Theme: Africa
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All over east-central Africa, for several centuries, there has been tension between two ways of life that have also been two human silhouettes: the tall, graceful cattle-people and the shorter, sturdier agriculturalists. They have different names in different places, but in Rwanda and Burundi they are the Tutsi and the Hutu.Read more
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“Africa” has also been a fetish in Western imaginations, and for far longer than the atom bomb. Savage and starving, inferior and infantile, superstitious and corrupt—the list of pejoratives goes on and on. The image of Africans as irrational took root in the Enlightenment and took off during the imperialism that followed. Europeans built political philosophies premised on the radical Otherness of Africans.Read more
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She appears to me, as if in a dream. Ordinarily I would have said it was a nightmare. My relationship with nature has never been good; not just not close to for that already presumes a certain proximity. As far as I was concerned, nature is best experienced behind a glass panel; air-conditioning and a glass of wine de rigueur.Read more
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Carl Zimmer on sleeping sicknesses and South Sudan. Read more
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Tonight is a drunk man, his dirty shirt. Read more
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I am at work on a book about Lagos, a non-fictional narrative. Why Lagos? It is the biggest city in Africa, and the fastest growing in the world. And it was my home for seventeen years, from infancy until I finished high-school.Read more
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Nearly two-thirds of West Africa’s remaining rainforests are in the small but troubled nation of Liberia. That is a small miracle. A decade ago, Liberia’s forests were being stripped bare by warlords to fund a vicious 14-year civil war that left 150,000 dead.Read more
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It is an interesting event when two entirely different travelling cultures encounter each other. During my anthropological fieldwork among the Mursi in South-western Ethiopia I was interested in discovering what the local people think about the tourists that they meet.Read more
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Arguably Africa’s finest filmmaker, Ousmane Sembene remains largely unknown outside of the film community. A talented group of artists is trying to change that. Read more
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There is already a considerable scholarship on alcohol in South Africa, which in many ways has guided the development of academic work on alcohol elsewhere in Africa.Read more
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At the time, some analysts suggested that the westward shift of conflict towards Darfur was no accident, insofar as the Khartoum regime was using war as a machine for survival. War, after all, kept the government’s armies busy and provided a means for co-opting potentially restless groupsRead more
