Leila Aboulela and Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, although from two different faith traditions, use fiction as a conduit to re-affirm these faith traditions, one Muslim, and the other Christian.
Kiswahili has the potential to forge strong trading ties between the people of eastern, central and southern Africa and to promote cultural cohesion. If widely promoted in these regions, the language can single-handedly remove the artificial barriers and boundaries imposed by imperial powers.
Prof. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza celebrates the life of his friend and mentor Thandika Mkandawire, remembering his devotion to Pan-Africanism and the diaspora, his deep sense of globalism, his lifelong and unromantic commitment to progressive causes, his generosity in mentoring younger African scholars and his unwavering faith in Africa's historic and humanistic agency and possibilities.
A.K KAIZA, one of the writers who worked with the late Mohinder Dhillon on his autobiography, My Camera, My Life, recalls the special moments he shared with this remarkable cameraman.
Kenya’s hip hop scene has been nothing but a graveyard of mixtapes which, while offering a glimpse of spirit and experimentation, deny listeners the beauty of intention, coherence, and completeness. Testimony 1990 is a New Age album, warm and optimistic. It does not lament. It chronicles contemporary challenges besetting a young man in Nairobi.
African mother tongue languages are increasingly being abandoned, with sub-Saharan Africa being one of the regions with the most endangered languages. But the solution will not come from simply promulgating policy. The “African society” must hold conversations with itself and overhaul its value system, because language is culture, and culture is empty without its set of values and truths.
Stanley Gazemba sets out to unveil the myths that surround bullfighting, a sport with a huge following among the Kisa, Idakho, Isukha, Banyore and Batsotso sub-tribes of the greater Luhya community, and meets with grizzled veterans of this popular blood sport.
The fears the epidemic has stoked have far outpaced its spread, and discussion of the disease’s politics, for better or worse, often outweighs that of epidemiology. Its ripple effects are familiar to anyone in a diaspora: negotiating how much distance to put between yourself and your origin—“origin” being that which others perceive it to be, and what ills they perceive it to embody.
Kisumu is not alone in using street names as a form of resistance, as a way of refusing to forget. The naming of streets in Kenya can be used as a form of symbolic resistance and as a locus for collective memory expressing group identity.
A story of an unlikely friendship, a chronicle of the final years of the late Kenyan writer Binyavanga’s life, from the perspective of a former student activist discovered on the brink of despair and mentored into a writer.
Award-winning American jazz singer/song-writer of East African ancestry, Somi, was in Lagos to work on her seventh studio album which will be released in the summer of 2020. Nigerian doctor, poet and music critic, Dami Ajayi caught up with Somi for Sunday brunch.
The best efforts to find a successor to the hugely successful African Writers Series have so far failed to bear fruit while the indigenisation of the book trade has seen the neglect of the African writer of fiction, with local publishers preferring the financial safety of educational publishing. The only alternative for a writer wishing to see their work in print is to seek to publish abroad, a road fraught with a myriad challenges where talent alone does not guarantee success.
