It wasn’t cricket
The systemic challenges faced by black South Africans in even getting onto the field to play cricket in the first place.
Lit
The danger of a single author
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel, 'Americanah,' was the 2017 choice for the “One Book, One New York” campaign. Is the campaign necessarily a good thing?
The work of historical fiction
How does it differ from straight-forward history? What are the limits and possibilities of the genre?
All your faves are problematic
A brief history of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, stanning and the trap of #blackgirlmagic.
“We Are All Many Things”
South African creatives of Muslim background interact matter-of-factly with their social identity. An interview with playwright and novelist Nadia Davids.
The unfinished business between Cameroon and France
France would rather play puppeteer than transparently acknowledge its role in first shaping — and now underhandedly curating — its colonial past.
Where is the Central African Republic?
The Central African Republic has become shorthand for “failed postcolonial African state,” basically the prototype of a country in permanent crisis.
The uncompromising Zoë Wicomb
Zoë Wicomb's fellow South African, JM Coetzee once wrote: "For years we have been waiting to see what the literature of post-apartheid South Africa will look like. Now Zoe Wicomb delivers the goods."
Art in dark times
Interview with historian Dan Magaziner about his new book, The Art of Life in South Africa, about one of the few art schools training black art teachers under Apartheid.
Crime in South Africa
Two books tell complex and illuminating stories of how crime and corruption play out at the street level in the country's cities.
Our Subjective List of The Best Books of 2016
We asked our editorial group, some contributors and friends to let us know what they would rate as their best hardcover they read this calendar year.
Inheritances of our fathers
History reminds us that the past is not something that can or should be left behind. Rather, we are morally obliged to keep reflecting on them.
Modern Muslims in Sudan
In his memoir, the sociologist Steve Howard writes about experiencing Ramadan in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum.
Africans Migrate in Africa All the Time
The majority of African migrants move between countries on the continent.
‘This is Lara Pawson reporting for the BBC …’
The first cigarette I smoked was a Marlboro. I was twenty-one. I didn’t feel sick and
Apparently, I love Africa. I’ve been told this by people who hardly know me.
In 2003, I was among the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, who marched through London to
Transnational eugenics
Few works sufficiently recognize the truly transnational character of the eugenics movement, and how colonial Africa served as the launching pad for it.
Why western economists get Africa wrong
It is worth revisiting economic historian Morten Jerven's book "Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong" (2015), a refreshing contribution to the debate about development scholarship on Africa.
Beyond the usual South African reporting on “Africa”
Journalism on and about the continent tends to veer between the extremes of neglect or stereotype on the one end, and touristic exoticism on the other.
The Last Journalists in a Dictatorship
Anjan Sundaram’s Rwanda exists in an authoritarian bubble characterized by fear and repression.