Between Harlem and home
African postcolonial cinema serves as a mirror, revealing the limits of escape—whether through migration or personal defiance—and exposing the tensions between dreams and reality.
United States
Between blackout and embargo
In Cuba, new forms of marginalization and racism have surfaced, but the dream of a good society based on the core principles of “buen vivir” for its people has not died.
João Lourenço’s American pivot
The Angolan president’s overture to the West isn't happening in a vacuum, nor should it be surprising.
Writers for a new world
The debacle around Ta-Nehisi Coates' latest book shows us that no matter a writer's individual acclaim, the liberal media establishment will never tolerate anything that fundamentally challenges its racist edifice.
The freedom to move
Hiking as Kenyans in Kenya is pathbreaking, both literally and metaphorically.
The dangers of white totalitarianism
Why is the US ultra-right turning to Rhodesia as their model for a white supremacist state?
Heeding the call
At the 31st New York African Film Festival, young filmmakers set the stage with adventurous and varied experiments in African cinema.
Direct action gets the goods
In 1985, black students at the University of Houston led a campaign for divestment from apartheid South Africa.
Children are the first to die
There is a particular historical pattern of colonial settler genocide that links Africa to Palestine.
Beware of false prophets
Is the beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake really devoid of politics?
Writing while black
The film adaptation of Percival Everett's novel ‘Erasure’ leaves little room to explore Black middle-class complicity in commodifying the traumas of Black working-class lives.
Being young and African in elite America
A new film follows the lives of four African students at MIT, where youthful idealism gets tested by the realities of American racism and inequality.
Imperialism in black face
Kenya’s plan to send 1,000 police officers to Haiti undermine's the country's fragile sovereignty.
Stopping Israel’s genocidal war
The struggle of the Palestinian people has become central in the global movement against US imperialism.
Kissinger’s secret war in Angola
Henry Kissinger was convinced that Africans were incapable of responsible government—so he fought against the national liberation movements fighting for independence.
Henry Kissinger’s Angola
In 1975, seeing how a communist victory in Angola’s civil war would boost the morale of Vietnamese freedom fighters, Henry Kissinger wanted to plan a covert operation against the MPLA.
Henry Kissinger’s Western Sahara
Morocco is one of the United States’ oldest allies, so when it occupied Western Sahara in 1975, the right to self-determination of the Sahrawi people mattered little.
Henry Kissinger’s South Africa
In the 1970s, Kissinger believed that the liberation of southern Africa from white-minority rule represented a Cold War setback.
Bayard Rustin’s Zimbabwe
A new film about American civil rights icon Bayard Rustin overlooks his later conservative turn, evident in his attitudes to anticolonial resistance in Africa.
What is the United Nations for?
Israel’s assault on Gaza has shown, once again, that the UN Security Council is ineffective when it comes to preventing wars and protecting the human rights of all people.