Unfinished liberatory agendas
How Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere’s approaches to gender politics, help reshape feminist visions for reclaiming a developmental state.
History
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.
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.