I received my copy of this year’s Commonwealth Prize winner Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love in the mail the other day.
Not that I don’t like its cover (or the book), but this is just silly.
And here’s why:
Some of us (in Canada, Great Britain, South Africa and India) also know 2008 Commonwealth Prize winner Lawrence Hill’s novel as The Book of Negroes and sure, this is the Australian edition’s cover, but still…
African contributions to the globalized world cannot be celebrated while the place occupied by African peoples remains on the periphery.
A contribuição africana no mundo globalizado não pode ser celebrada enquanto o lugar ocupado pelos povos africanos for o da periferia.
Samthing Soweto and DJ Maphorisa’s clash over a song credit raises the question of whether numbers trump respect in the Amapiano music scene.
Twenty-one years after Liberia’s political elite acquiesced to “negative peace,” the US now champions the fight against impunity. Except when their own companies are involved.
While it might be cathartic to compare Elon Musk’s tech firms to apartheid-era mines, the connection between ex-South Africans and American capitalism is complicated.
To navigate multipolarity, the continent needs a common narrative that strategically mediates its conversations with China and other world powers.
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.
Without an immediate change in approach, Somalia will remain a fragmented country populated by self-serving elites seeking foreign patrons.
No matter where they are, the children of African heads-of-state live lives comically far-removed from those of the average citizen in their home countries.
The war in Sudan shows how during conflict, the internet is as critical as food or medicine.
South Africa’s pivot to electricity markets will be socially regressive, whether green or not.
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.
The EU’s military involvement in West Africa, the Gulf of Guinea, South Sudan, and East Africa is well-known. But one mission on the continent has gone relatively unnoticed.
Todos sabem do envolvimento militar da União Europeia (EU) na África Ocidental, no Golfo da Guiné, no Sudão do Sul e na África Oriental. No entanto, uma missão no continente passou relativamente despercebida.
The protests against illegal mining in Ghana are revealing how the country’s political class still fears an engaged citizenry.
How the UAE-backed RSF looted Sudan’s National Museum.
Without an immediate halt to US arms to Israel, it’s hard to see why Israel should stop slaughtering civilians in Gaza and Lebanon.
While many diasporans speculate romantically about the people we were or could have been, is that speculation mutual?
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.
Decolonial African feminism and the revolutionary lives of three mothers of Kenya.
