Flawed lenses
How much work do we need to do to see our history and that of the African continent in all its complexity?
Lit
Tram 83, a soundtrack
Fiston Mwanza Mujila's debut novel is painted by the music of a nightclub in a fictional central African city-state. On this month's AIAC Radio we imagined what it might sound like.
A man of the people
Robert Vinson's biography of Albert Luthuli hints at how liberation histories might be reframed to better address the problems of the present.
Uganda’s most controversial and disruptive politician
A new book revisits the career of Uganda’s first elected prime minister, Benedicto Kiwanuka, his followers, and political ideas.
The ultimate end of decolonization
Islamic scholarship in Africa and the meaning and end of decolonization in the work of religious studies scholar, Ousmane Kane.
Music makes the past alive
Africa Is a Country Radio is back with a new season. Each show will be inspired by the work of a different African author. First up, we explore the Ethiopian Tizita with Mukoma Wa Ngugi.
Reading Africa, Africans reading
This week on AIAC Talk: 2021 has been declared a great year for African literature, but what does that actually mean?
Criminal justice for the rising middle class
A new book on policing in South Africa wants to go beyond the usual call for reform. But adapting literature tuned for reform to the task of abolition is a difficult needle to thread.
Mission betrayed
The New Apartheid, a new book by Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, seeks to define a generational mission in South Africa. Instead, it shrouds our existing one in complete opacity.
The class contradictions of scholar activism
The radical politics of the professional middle classes—too often found full of rhetoric, but short on action—are explored in Leo Zeilig’s new novel, The World Turned Upside Down.
Probing the depths of the CIA’s misdeeds in Africa
The CIA committed many crimes in the early days of post-independence Africa. But is it fair to call their interference “recolonization”?
Africans and the creation of the modern world
Europe would have been a marginal player in world history without Africa's natural resources and centuries of cheap African labor.
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s skepticisms
Abdulrazak Gurnah's novels offer a skepticism against the cultural politics of packaging African stories for global circulation and consumption.
But, first we’ll take this W
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Nobel Prize for Literature win raises questions about the role of the LitNobel and how they construct what we think of and buy as African literature.
A matter that defies tears
Wọle Ṣoyinka's new novel examines a country caught in the crosshairs of unimaginable events.
Amílcar Cabral and the limits of utopianism
Antonio Tomás’ new book on Amilcar Cabral takes us back to the crucible of decolonization and permits us to assess its aspirations and limitations anew.
A different sort of truth
Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s fiction rebukes the Orientalist images of the Muslim world that provided a rationale for the war on terror.
The exilic geographies of the South
Dugmore Boetie was part of a wave of South African writers who fled Apartheid. His exile and future literary notoriety, however, took a different path to some of the more classic refugee peregrinations.
The longest shadow
We tell our stories when we are ready. This story is about the child sexual abuse I experienced at the hands of Anglican priests in South Africa.
In the company of coronavirus
What literature can teach us about what happens when the chain that connects human beings to nature is broken.