The colonial wounds of Senegal’s girlchild
In ‘Black Girl’ (1966) and ‘Cuties’ (2020), M'Bissine T. Diop is a cautionary figure who warns of colonialism's wounds and afterlives for Black girl belonging in the present day.
Culture
Reading List: Hugo ka Canham
On the publication of his book on black life on the margins, the South African author reflects on work that expand the meaning of being black on the world.
You couldn’t breathe until the trees were gone
A new film by documentarians Sara Newens and Mina T. Son shows yet another way in which nature is enlisted to marginalize Black communities.
Stop paying attention to Jonathan Jansen
The South African professor is under fire for suggesting life under apartheid was better than life under democracy. Stop giving him so much airtime.
Dreams of freedom
A historical novel by Sudanese writer Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin narrates an unusual love story between a slave and a princess.
Those who make homes in dark buildings
In his new book ‘The Blinded City,’ Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon takes readers into inner city Johannesburg not as it was or could be, but as it is.
Dreams of highfalutin philosophies
If an author writes with empathy, precision and authenticity about experiences foreign to their own, they're a good writer and not a cultural appropriator.
Taper salam
For African women passing through Morocco en route to Europe, begging on the streets becomes a way to support themselves, but also reinforces humiliation and shame.
A picture’s worth
Mabel Cetu is considered South Africa's first Black woman photojournalist and documented the everyday lives of Black communities in the 1950s.
Greed has fiercer allies than justice
Libyan writer Ibrahim Al-Koni’s latest novel is a philosophical retelling of the story of Amazigh queen Al-Kahina.
The media of the useable past
Revisiting the papers of left, anti-colonial revolt from the continent can remind us of messy, rich alternatives.
Museveni’s goons are polite
Uganda’s rulers don’t get that clobbering words is impossible. The pen will escape every hammer, and cross borders to haunt oppressors, even if the authors are no longer around.
Faster than the ashes of a burning fire
Hausa poetics of compassion and resistance in northern Nigeria in the age of pandemics and neoliberal democracy.
Making meaning in Johannesburg
Documenting an urban housing crisis and how tens of thousands of informal workers and unemployed people struggle to reshape Johannesburg.
The land doesn’t lie
Safi Faye's 1976 film, 'A Farmer's Love Letter,' exposes the gap between the post-colonial state and the concerns of ordinary people.
The legacies of their many shaykhs
Indigenous traditions possess the greatest potential for developing robust civic values and identity in Africa.
How knowledge makes a discourse true
Mainstream discourses about Aamajiranci, northern Nigeria’s Qur'anic schooling system, expose the power politics of knowledge in postcolonial societies.
The limits of the cop drama
A bleak new television drama, ‘Donkerbos,’ explores secrets in small town South Africa, but fails to offer alternatives to the tropes of good vs evil.
How to make sense of Khoisan revivalism
Khoisan Consciousness is sweeping across South Africa. Exploring multiple perspectives is vital to make sense of it.
Consumed by numbers
The "follow-back" economy of Nigerian Twitter represents a struggle for recognition in a vastly unequal and status-obsessed society.