
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.
Journalist Vincent Bevins’ new book, The Jakarta Method, shows that some of the 20th century’s ugliest episodes are still unfolding.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Janet McIntosh's fascinating book, Unsettled: Denial and Belonging Among White Kenyans, forces an interrogation of the past.
During the Cold War, Khartoum was very successful at frustrating solidarity by other Africans for South Sudan's independence struggle.
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.
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.
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.
What does the decade-old “Congo-case,” involving two Norwegian mercenaries, tell us about residue coloniality in Scandinavia?
Media scholar Cara Moyer-Duncan wrote a book about postapartheid South Africa. Here she gives her book picks for our #ReadingList series.
What it means to be a man and a feminist.
Jumoke Verissimo’s first novel, A Small Silence, explores the psychic afterlives of protest in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic.
How do white South African writers confront the country's as well as their own pasts?
A close friend remembers the Kenyan writer and commentator Binyavanga Wainaina (January 18, 1971 - May 21, 2019).
Rama Salla Dieng talks with a British literature scholar on literary activism in French.
A new thriller by Andrew Welsh-Huggins follows a detective investigating the disappearance of a Somali-American teenager in Ohio.
The author of a book on football and revolution in Egypt gives us a list of must reads on football in the Middle East and North Africa.
The author and journalist shares a reading list from her time as The New York Times' Bureau Chief for West Africa.