The Cape Colony
The campaign to separate South Africa's Western Cape from the rest of the country is not only a symptom of white privilege, but also of the myth that the province is better run.
Race
What’s wrong with the South African Institute of Race Relations?
Surveys on race by South Africa’s Institute of Race Relations (IRR) are deeply flawed and cynically used. Its influence on mainstream politics is significant and dangerous.
In sun and shadow
On the last episode of our sports and music series on Africa Is a Country Radio, we visit with Sean Jacobs and Tony Karon of the Eleven Named People podcast to preview the 2022 men's World Cup football tournament.
The wounded hippo
In a US confronting its own anti-black racism, sentimental imaginings of Africa do little but uphold the white savior industrial complex.
Brazil’s violent caste system
Despite the country’s marker as a “racial democracy,” racism and prejudice still persist in Brazil, often violently and with deadly consequences.
Newen Afrobeat and echoes of Fela around the Andes
In the third installment on Afrobeat in South America, political scientist Simon A. Akindes writes about Newen Afrobeat from Chile’s capital.
Resistance and commodification
A scholar of Black Brazil discusses the past, present, and future of the antiracist movement, in the run up to this year's presidential elections.
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.
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.
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?
Resisting petty apartheid
The historian Premesh Lalu’s film about an apartheid-era cinema on the Cape Flats also offers a glimpse of a future beyond racism for South Africa.
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 new politics, from the ground up
Cape Town-based activist Axolile Notywala wants to bring people from different backgrounds together to build a movement on what it means to be free in South Africa.
Punks of the Witwatersrand
The Rise and Fall of National Wake, South Africa’s first multiracial punk band at the height of apartheid, that sang about state violence and political freedoms.
The UK and migrant men from the Global South
To understand why it is single young men that are the primary target of Britain’s deportation of asylum-seekers to Rwanda, we need to revisit the country’s history.
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.
Colonial Vice at the Venice Biennale
At the world’s most prestigious art exhibition, all is not well when it comes to relative newcomers from the African continent.
Take it to the house
On this month's AIAC Radio, Boima celebrates all things basketball, looking at its historical relationships with music and race, then focusing on Africa's biggest names in the sport.
A question of color
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu's novel "The Theory of Flight" may be the first to take seriously Zimbabwe’s complicated race politics, beyond the obvious black vs whites.
Egypt and the Afrocentrists: The latest round
Why did North Africans and Middle Easterners almost overnight go from being comrades-in-struggle to racial intruders in Africa and in African American cities?