Selling fencing as freedom
What happens when companies start to sell the idea of a frictionless consumption that helps people at the same time?
History
Postcolonial cons, scandals, and fraud
Business fraud and illicit financial flows are not a new problem for Africa—the "Drevici Affair" in Nkrumah's Ghana is instructive.
Frantz Fanon unveiled
Although he was a spokesperson for the Algerian National Liberation Front, Frantz Fanon’s ideas often came at odds with that movement’s political demands.
Breakfast at Mobutu’s
Jacques Bongoma was a young Congolese progressive who became a close advisor to Joseph Mobutu after the country’s 1965 coup.
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.
Memories are to be shared
It will have to be the Algerian diaspora inside France who will eventually have to mainstream the truth of France's colonial legacy.
The Bisho March and the Leipzig Option
Revisionist histories of South Africa’s transition to democracy are overdue, like on the deadly march on Bisho in the Ciskei homeland on 7 September 1992.
The new imperialism’s strange bedfellows
Africa's political liberation and economic emancipation can't be one-country affairs, but pan-African combined with international solidarity.
Reading List: Patrice Nganang
The novelist on 3 books he returns to: by Wole Soyinka, Ibn Khaldun, and a third on the history and the system of writing of an early 20th-century Cameroonian king.
Cosmopolitan Africans, before colonialism
Africa's engagement with the world before European colonialism holds unexpected episodes of un-colonial power relations.
Nelson Mandela and the revolutionaries
The ANC and Nelson Mandela’s turn to violent anticolonial struggle in the early 1960s, is the subject of a new book by historian of South Africa, Paul Landau.
Resisting petty apartheid
The historian Premesh Lalu’s film about an apartheid-era cinema on the Cape Flats also offers a glimpse of a future beyond racism for South Africa.
Panthers in Congo
The film 'Congo Oyé,' pulled from the archives of a New York City library a decade ago, explores different interpretations of revolution, Black sovereignty and liberation.
How we tell the story of African film history
For most outsiders, modern Ethiopian cinema means Haile Gerima and Salem Mekuria. But others, in addition to these, made its rich cinema history.
African liberation and African scholarship
The Sixth International Congress of African and African Diaspora Studies in Accra in August 2023 foregrounds the struggle against African Studies as a form of knowledge production located, for the most part, outside Africa.
Democraticizing money
Cameroonian economist Joseph Tchundjang Pouemi died in 1984, either poisoned or by suicide. His ideas about the international monetary system and the CFA franc are worth revisiting.
The UK and migrant men from the Global South
To understand why it is single young men that are the primary target of Britain’s deportation of asylum-seekers to Rwanda, we need to revisit the country’s history.
When Egypt was Black
Pharaonism, a mode of national identification linking people living in Egypt today with ancient pharaohs. It emerged partly as an alternative to colonial British efforts to racialize Egyptians as people of color.
Where, and Why, is North Africa?
The centrality of race, colonialism, political projects around transnational identities, and the social sciences, all had effects on how the Middle East as a region came to be.
A crop that changed the world
The story about peanuts, and the people who grew it at the margins of an empire in 19th century West Africa, then the most abundant source of the world’s most important oilseed.