What is whiteness in North Africa?
What happens when we take the study of whiteness from settler colonial contexts into the postcolony?
Culture
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.
On failed states and the pitfalls of Western commentary
The tendency of Western commentators to dress up African tragedies in the patronizing logic of relativism.
When the spirits of the ancestors call you back
A homage to a true pan-African athlete-activist, Lee Evans, who at the Olympics Games in 1968 broke the 400-meter world record and embarked on a life of political activism.
Decolonize this
To undo the misrepresentation of women of color in global media, we need a historically grounded solidarity.
In the company of coronavirus
What literature can teach us about what happens when the chain that connects human beings to nature is broken.
The most humanistic socialist of our generation
The mathematician Edwin Madunagu, 75 years old in 2021, is one of Nigeria’s foremost socialist intellectuals. Here, his friend Biodun Jeyifo, the literary scholar, pays tribute to him.
What is the value of pan-Africanism for psychology?
How psychologists can and should become advocates for African and African feminist critiques of academia and of society.
Another hero falls
Eric “Bucs” Damons existed beyond the frame of the narrow scope of the elite South African sporting narrative.
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.
Can we reclaim football from below?
The mafia-style control of South African football, from the Premier Soccer League on down, means a dearth of development and enduring loss for the national team.
Life as young black men in Johannesburg
The South African rap duo, Stiff Pap’s art is of the internet age: Their debut, TUFF TIME$, is at once unmistakably authentic, and entirely new.
Breaking the shackles
Ghana is slowly developing its mental health care to protect human rights. Yet sensationalist journalism, including in the progressive media, continues to portray the treatment of mental health in the country as backward and abusive.
Clubbing in Cairo
Africa Is a Country Radio is back with a new season focused on African club culture. Our first stop is Cairo with Egyptian music journalist Maha El Nabawi. Listen on Worldwide FM.
An oblique public voice
Revisiting the films of Malian-born author and filmmaker Manthia Diawara.
The music industry and vaccine apartheid
Music’s ingratiating moral mask has withered, revealing a disfigured face whose true ethical philosophy is, as Lauryn Hill once noted, “paper thin.”
When the war is over
In his new book, the Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani argues that breaking cycles of violence requires collective action. He finds hope in the unfinished project of South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle.
Africa’s lost psychiatrists
Many of the continent’s most highly trained mental health professionals migrate outside Africa. The result, sadly, makes global inequalities in access to mental health, worse.
Unmasking Nigerian elites
In the Nigerian film 'La Femme Anjola,' which delights with brilliant performances, no one is exactly who they seem.
The circus of peer-reviewed publications
Academic journals pride themselves on “blind peer-review.” However, what if all that’s blind is the reckoning with inherent systemic discrimination?