Zimbabwean historian Terence Ranger (1929-2015) is no more. Ranger was central to the historiography of Rhodesian colonialism and a keen observer of post-independent Zimbabwe. In the image above, taken in 1962, Ranger is on the left. At the time he was being deported from Rhodesia. In middle Joshua Nkomo, then leader of the liberation movement ZAPU, and second […]
The author on how she developed consciousness about the centrality of domestic work in her native Colombia and further afield
The writer, an anthropologist, gets a quick lesson on race and crime on a visit to South Africa.
The remarkable thing about Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard’s reserve is that it never prevents him from protecting those whom he leads.
Most elites in the Netherlands are no different than racists when it comes to defending #ZwartePiet.
The author stars as the famed South African activist in a new play. Dulcie September was murdered by a conspiracy of South African and French death squads.
“We know… but we don’t know.” These were words that we heard often from Jeff Guy (1940-2014) in discussing the history of KwaZulu-Natal, the region that fascinated us all. In print, these words may look banal. But in Jeff’s dramatic, deliberate cadence, they resonated as a historian’s call to arms: a command to return to […]
Christmas is coming, and like the German Bundesliga we’re going to be taking a wee break on AIAC, returning in the early days of 2015. Everyone has their own ways of getting through those long, blogless days of festive family over-eating, and AIAC generally relies on Gin and Tonic, long walks, and English football. But there are also […]
Last week, I discussed the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database and two of its offshoot projects, the African Names Database and the African Origins Project. While the focus of my piece was meant to be on the quantitative data on slaving voyages, readers responded most strongly to these connected projects, which aim to recover lost names and identities […]
The myth of an all-white, Christian German society largely persists. So does the idea that anyone who is black only arrived here in the late 20th century or the 21st as refugees, or for economic reasons. Though many Germans actually remain unaware or do not acknowledge it, German colonialism did exist—and no, it was not […]
In South Africa's second city, poverty as well as other forms of inequality, are the direct consequence of elite and middle class wealth.
Can an African language literature prize be inherently Pan-African?