Category: Africa

  • Auschwitz to Rwanda: The link between science, colonialism and genocide Mail & Guardian Africa Johannesburg, South Africa 2017-02-01 Heike Becker Sixty years later, the recurrent connections of science and genocide still demonstrate the dark underbelly of Western modernity in Africa, Europe, and the world. (Reuters/Finbarr O’Reilly) Significant links connect racial science in colonial southern Africa…

  • President with a torpedo in his crotch: how the works of Lubaina Himid speak to Trump times The Guardian 2017-01-17 Hettie Judah Lubaina Himid among the cutouts of slaves that form her 2004 piece Naming the Money, at Spike Island contemporary art centre in Bristol. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt for the Guardian Born in Zanzibar and…

  • Shaken Out of Time: Black Bodies and Movement in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time Virginia Quarterly Review Volume 93, Number 1, Winter 2017 pages 196-199 Kaitlyn Greenidge Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont Swing Time By Zadie Smith, Penguin, 2016, 464p. HB, $27. Midway through Zadie Smith’s new novel, Swing Time, the unnamed narrator watches two girls walk…

  • Meet the Afro-Mexicans connecting to their African roots through dance Ventures Africa 2017-01-05 Iroegbu Chinaemerem Oti “Based on your culture, history, and traditions, do you consider yourself Black, meaning Afro-Mexican or Afro-descendant?” – MEXICO’S 2015 Intercensal Survey The sound of Bata drums filled the air as girls, with printed scarfs tied around their waists and white…

  • Race, Identity and the Making of Hashim Amla Africa Is A Country 2013-07-20 Niren Tolsi Hashim Amla has arrived. His back-lift to gully now appears the sort of lazy flourish that bored twelve-year-olds develop because they are staggeringly superior to their opposition, rather than the defect that presumed he wouldn’t cut it at international level…

  • The World of Zadie Smith: Mixed-Race People and Polychromatic Dreams The Wire 2017-01-11 Radhika Oberoi Swing Time like its predecessors is intensely curious about race, but it is also curious about so much more than race, such as Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Ali Baba Goes to Town and Michael Jackson. Cool Britannia, slickly marketed by Tony Blair’s…

  • How a mixed-race love affair between an African prince and an Englishwoman caused an international furore The Daily Telegraph Sydney, New South Wales, Australia 2016-12-16 Marea Donnelly, History writer Ruth Williams and her husband Prince Seretse Khama in London in 1949. ONE can only surmise as to whether bank clerk Ruth Williams and her Bechuanaland prince Seretse…

  • Uganda is worried about the number of Chinese men marrying their women Quartz Africa 2016-12-09 Lily Kuo Contractors, petty traders, investors, and entrepreneurs from China have been pouring into Uganda for the past decade. China is a top investor in the east African country, accounting for as much as half of total foreign investment between…

  • Word of Honour: Reclaiming Mandela’s Promise Chace Studios South Africa 2016 Color Running Time: 01:13:00 Kiersten Dunbar Chace, Producer, Director, Editor David Grant, Consultant/Writer In 1997, just prior to his departure from politics, President Nelson Mandela delivered an informal speech to a predominately mixed-race Coloured community in the Western Cape. He reassured them they had nothing…

  • What is the Black Atlantic? My Comparative Perspective Afro-Europe International Blog 2011-01-09 Sibo Kano Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1994) is a difficult read but it’s a very influential book. An author who builds further on Gilroy’s work and who writes very accessible books about blackness is Livio Sansone (professor of anthropology at the University of…