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.
Lit
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.
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.
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.