Yvonne Vera’s gardens
Tadiwa Madenga’s latest book offers us a biographical portrait of Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera written through her love of plants, gardens and nature.
Lit
The DRC’s never-ending wars
A new book argues for the centrality of Congolese elites and regional powers in perpetuating domestic conflict, but it too easily lets the West off the hook.
Shadows of coloniality
What does it mean to be Malawian?
Languages are not in competition
Recognizing and appreciating creative writers in Kiswahili de-centers the use of imperial and borrowed languages in African literatures.
I am because you are
A tribute to the late Kenyan poet, playwright and activist, Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo (December 12, 1942-June 30, 2023).
The story of Eskom
Load-shedding, deepening privatization, and unaffordable electricity makes it difficult to imagine a pivot away from the neoliberal approach to South Africa’s climate crisis.
Poetry, nationalism, and al-Shabaab
In Somalia, poets are considered organic public intellectuals.
Henry Kissinger’s South Africa
In the 1970s, Kissinger believed that the liberation of southern Africa from white-minority rule represented a Cold War setback.
Reading List: Daniel Hammett, Laura S. Martin and Izuu Nwankwọ
What is the relationship between humor and politics in Africa?
What about queer joy?
Telling one's story as a black queer person isn't yet the luxury it is chalked out to be, especially when it remains dangerous to be queer in the world.
Reading List: Faeeza Ballim
What does the history of South Africa’s power utility, Eskom, tell us about the apartheid and post-apartheid state?
Reclaiming development alternatives
Post-Colonialisms Today provides an antidote to Western-centric analysis of Africa in a special issue of 'Africa Development.'
When settlers become civilians
The tragedy of settler-colonialism.
Wathinta abafazi, wathinta imbokodo
How 'Dawn' magazine illustrates the significant role women played in South Africa’s armed struggle against apartheid.
Reading List: Joeva Rock
We often hear from Western donors that Africa suffers from food ‘scarcity.’ The real problem is the exploitation of African land, labor, and knowledge.
African digital culture in context
How might a longer view of African art-making affect our understanding of what counts as art, text, and authorship?
Against exceptionalism
Although visibility is important, contemporary queer African literature reveals how easily representation privileges narratives of the resourceful and upwardly mobile.
An ungovernable mind
Frustrated by most of his contemporaries, but supported by like-minded friends, Zimbabwean author Dambudzo Marechera forever changed our notion of what African literature is.
Black women write
In her new biography of South African writer Lauretta Ngcobo, Barbara Boswell shows how the publishing industry historically excluded Black women, and how they wrote in spite of that.
The rise and fall of an African novelist
By questioning black masculinity in post-apartheid South Africa, Thando Mgqolozana became one of the most impactful writers of his time. But then he got accused of the same thing he opposed.