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Does Zimbabwe’s new Constitution live up to women’s aspirations?
This weekend, Zimbabwe held a Constitutional referendum. And so Zimbabwe enjoyed yet another 15 seconds of international press attention. Turnout was reported as low. The public was as apathetic,...
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Welcome to Mali
Bamako airport (Photo by Glenna Gordon for everydayafrica.tumblr.com) Bamako doesn’t feel like the capital of a country at war. True, people are stressed, and the pace of life might have slowed. The...
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Chinua Achebe 1930-2013
Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered. As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings. – Things Fall Apart. It is not a surprise the amount of...
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Chinua Achebe The Writer Lives On
By Mukoma Wa Ngugi “Sir, I am very happy to finally meet you in person – I have read all your books,” a man gushed to my father, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o at the Jomo Kenyatta Airport, Nairobi. My father...
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The Dutch Media Drama
Guest Post by Martijn Kleppe Even though the Netherlands have been known for their tolerant attitude towards “immigrants”, the last couple of years have seen several debates about the role of those...
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The Trouble with the Dutch Commemoration of the Abolition of Slavery
On the first of July this year the Netherlands are commemorating the 150th anniversary of the abolishment of slavery in their former colonies Suriname and their dependencies: the Dutch Antilles. The...
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What has Steve Bantu Biko got to do with partying and spring in the Netherlands?
What has murdered Black Consciousness activist Steve Bantu Biko to do with the beginning of spring in the Netherlands? Don’t worry, you didn’t miss anything in school. Steve Biko has indeed nothing to...
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Afrique 3.0, Version 2.0
Flying back from Dakar and Bamako to my home near “Little Senegal,” I snatched up Courrier International’s special issue “Afrique 3.0″ while passing through Paris. Tom made a quick survey of it just...
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Chinua Achebe: A Poet of Global Encounters
The first time I met Chinua Achebe I had just started teaching at Bard College, where I had been hired as Director of Africana Studies. I saw Chinua one evening at a campus event and nervously...
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Madonna vs Joyce Banda: Celebrity Deathmatch (Philanthropy Edition)
We had been studiously avoiding coverage of Madonna’s latest trip to Malawi, but such is the deliciousness of the excoriating 11-point press release put out yesterday by Joyce Banda that we couldn’t...
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Weekend Special, N°1000
1. African Dosseh Ayamam becomes the first man to walk on Mars. 2. Charismatic Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie has a new novel which is about love, race and … “hair politics.” She is a natural...
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Apartheid in Manhattan: The International Center for Photography’s “Rise and...
The International Center for Photography (ICP) is located in the heart of Manhattan, at the corner of West 43rd Street and the Avenue of the Americas. Nearby, Times Square’s mirages—brilliant expanses...
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Big Brother Goodluck Jonathan
Late last year, we ran a piece on the documentary Fuelling Poverty, a 30 minute crash course on the politics, implications, and significance of #OccupyNigeria and the fuel subsidy protests of January...
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Empress of East Africa, Bi Kidude RIP
It was 2011 and we were preparing for TEDxDar. Behind schedule as always, we needed to get Bi Kidude, this iconic figure on our stage. We wanted to hear her voice and her story in an intimate way. We...
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Joyce Banda has bigger problems than Madonna
The historian Margery Perham once wrote that “the basic difficulty” with the British colonial technique of indirect rule, of which she was a major architect, was “the great gap between the culture of...
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Did Britain’s MI6 have Patrice Lumumba murdered?
Guest Post by Harry Stopes Africa is a Country readers may not regularly check the London Review of Books, a British literary magazine with a circulation just over 50,000–it’s meant more for...
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Aristide Zolberg and African Studies
In a 2010 interview, Aristide Zolberg—the pioneer Africanist political scientist who died on April 12 at the age of 81—described his early interest in the politics of a continent in the first throes...
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Football Referee of the Year
My knowledge of European club football doesn’t stretch much further beyond what gets posted here on Football is a Country and the odd link I come across on our Twitter feed (blame my wary interest on...
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The Master Drummer of Afrobeat
Tony Allen’s forthcoming book Tony Allen: An Autobiography of the Master Drummer of Afrobeat (Duke University Press, September 2013): “Tony Allen is the autobiography of legendary Nigerian drummer...
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Kamuzu Day and Malawi’s Festival of Forgetting
*By Jimmy Kainja* Last week we had a public holiday in Malawi. May 14 is “Kamuzu Day,” when the nation celebrates the life of its founding president, Hastings Kamuzu Banda whose autocratic rule lasted...
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