used a series of plagues to cut Ugandans out of the capital city.
Lumumba’s iconography in the arts
On anniversary of the birthday of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of an independent Congo, we ask, "What iconography arose around him, and why is that iconography so diverse?"
Six LGBTQ+ figures from African history
In honor of Pride month, we revisit the past which shows that many Africans were unapologetic about their sexuality and gender non-conformity.
The Two Sudans
During the Cold War, Khartoum was very successful at frustrating solidarity by other Africans for South Sudan's independence struggle.
A murder in Congo
What does the decade-old “Congo-case,” involving two Norwegian mercenaries, tell us about residue coloniality in Scandinavia?
Omar Blondin Diop’s revolution in Senegal
In 1973, Senegalese activist and artist Omar Blondin Diop died in a Senegalese prison. His life helps reveal what revolutionary politics look like in a neocolonial state.
The Senghor Myth
Once you've exhausted all the Negritude quotes, you have to confront the fact that Leopold Sedar Senghor ran Senegal as a repressive, one-party state.
A time for farewell, and a return
Africans rarely re-evaluate ourselves, the basis of our knowledge and our traditions on our own terms, argues Sierra Leonean writer Ishmael Beah.
Whiteness in Southern Africa
Rethinking white societies in Southern Africa from the 1930s to the 1990s, particularly the region’s white workers and white poor and their relationship with white-ruled states.