The greatest achievement of Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu was to recast African knowledge from something lost to something gained.
Latest
What’s good for investors isn’t good for Africans
How Africa’s pension funds risk becoming instruments of Africa’s neoliberal takeover.
An African Queer in the academy
We do not have to die, become sick or leave the academy to live and be in this space.
Keeping a displaced group closely knit together
A photo essay on Masjid Tajul Huda, a mostly West African mosque in the Bronx, New York.
The land of the freed people
‘We Slaves of Suriname’ (1934) was the first study of Dutch colonial rule from the perspectives of the people who resisted it. It is has been published in English for the first time.
Something for nothing
As coal is dying we must be prepared to absorb the transferable infrastructure of this industry and re-tool it for use in the emerging economy.
RADIO
On this month’s AIAC Radio, Boima celebrates all things basketball, looking at its historical relationships with music and race, then focusing on Africa’s biggest names in the sport.
Culture
A hopeful song about Sierra Leone
A new film, “Sing Freetown” (director: Clive Patterson) and accompanying theater project from Sorious Samura and Charlie Haffner attempt, with varying success, to sing a different song of Freetown.
Beja music cannot be beaten by any regime
The Dorpa Band from Port Sudan, a city on the Red Sea coast in eastern Sudan, embodies Beja Culture. Their bandleader, writes what drives their music.
The psychological pains of Ethiopian intellectuals
The desire to be absorbed into and consumed by the West, to find solace in its seductive promises, animates Robin Dimet’s film, “Sami’s Odysseys.”
Omar Blondin Diop and Issa Samb’s Senegal
Activist Blondin Diop and artist Samb are exemplars of Senegal’s post-independence promise and crisis, marked by the global uprisings of May 1968. Mustapha Saha was a friend to both of them.
Inhabiting the shapes and sounds and patterns of other people
May 21 marks the anniversary of the writer and commentator Binyavanga Wainaina’s untimely death in 2019. He was 48.
Climate Politricks
"Climate Politricks," our series on climate justice, tax justice and extractives in African spaces. Edited by Grieve Chelwa and funded by the Africa Regional Office of OSF.
A new documentary focuses on using the soil’s carbon absorbent properties to solve the climate change problem.
Social policy is essential to creating more just African countries. Why is it not the norm across the continent?
Politics
Take back the unions for their members
Why South Africa needs to democratize its labor movement.
Troubled times in Egypt
On this week’s AIAC Podcast: A decade after the Arab Spring, Egypt faces troubled times. Could we see another uprising?
Endless war in Somalia
Somalis have enough to worry about. The last thing they need is more war, especially one sponsored by the United States’ War on Terror.
The case for educational justice in post-COVID Africa
If generations of African youth are to prosper post-pandemic, a fundamental and vital shift in educational context and content is needed.
A man of few words
Late Kenyan President, Mwai Kibaki, could be a political heartbreaker and a great disappointment when he moved smoothly on from a cause.
Russia
Rushing to boycott
The cultural boycott of Russia turns to the flawed precedent of apartheid South Africa for inspiration, while ignoring the much more carefully considered boycott of official Israeli culture by the BDS Movement.
The war in Ukraine may seem far from Africa, but it is not
To compensate for its possible isolation by the West, Russia could turn its attention to Africa, making the continent the next center stage for imperialist struggles.
The politics of imperial gratitude
South African discourse about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continually references Soviet support for the exiled ANC. But the past is more complicated than official Russian and South African statements suggest.
Ukraine and the left’s imperialist economism
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has highlighted the narrowness of the crude anti-imperialist positions that are silent about the actual invasion of an independent country.