Makeshift modernity
The rise of African Speculative Fiction and other exciting cultural production indicates that modernity is not an exercise in “catching up” with Europe, but an entirely new condition.
Lit
The making and unmaking of permanent minorities
Mahmood Mamdani’s new book asks how communities that have been enemies can heal. But does it succeed?
Decolonizing humanity
The political philosopher Achille Mbembe’s latest book asks us to emerge from the enclosure of race.
The many lives of Nawal El Saadawi
El Sadaawi died on March 21, 2021. Her complex and evolving positions mean there is more than one version of her to commemorate.
Man of action
An interview with Brian Peterson, author of a new biography of Thomas Sankara. Peterson positions 1980s Burkina Faso as counterhegemonic to the neoliberal transition then.
The transcendence of boundaries
What kinds of radical emancipatory futures are being imagined in Africa’s speculative fictions?
Equatorial Guinea’s ‘American Dirt’
A novel and Netflix film about Spanish colonialism in Equatorial Guinea raises questions about appropriation and storytelling.
Reading List: Kwasi Konadu
On telling stories through the evocative and varied moments in which humans live, rather than through the predictable and artificial plots historians devise.
The Xhosa literary revival
The writer Mphuthumi Ntabeni's new novel explores the deep history of colonialism and resistance in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.
The poet of colouredness and exile
Dennis Brutus described Arthur Nortje as “perhaps the best South African poet of our time.”
Making the city possible
Re-visiting Nairobi's urban history offers a glimpse into the forces that shaped modern life.
Tips from the apocalypse
Speculative fiction by writers from Africa explore viral apocalypses. What can we learn from art on catastrophe?
Angola’s veterans
Recent changes affect the daily lives of ex-combatants and other soldiers who struggle to reintegrate into society a decade after the end of the war.
Slam democracy
The Democratic Republic of the Congo has a rigid educational system, largely unchanged from the colonial era. Slam artists and activists are working to open it up to alternative spaces of expression.
Beyond the Nobel Peace Prize
New biographies reveal Wangari Maathai as a reflective scholar and critical thinker.
Décoloniser la littérature africaine
Les études littéraires africaines devraient donner plus d'espace aux nombreux écrivains vivant sur le continent, dans les langues africaines.
Decolonizing African literature begins with language
Senegalese writer, Boubacar Boris Diop, on the problematic circuits of teaching African literature first legitimized in Europe in African universities
The philosopher king
A new biography of Tanzania's first president, Julius Nyerere, reveals a complicated legacy.
Frozen in time
How African literature is taught reveals a depressing lack of knowledge concerning North African writers and their works.