“Black African” may be oxymoronic
For many African immigrants in the United States, being seen as Black doesn’t necessarily equate to seeing oneself as Black.
Ghana
The used car problem
It’s tempting but unsatisfactory to blame poverty and weak regulation for the dumping of used vehicles in Africa.
After we have grown too tired of jumping
The Ghanaian game, Ampe, is an education in Blackness and womanhood.
The haunting draw of the West
To be African means at some point to desire to leave. African cinema can provide solace for our tortured relationship to the West and our own continent.
Postcolonial cons, scandals, and fraud
Business fraud and illicit financial flows are not a new problem for Africa—the "Drevici Affair" in Nkrumah's Ghana is instructive.
Kwasi Wiredu’s golden rule
The greatest achievement of Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu was to recast African knowledge from something lost to something gained.
Soccer capitalism
Soccer academies in Africa sprang from European club interventions with varied success, but, as examples in Ghana prove, they can be sites of local, entrepreneurial spirit.
How should we struggle?
Lawyerfication discourse in Ghana ignores the operation of power on the ground and conflates legality with justice.
God was everywhere in the street
Renowned Ghanaian highlife musician, Nana Ampadu, died on September 28, 2021. In this interview from 2007, historian Jennifer Hart talks with him about the music that made him famous.
Christianity and new queer African imaginations
The leading African writers and creative artists who are reimagining Christian thought and the several Christian-inspired groups who are transforming religious practice.
Breaking the shackles
Ghana is slowly developing its mental health care to protect human rights. Yet sensationalist journalism, including in the progressive media, continues to portray the treatment of mental health in the country as backward and abusive.
Kwame Nkrumah’s Encounter with Karl Marx
Nkrumah’s written works and speeches reveal a selective encounter and appropriation of tools—in this case from Marxist thought—that were translated through Nkrumah’s traveling theory.
Reading List: Kwasi Konadu
On telling stories through the evocative and varied moments in which humans live, rather than through the predictable and artificial plots historians devise.
The pathology of economics
COVID-19 exposes the deadly dominance of neoclassical economics in Africa.
Ghana’s moral panic
Enough of the ignorance: LGBT+ rights are Ghanaian and human rights, not an attempt by Westerners to impose their values or culture.
Pioneers in Black Studies
Kwame Nkrumah’s ideas about pan-Africanism and African liberation inspired many young scholars to explore global linkages around race and power, to uncover historical connections and forge new ones.
Unfinished liberatory agendas
How Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere’s approaches to gender politics, help reshape feminist visions for reclaiming a developmental state.
The passing of Jerry John Rawlings
Lessons on radical politics from a 1970s political-cultural icon. Rawlings also dominated and shaped Ghanaian politics through the 1980s and 1990s.
Looking disenchantment in the face
The history of Africa involves navigating utopian visions and brutal realities as the recent work of Egyptian filmmaker Tamer el-Said's and before that, Ayi Kwei Armah show.
Dismantling and transcending colonialism’s legacy
Nkrumah, Nyerere and Senghor were acutely aware of the need to displace the epistemic conditions of colonization in order to transcend it.