The ANC and Nelson Mandela’s turn to violent anticolonial struggle in the early 1960s, is the subject of a new book by historian of South Africa, Paul Landau.
Latest
Instrumentalizing migrants
From Operation Fiela to Operation Dudula, xenophobia in South Africa is bent on protecting the interests of politicians.
Resisting petty apartheid
The historian Premesh Lalu’s film about an apartheid-era cinema on the Cape Flats also offers a glimpse of a future beyond racism for South Africa.
Suffering from a similar fate
Neoliberal policy in Sri Lanka has triggered a massive socioeconomic crisis. The way out is not through the IMF, but through redistributing wealth.
Reading List: Véronique Tadjo
To address a difficult and traumatic subject like Ebola, the writer Véronique Tadjo turned to oral literature for inspiration.
Talking down on speaking up
Beyond the social media firestorm over journalist Trish Lorenz’s book about #EndSARS, it is worth engaging in the debate about wider representation in movement building and protest.
PODCAST
On this week’s AIAC podcast: After an upswing before the pandemic, the global climate justice movement currently looks stuck. What kind of climate politics can appeal to the majority of people?
Culture
Panthers in Congo
The film ‘Congo Oyé,’ pulled from the archives of a New York City library a decade ago, explores different interpretations of revolution, Black sovereignty and liberation.
How we tell the story of African film history
For most outsiders, modern Ethiopian cinema means Haile Gerima and Salem Mekuria. But others, in addition to these, made its rich cinema history.
The skeleton in the closet
The novelist Nadifa Mohamed complicates Britain’s troubled, racist legal history through the personal tale of one otherwise insignificant person, a Somali immigrant to Cardiff in Wales.
A big African literature prize in an African language
The Kiswahili Prize works to undermine the marginalization of African languages in literary culture. An interview with one of its founders.
We are actually reading
The Radical Books Collective teams up with Africa Is a Country to bring you progressive conversations about books, literature, and publishing on this platform.
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
The war that doesn’t say its name
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo conflict, as well as peacemaking, have become ends in themselves, while the fighting is carried forward by its own momentum.
Life to the sound of gunfire
Nigerians fleeing extremist violence at home take refuge across the border in Niger among an already fragile population. Together they proceed to carve out a way to live better lives for now.
Like a bad rain year
The consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for African food security and the need for greater food sovereignty.
No amount of foreign currency can justify this
The dire, often fatal, conditions that African, and in this case specifically Kenyan, domestic workers are facing in the Middle East.
The “alternative” money economy of Nigerian students
In Northern Cyprus, African students, many of them Nigerian, study diligently for tertiary degrees while juggling multiple income streams in a peer-to-peer system for collective survival.
Russia
Like a bad rain year
The consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for African food security and the need for greater food sovereignty.
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.