On Safari, Summer 2016 Edition

Don't worry, we'll cook up some stuff for the fall and we'll be back on September 1. In the meantime, you can go potter around the website and catch up on our archive.

Sean Jacobs.

While we would like to go full steam year round, the fact that we have day jobs (for example, I work as a professor), means we have to take a break from the site every summer. To recharge our batteries. Officially we went on break Friday, July 16th (we set up you up with a Sierra Leone-connected mix). However, in honor of one of our patron saints, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (not the Hollywood version, but the more radical, contradictory Mandela) whose birthday it is today (he would have been 98 years old), we’re making the break official. Don’t worry, we’ll cook up some stuff for the fall and we’ll be back on September 1. In the meantime, you can go potter around the website and catch up on our archive. If you have really bad withdrawal symptoms, check in occasionally at our social media media (Facebook here, here and here, Instagram and Twitter here, here and here). See you in the Fall.

Tuti Beach. Khartoum, Sudan. Image credit Jedrek Burak via Flickr (CC).

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.

Business as usual?

This month, Algeria quietly held its second election since Abdelaziz Bouteflika was ousted in 2019. On the podcast, we ask what Abdelmadjid Tebboune’s second term means for the country.

The complexities of solidarity

Assassinated in 1978, Henri Curiel was a Jewish Egyptian Marxist whose likely killers include fascist French-Algerian colons, the apartheid South African Bureau of State Security, and the Abu Nidal Organization.