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?
History
The rise and fall of a Nigerian labor hero
Adams Oshiomhole was one of the most powerful trade union leaders in Nigeria. His career trajectory represents the wider political subjugation of the national labor movement.
The Pearl of the Indian Ocean
Exploring the different neighborhoods within Mogadishu raises the question: who is this city really for?
The afterlives of indenture
South Africa's history of indentured labor leaves behind a legacy of violence against women among the country's South Asian population.
Soft targets
What was behind the assassinations in the 1980s of two key anti-apartheid figures: Swedish Prime Minister, Olof Palme, and senior ANC official, Dulcie September?
Unfinished liberatory agendas
How Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere’s approaches to gender politics, help reshape feminist visions for reclaiming a developmental state.
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.
From the Niger to the Nile
In the late 1890s and early 1900s, a number of West African Muslims migrated east, settling in Sudan and Mecca, to seek refuge from European colonization.
History class
What might Black Lives Matter learn from Africanist scholars who have studied inequality outside the US, especially in Africa?
Remembering Emma Gama Pinto
To those who did not know Emma Gama Pinto, she was just “the wife of Pio Gama Pinto,” the Kenyan anticolonial fighter, but to those who knew her, she was fearless in her own right.
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?
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.