Bookends: Chinelo Okparanta
The Nigerian-American author of the novel "Harry Sylvester Bird" talks to the Radical Books Collective ahead of her appearance at their book club.
Lit
Warsan Shire’s prayer for the unmourned
The British-Somali poet Warsan Shire’s audacious yet uneven volume of poetry captures the quiet loneliness of African immigrant lives in the West.
Reading List: Patrice Nganang
The novelist on 3 books he returns to: by Wole Soyinka, Ibn Khaldun, and a third on the history and the system of writing of an early 20th-century Cameroonian king.
Reading List: Nicky Falkof
What happens to the contemporary explosion of moral panics, urban legends, and other paranoid narratives when they manifest in a place like South Africa?
Nelson Mandela and the revolutionaries
The ANC and Nelson Mandela’s turn to violent anticolonial struggle in the early 1960s, is the subject of a new book by historian of South Africa, Paul Landau.
Reading List: Véronique Tadjo
To address a difficult and traumatic subject like Ebola, the writer Véronique Tadjo turned to oral literature for inspiration.
Talking down on speaking up
Beyond the social media firestorm over journalist Trish Lorenz’s book about #EndSARS, it is worth engaging in the debate about wider representation in movement building and protest.
The skeleton in the closet
The novelist Nadifa Mohamed complicates Britain’s troubled, racist legal history through the personal tale of one otherwise insignificant person, a Somali immigrant to Cardiff in Wales.
A big African literature prize in an African language
The Kiswahili Prize works to undermine the marginalization of African languages in literary culture. An interview with one of its founders.
We are actually reading
The Radical Books Collective teams up with Africa Is a Country to bring you progressive conversations about books, literature, and publishing on this platform.
Bookends: Khadija Abdalla Bajaber
The author of 'The House of Rust' tells us all the little things (from foods to films) that get her imagination going.
What is it about the Kenyan postcolonial state?
The lesson from political economist Rok Ajulu’s academic work and activism: it’s not enough to change the “tenants,” but fight to change both the “state” and all of its houses.
Navigating queer utopia
A new book presents an empirical challenge to the myth of South Africa as the “pink capital” of Africa and contributes to building an archive of queer, African, and religious narratives.
When Egypt was Black
Pharaonism, a mode of national identification linking people living in Egypt today with ancient pharaohs. It emerged partly as an alternative to colonial British efforts to racialize Egyptians as people of color.
Where, and Why, is North Africa?
The centrality of race, colonialism, political projects around transnational identities, and the social sciences, all had effects on how the Middle East as a region came to be.
A crop that changed the world
The story about peanuts, and the people who grew it at the margins of an empire in 19th century West Africa, then the most abundant source of the world’s most important oilseed.
The land of the freed people
'We Slaves of Suriname' (1934) was the first study of Dutch colonial rule from the perspectives of the people who resisted it. It is has been published in English for the first time.
Inhabiting the shapes and sounds and patterns of other people
May 21 marks the anniversary of the writer and commentator Binyavanga Wainaina’s untimely death in 2019. He was 48.
Red and Black
Yunxiang Gao’s new book takes a fresh look at connected lives of African American and Chinese leftist activists, artists and intellectuals after World War II.
The Dar es Salaam years
In the early 1970s, Walter Rodney, expelled from Jamaica, took a post in Tanzania. In Leo Zeilig’s new book, he captures those exciting, but also difficult years and how it formed Rodney.