Tips from the apocalypse
Speculative fiction by writers from Africa explore viral apocalypses. What can we learn from art on catastrophe?
Lit
Angola’s veterans
Recent changes affect the daily lives of ex-combatants and other soldiers who struggle to reintegrate into society a decade after the end of the war.
Slam democracy
The Democratic Republic of the Congo has a rigid educational system, largely unchanged from the colonial era. Slam artists and activists are working to open it up to alternative spaces of expression.
Beyond the Nobel Peace Prize
New biographies reveal Wangari Maathai as a reflective scholar and critical thinker.
Décoloniser la littérature africaine
Les études littéraires africaines devraient donner plus d'espace aux nombreux écrivains vivant sur le continent, dans les langues africaines.
Decolonizing African literature begins with language
Senegalese writer, Boubacar Boris Diop, on the problematic circuits of teaching African literature first legitimized in Europe in African universities
The philosopher king
A new biography of Tanzania's first president, Julius Nyerere, reveals a complicated legacy.
Frozen in time
How African literature is taught reveals a depressing lack of knowledge concerning North African writers and their works.
The Cold War’s unfinished legacy
Journalist Vincent Bevins’ new book, The Jakarta Method, shows that some of the 20th century’s ugliest episodes are still unfolding.
The exiled writer from Equatorial Guinea
A new documentary about Equatorial Guinea and the exiled writer Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel provides an honest, critical examination of the country's political, social, and cultural issues.
African literature is a country
What if you survey African literature professors to find out which works and writers are most regularly taught? Only a few canonical ones continue to dominate curricula.
White eyes
Pressure on African writers to avoid the criticism of poverty porn limits the imagination of the writer and the ability to speak truth to power.
A deafening salvo
With a new book, Chimurenga resurrects Festac, the blackest and largest ever gathering of artists from Africa and its diaspora in 1977 in Lagos, Nigeria.
An ambivalent sense of belonging
Janet McIntosh's fascinating book, Unsettled: Denial and Belonging Among White Kenyans, forces an interrogation of the past.
The Two Sudans
During the Cold War, Khartoum was very successful at frustrating solidarity by other Africans for South Sudan's independence struggle.
What does it mean to be African in a post-apartheid academy?
The Nigerian scholar and poet, Harry Garuba, who died in February 2020, was a key figure in African Studies and teaching literature in South Africa.
Reading List: Xavier Livermon
Livermon’s new book explores how South African kwaito artists, Lebo Mathosa and Mandoza, pushed against the boundaries of gender and performance in their music.
The wife’s tale
First published in 2018, Aida Edemariam’s The Wife’s Tale is an extraordinary book that will help in opening up new narratives about women's histories.
A murder in Congo
What does the decade-old “Congo-case,” involving two Norwegian mercenaries, tell us about residue coloniality in Scandinavia?