The imperial forest
Gregg Mitman’s 'Empire of Rubber' is less a historical reading of Liberia than a history of America and racial capitalism through the lens of a US corporate giant.
Lit
Between East Africa and the Gulf
Political encounters between the Arab Gulf and Africa span centuries. Mahmud Traouri's novel 'Maymuna' demonstrates the significant role of a woman’s journey from East Africa to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Defying defeat
Political prisoner Alaa Abd El-Fattah’s collection of writings are a powerful and evocative reminder that democracy in Egypt remains a bleak prospect.
Reading List: Shimrit Lee
The author of 'Decolonize Museums' assembles a list of essential reading on the past, present and future of museums.
Bookends: Rémy Ngamije
Rwandan-Namibian writer and founder of Doek! arts organization shares his sober routine and dramatic daydreams.
How to write like Binyavanga Wainana
This week on the AIAC podcast, we discuss a new posthumous collection of writing from Binyavanga Wainana.
Reading List: Melinda Ferguson
The award-winning South African author Melinda Ferguson takes us through a selection of books exploring freedom, death, truth, as well as psychedelics, which can be a route to pondering such big questions.
Reading List: Edna Bonhomme
The author writes about books whose true power comes from excavating the perennial endemic diseases that never leave our sight.
The proper course of justice
Existing models of racial healing center whiteness and demand the emotional labor of Black folk, fetishizing reconciliation but forsaking justice.
Binyavanga Wainaina: The early years
On the occasion of the release of 'How to Write About Africa,' a collection of early essays and short fiction by Binyavanga Wainaina, Achal Prabhala remembers his friend’s earlier beginnings and literary breakthroughs.
First as tragedy, second as farce
NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel 'Glory' forcefully evokes the Zimbabwean political landscape but struggles to stretch itself beyond the documentarian, vacillating between the journalistic and fictive.
Breakfast at Mobutu’s
Jacques Bongoma was a young Congolese progressive who became a close advisor to Joseph Mobutu after the country’s 1965 coup.
Reading List: Duncan McEachern Yoon
The author’s new book wants to clear away some of the misunderstandings that dog Africa and China relations. Here, he catalogs the books that guided him.
Reading List: Mutt_Lon
The books that the author, a Cameroonian novelist, has been reading share an ethics of political engagement, a quest for identity and cultural inventory, and an ear for the voices and harmonies of African languages.
Where laws and guns cannot reach
South African poet Don Mattera, who died in July, was the real deal—preferring to throw his lot in with the ignored and the undervalued. Unsurprisingly, his monumental life and work is undervalued too.
Reading List: Ari Gautier
Writer Ari Gautier owes his own blend of mythology, Dalit consciousness, and surrealism to literary stylists such as Amos Tutuola, Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo.
The story of depression and how we treat it
A new book weaves science, history, philosophy and personal narrative in a refreshing and more globally inclusive look at depression.
Africa holds up a mirror to India
Shobana Shankar's new book, 'Africa, India and the Spectre of Race' (Hurst/Oxford, 2021) explores this complicated history.
Apartheid of a special type
The Israel/Palestine system meets the definition of apartheid in international law, but presents different challenges for the campaign against it than was the case for the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.
Denouncing the reader
Zoë Wicomb thinks she knows why black South African readers appreciate Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize-winning novel 'The Promise' (2021) whilst many white readers were turned off by it.