Du Bois in Berlin
Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Lines of Descent (2014) argues that W. E. B. Du Bois’s two years as a graduate student in Berlin vitally informed his views on race and politics.
Culture
The Blitzboks in America
What the recent World Rugby Sevens Series global championship reveals about national rugby cultures, particularly South Africa's.
The untold story of the making of South Africa
The quest to understand the real cost of gold in our lives and the fate of those trapped in the mining economy’s cage.
The ‘abnormality’ of Cape Town’s traditional carnival
Breaking with the usual media conversation about the carnival that recalls Cape Town’s slave past.
Afro football fever
Football historian and broadcaster David Goldblatt’s new, encyclopedic book of football opens with a chapter on Africa. Here we republish an excerpt.
We wear the masks
The TV series "Watchmen" deserves credit for how it put unsung elements of black history into mainstream culture.
Zimbabwe’s forgotten football history
Zimbabwe’s national football was under black control decades before independence—but the colonial legacy of racial segregation still haunts.
The legend of flying Africans
The film Uncut Gems, Black American identity politics, and the narrative appeal of Ethiopian beginnings.
Family politics and the supernatural
A new documentary film tells a tale of everyday class, religious, and educational contestations around land in Kenya.
Twitter and a new criminal type
What might the fascination in displaying and seeing the body of “the criminal” tell us about South Africa today?
Reading List: Benjamin Talton
The writer, a historian, on scholarly texts, novels, and memoirs that he consulted in writing a political biography of US congressman Mickey Leland and his solidarity politics in Africa.
Excavating forgotten histories in South Africa
Remembering Adelaide Tantsi Dube’s poem 'Africa: My Native Land,' first published in 1913, the same year the white government stripped black South Africans of their land.
Reading List: Peter James Hudson
The writer, a historian of capitalism, white supremacy, and US imperialism, on four books he has been reading.
How African is the ‘African Studies Review’?
The journal’s editor acknowledges that it has a long way to go before most Africa-based scholars recognize it as an especially African journal.
A question of desperation
Black popular culture has gained two new heroes in Queen & Slim—a film about desperate violence.
Vanquisher of troubles or light of our home
The music of Albalabel, a pioneering women’s group in conservative and patriarchal Sudan, endures over decades of struggle.
Reading List: Ainehi Edoro
English Professor and Editor of Brittle Paper, recommends five books she’s been reading.
Linda Ronstadt is still playing Sun City
Nearly four decades later, Linda Ronstadt’s arguments against the cultural boycott - repeated in a new film - ring hollow.
The epidemic of thinkfluencers
For this group, politics is often framed as a series of never-ending discussions about social justice: The experience from South Africa.
Will the colonized ever speak?
New French film on decolonization in Africa and Asia incapable of avoiding the Eurocentrism the filmmakers wanted to steer clear of.