Creating colonial Portugal in Africa
How colonial Portugal, to project the idea of a multi-continental and multiracial country, initiated a drive to encourage white settlement in Angola and Mozambique.
History
Uncovering ‘undesirable whites’ in the colonial archive
Can African scholars write different histories about settler societies—especially as Africans or Africanist scholars based in Africa or in the diaspora? The case of Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) is instructive.
Working-class whiteness vs. the apartheid state
How did South Africa’s white working class—those close to the politicized black workforce—experience the reform of apartheid?
White mineworkers at Zambian Independence
Why did white mineworkers on the Zambian Copperbelt not seriously resist decolonization?
Mandela and the Others
What can we learn from the 256 hours of audio recordings of the 1964 Rivonia Trial's proceedings?
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?
A storm is coming
A post-colonial visual meditation on archive, memory, and colonial violence.
Solidarity under quarantine
Nelson Mandela's life teaches us that being quarantined is not the end of politics, but for the regeneration of politics.
To remember selectively
How partisanship distorts the construction and narration of public memory about historical events, especially the resistance against apartheid.
A Letter Unanswered
Did Frantz Fanon ask Léopold Sedar Senghor for a job in 1953? And what might have happened to postcolonial psychiatry in Senegal if Senghor had given him one?
In the back and in the side
South Africa’s Human Rights Day (originally Sharpeville Day) holds a special place in the nation’s history.
Algeria’s forgotten revolutionary history
In the 1960s, Algiers was a beacon for worldwide liberation movements. What happened to its rebellious spirit?
Du Bois in Berlin
Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Lines of Descent (2014) argues that W. E. B. Du Bois’s two years as a graduate student in Berlin vitally informed his views on race and politics.
The untold story of the making of South Africa
The quest to understand the real cost of gold in our lives and the fate of those trapped in the mining economy’s cage.
The mysterious death of a UN Secretary-General
Revisiting the events that led to the tragic death of Dag Hammarskjöld, a key UN official in the decolonization of Africa during the Cold War.
Excavating forgotten histories in South Africa
Remembering Adelaide Tantsi Dube’s poem 'Africa: My Native Land,' first published in 1913, the same year the white government stripped black South Africans of their land.
The short, white woman with a South African accent
Urdang reflects her long friendship with fellow political exile Jennifer Davis, the anti-apartheid activist and changemaker.
Jennifer Davis: Fearless and visionary
Davis, who died at 84 on October 15th, was a prominent leader of the anti-apartheid movement in the US and an analytical thinker and visionary.
A living monument of the struggle
The passing of American economist Ann Seidman has again spotlighted the impacts of committed scholarship on Africa.
Nativism and narrow nationalism in South African politics
The question of who belongs in South Africa, stains any project that aims to build a more equal and inclusive society.