Hopium kills but hope seeds
Reflections on Trump’s 2024 US presidential victory.
14 Articles by:
Dan Magaziner
Dan Magaziner is a professor of history at Yale University.
Marikana and the end of South African exceptionalism
South Africa’s problems are no longer specific to the apartheid legacy, but about more global issues of poverty and inequality.
Kwame Nkrumah and decolonial imagination
Historian Jeffrey Ahlman talks with Dan Magaziner about Nkrumahism’s shifting forms, and its influence on contemporary decolonization movements.
The work of historical fiction
How does it differ from straight-forward history? What are the limits and possibilities of the genre?
“We Are All Many Things”
South African creatives of Muslim background interact matter-of-factly with their social identity. An interview with playwright and novelist Nadia Davids.
Mind Your Own Business
Dan Magaziner gets to shake the hand of Paul Kagame, a man many consider a dictator at best and a war criminal at worst.
Racial nationalism and the political imagination
The little-known story of how US-based Pan Africanists responded to white racism and a corrupt school system by founding their own schools in the 1960s and 1970s.
Love, race and history in Ghana
Historian Carina Ray on her book that explores the history of interracial intimacy in the Gold Coast and Ghana.
We Are Called Those Who Have Come
The fearlessness with which South African students confront their society’s contradictions, suggests much more than fees may fall.
Apartheid’s Revenge
The ethno-nationalism that marked apartheid’s dying days has now morphed into a malignant “nativism” that threatens post-apartheid democracy.
Tata Mandela
The Mandela Capture Memorial in Howick, Kwazulu Natal speaks eloquently to the essential truth: that in South Africa, some families mattered more than other.
Counting bodies and column inches
The Pistorius’ murder trial is a good time to review how New York Times reported on another South African killing: Marikana.
Marcus Garvey’s Africa
The historian Robert Vinson explores Garvey’s influence in South Africa in the 1920s and 1930s.
We write what we like about Steve Biko
What does it mean for a dead man to live through us, as we chant his name and claim him?