The roots of our storytelling
What happens when we stop reading African fiction through European literary history and instead trace its worldmaking through indigenous cosmology?
Lit
A world reimagined in Black
By placing Kwame Nkrumah at the center of a global Black political network, Howard W. French reveals how the promise of pan-African emancipation was narrowed—and what its failure still costs Africa and the diaspora.
Co-opting African literature
Can a festival meaningfully applaud African creativity while its sponsor profits from African death?
Empire’s middlemen
From Portuguese Goa to colonial Kampala, Mahmood Mamdani’s latest book shows how India became an instrument of empire, and a scapegoat in its aftermath.
Global Africa for whom?
Nairobi’s cultural moment reflects both the promise of continental imagination and the anxiety of performing arrival for the world’s gaze.
Rethinking the boundaries of blackness
South Africa’s visual culture reveals that its racial categories were never fixed, while the history of indenture complicates the terms of solidarity and exclusion.
Reading List: Olufemi Terry
What does it mean to imagine a city with no fixed essence, only shifting histories and unstable forms of power?
The poetics of protest
From rooftop beginnings to open mics that echo on the streets, Kenya’s newest literary collective shows how art can archive struggle and energize dissent.
What do we want?
In her latest novel, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie examines the contradictions of women’s desires, while leaving her own narrative blind spots exposed.
The world isn’t broken, it was built this way
From Congo to Gaza, the machinery of empire hides behind the language of aid and development.
Firearms aren’t the only weapons
The writings of revolutionary Angolan leader and intellectual Mário Pinto de Andrade helped galvanize the independence struggle. They are now available in English.
As armas não só de fogo
Os escritos do líder e intelectual revolucionário angolano Mário Pinto de Andrade ajudaram a galvanizar a luta pela independência. Estão agora disponíveis em inglês.
Beyond national liberation
A new book issues both an indictment of South Africa’s failed transition and a call to rebuild the left through climate justice, solidarity economies, and radical humanism.
A powerful storytelling tradition
The last great Fang bard, Eyí Moan Ndong fused myth, music, and sci-fi to create epic performances that defy Western categories—and demand global recognition.
Una tradición literaria poderosa
El último gran bardo Fang, Eyí Moan Ndong, fusionó el mito, la música y la ciencia ficción para crear actuaciones épicas que desafían las categorías occidentales y exigen reconocimiento mundial.
Journey through the afterlives of a colonized Africa
In a hauntingly sincere recollection of her childhood and evolution into the ‘Most Dangerous woman in Africa,’ Andrée Blouin reintroduces herself while taking readers alongside an intimate ‘Africa Tour.'
When Brazil’s African Muslims scared the world
Taking place 190 years ago, the Malê Revolt in Bahia, led by African Muslim slaves, shook Brazil's foundations and echoed global fears of a new Haiti.
Reading List: Adam Hanieh
Materially speaking, oil is simply a sticky, black goo. It doesn’t have any innate power separate from the kind of society we live in—capitalism.
Reading List: Dotun Ayobade
What can the lives of the women behind Afrobeat tell us about creativity, resistance, and the interplay of power and pleasure in 1970s Nigeria?
Reading the present as history
In his debut novel, Thaer Husien remixes genre and takes readers on a psychedelic ride through a dystopian yet disturbingly familiar future Palestine.