Is the nation state the best we got?
What lessons can we draw from 1960s and 1970s anticolonialism and pan-Africanism to rethink the nation state today?
Politics
Mugabe and the tradition to not speak ill of the dead
What is the proper way for young Zimbabweans to remember Robert Mugabe's legacy?
The making of Mugabe’s intolerance
How an autocratic strain of pan-Africanism of the early 1960s shaped Robert Mugabe.
Do we really need prisons and police?
Can policing deliver justice in South Africa? The short answer to that question has been, decidedly, no.
The problem with microcredit in Africa
The microcredit industry is not a driver of development and poverty reduction, but quite the opposite: it is an "anti-developmental" intervention.
We all the way live
Live TV broadcasts of political rallies, funerals and press conferences, may be more decisive than social media in shaping mass debate in South Africa.
The emptiness of an ending
With Mugabe's death, might there be space for a new self-definition as a nation in Zimbabwe, as a broad family of nationals, with a shared national project?
Nativism and narrow nationalism in South African politics
The question of who belongs in South Africa, stains any project that aims to build a more equal and inclusive society.
Jour des morts
Comment le vol de cadavres au Gabon reflète la politique du pays.
Day of the dead
How stealing corpses in Gabon reflects its politics: a political system that does not hesitate to draw its vital force in death, even as death and paralysis threaten the system’s leading beneficiaries.
The ghost battalion
On the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA) the organized force behind the revolutionary uprising in Sudan.
The manifestation of climate injustice
Following the new UN report on climate change and agricultural land use, David S. Williams highlights the effects climate changes will have on communities in informal urban areas.
‘We are now treated the same as men. We have exactly the same rights’
How women farm workers in North Africa, specifically Morocco, are achieving justice on the job.
Silencing the national anthem
Last month the government of South Sudan passed a decree that the national anthem could not be sung not in the presence of the President. What could be behind this decision?
Frankenstein’s monster in Khartoum
On Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, known as Hemitti, the man behind the massacres against Sudanese protesters.
The South of Algeria has something to say
While protests in the north of Algeria grabs headlines today, protest and dissent in the Algerian Sahara have been going on for decades.
Decolonizing Africa’s past
On national anniversaries and democratic survival.
Waterless scars and pipe dreams in Nairobi
Poor Nairobi residents pay close to four times more for water that is much less clean, adequate or consistent.
Monetary imperialism in Francophone Africa
The transcript of a conversation with Senegalese development economist, Ndongo Samba Sylla, about monetary policy and its colonial legacy.
Drones over Djibouti
Investments in military infrastructure by global powers, such as China and the United States, have increased on the African continent in recent years.