
The land of the freed people
'We Slaves of Suriname' (1934) was the first study of Dutch colonial rule from the perspectives of the people who resisted it. It is has been published in English for the first time.
'We Slaves of Suriname' (1934) was the first study of Dutch colonial rule from the perspectives of the people who resisted it. It is has been published in English for the first time.
Activist Blondin Diop and artist Samb are exemplars of Senegal’s post-independence promise and crisis, marked by the global uprisings of May 1968. Mustapha Saha was a friend to both of them.
In the early 1970s, Walter Rodney, expelled from Jamaica, took a post in Tanzania. In Leo Zeilig’s new book, he captures those exciting, but also difficult years and how it formed Rodney.
Why are Kenya's ruling family trying to reinvent themselves as friends of Mau Mau so many years later?
The death of Paulo Lara warrants an appreciation of his and his family’s contribution to preserving the documented history of Angola’s liberation struggle.
On justice, impunity and ridicule: the historic outcome of the 2022 trial in Burkina Faso against Thomas Sankara’s killers.
Why did North Africans and Middle Easterners almost overnight go from being comrades-in-struggle to racial intruders in Africa and in African American cities?
South African discourse about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continually references Soviet support for the exiled ANC. But the past is more complicated than official Russian and South African statements suggest.
David Samaai was the first black (and coloured) South African to play at Wimbledon in 1949. He was 21 years old. He did so before the Americans, Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe.
The Kenyan Organic Intellectuals Network wants to challenge the vague manner elites there deal with the past and take on the challenges of the present.
This week on AIAC Talk: Pio Gama Pinto was Kenya’s first post-independence martyr. Why does he matter today?
Egyptian women's struggle today stands on the shoulders of many historical role models. One of them is Huda Shaarawi.
Robert Vinson's biography of Albert Luthuli hints at how liberation histories might be reframed to better address the problems of the present.
German historian Daniel Tödt wrote a history of the Congolese évolués. In this interview, he talks about the historiographical interventions of his book and the role of Patrice Lumumba in the history of évolués.
During Guinea-Bissau’s war of liberation, women filled key positions on the frontline. That is often forgotten in the mythology of the struggle for independence.
A new book revisits the career of Uganda’s first elected prime minister, Benedicto Kiwanuka, his followers, and political ideas.
Gurnah’s Nobel Prize invites us to ponder Germany’s colonial past between the Scramble for Africa and the First World War in what is now Tanzania, Burundi, and Rwanda.
The return of Patrice Lumumba’s remains must not be an occasion for Belgium to congratulate itself, but for a full accounting of the colonial violence that led to the assassination and coverup.
The grievances of this generation in Kenya are disturbingly similar to those of the generation of the 1940s who took up arms in the Mau Mau movement. For both, it is about land and freedom.
Street names are political weapons. They produce memories, attachment and intimacy—all while often sneakily distorting history.