Africa Is a Country

Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani

Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani

By
Tom Devriendt

Last year, Chris Abani introduced Ghana-born writer and poet Kwame Dawes (who spent most of his childhood and early adult life in Jamaica) to a Lannan Foundation audience:

And talked with him:

The Lannan archive has enough talks to keep you entertained for a whole week, by the way. There’s Howard Zinn in conversation with Arundhati Roy (and the same Arundhati Roy more recently), there’s J.M. Coetzee, Eduardo Galeano, Octavio Paz, Cornel West, Czeslaw Milosz, Lucille Clifton, Nadine Gordimer, etcetera.

I suggest you browse yourself. — Tom Devriendt

Further Reading

Fuel’s errand

When Africa’s richest man announced the construction of the continent’s largest crude oil refinery, many were hopeful. But Aliko Dangote has not saved Nigeria. The Nigerian Scam returns to the Africa Is a Country Podcast to explain why.

Fragile state

Without an immediate change in approach, Somalia will remain a fragmented country populated by self-serving elites seeking foreign patrons.

Coming home

In 1991, acclaimed South African artist Helen Sebidi’s artworks were presumed stolen in Sweden. Three decades later, a caretaker at the residential college where they disappeared found them in a ceiling cupboard, still in their original packaging.

Imaginary homelands

A new biography of former apartheid homeland leader Lucas Mangope struggles to do more than arrange the actions of its subject into a neat chronology.