Decolonizing the Lens
Because of the 1994 genocide, Rwanda occupies a complicated place in the world’s imagination. A new film, about the preceding 1973 pogrom, wants to demystify that view. Does it succeed?
Culture
Corona, how are you?
COVID-19 spreads from Europe to Africa, inverting colonial imaginaries of African disease and challenging inherited hierarchies.
Home is the space
From exile, bassist and composer, Johnny Mbizo Dyani (1945-1986), explored and promoted the folk music traditions of South Africa.
Mama Africa
A documentary film reclaims precolonial histories and spiritualities between Nigeria and Venezuela.
On being queer and contained
There is a disconcerting resemblance between how some Senegalese talk about homosexuality and how they discuss COVID-19.
Food is power
The World Food Program says COVID-19 will bring about a famine of biblical proportions, so it is a good time to revisit why food has never just been about the simple act of eating. Food is history. Food is identity.
The third brother
A new thriller by Andrew Welsh-Huggins follows a detective investigating the disappearance of a Somali-American teenager in Ohio.
A storm is coming
A post-colonial visual meditation on archive, memory, and colonial violence.
Reading List: Ronnie Close
The author of a book on football and revolution in Egypt gives us a list of must reads on football in the Middle East and North Africa.
Talking about trees
Capturing the absurdity of everyday life in Sudan under, now ousted President, Omar al Bashir.
Tales of a civilized slavery
Black Brazilians have to fight official and popular narratives hiding the country's brutal and violent legacy of slavery.
Reading List: Dionne Searcey
The author and journalist shares a reading list from her time as The New York Times' Bureau Chief for West Africa.
Death’s new rules
Coronavirus will force all of us to grapple with a new sense of mortality.
Painting Kenya’s power dynamics
The painter talks about how the distance between Nairobi and London allows him to take on topics at the heart of Kenya’s body politic.
A Letter Unanswered
Did Frantz Fanon ask Léopold Sedar Senghor for a job in 1953? And what might have happened to postcolonial psychiatry in Senegal if Senghor had given him one?
Rouge Impératrice
Imagining a utopian, unified African federation not divided by colonial era borders or neocolonial interventions.
Reading List: T.J. Tallie
Among the books historian Tallie has on his reading list is one about the food of the American Old South—“… a forgotten Little Africa but nobody speaks of it that way.”
African political techno
The evolution of techno, from within Detroit’s African-American community to Kampala, Uganda.
Reading List: Jill Kelly
The historian of South Africa on books she is reading for a new project on women and anti-apartheid activities in 1950s rural KwaZulu-Natal.
Letters of resistance
An anthology series, Women Writing Africa, restores women’s writing to the public archive.