History
After the Golden Era Restoring Nigeria’s Foreign Policy Towards West Africa
Nigerian politics matter at home and abroad, particularly for West Africa. Likewise, West Africa’s stability or otherwise matters and has real implications for Nigeria. Unlike the Muhammadu Buhari administration, Nigeria’s next president cannot afford to neglect foreign policy in favour of an overemphasis on domestic issues. Read More...
Resisting Linguistic Genocide How Colonization Shaped Language in Guinea-Bissau
Colonization was an enterprise that not only administratively dominated the colonized territories by having exploited its resources illegitimately and illegally. In Guinea-Bissau as in other formerly colonized regions, colonization was, above all, also an act of cultural alienation of the natives, who saw their traditions belittled and ridiculed, their history suspended, and their languages the preserve of the most uneducated. Read More...
Black Mecca A Brief History of Black Islam from Africa to the Diaspora
By the second half of the twentieth century, Islam re-emerged as an ideological tool for African Americans fighting within civil rights and Black Power movements. Ironically, the proliferation of Black Islamic organizations in twentieth-century United States—most famously the Nation of Islam—often masks the gradual, centuries-long formation of said organizations, their ideologies, and their influence on modern Afro-diasporic identity. Read More...
Who Was Kenneth Onwuka Dike? Remembering the Father of Modern African Historiography
For Kenneth Onwuka Dike, history was a tool not only useful for discovering the past but also for planning the future. Dike is recognized for countering the Western claim that Africa lacked history because African societies relied on oral tradition as opposed to written records. Read More...
Against Wildlife Republics Conservation and Imperialist Expansion in Africa
In 1972, pan-Africanist and Marxist thinker from Guyana, Walter Rodney, warned of ‘Wildlife Republics’, calling attention to wildlife conservation in Africa as a new form of imperialist and capitalist exploitation. Today, conservation is still a pretext to dispossess local communities for imperialist expansion and capitalist development. Read More...
Feiridiwanali ei Gumugubei Andy Palacio and the Garifuna Revolution
The important role Palacio played in placing Garifuna culture on the world stage was on par with the pan-African legacies of musicians such as Bob Marley and Fela Kuti. Read More...
The End of Empire? Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II Has Died
Twenty-five when she became queen, Queen Elizabeth II’s reign saw a declining, brutal British Empire and declarations of independence that have continued till date in former British colonies across Africa and the African diaspora. Read more. Read More...
The Inevitability of Bola Ahmed Tinubu The Unsurprising Candidacy of APC’s Presidential Nominee
Convincing Nigerians to ignore the controversies of his past, his wealth and his choice of running mate will be the crowning achievement of Tinubu’s career—not becoming president. Read more Read More...
Abacha Returns (Again) Why the US is Returning $23 Million to Nigeria
In recent years, the recovery of Abacha-related funds has been a recurrent fixture in successive administrations. With Nigeria’s present economic challenges, many Nigerians believe the recovered funds may help improve affairs. Read more. Read More...
One Last Dance? Atiku Abubakar, PDP’s North Star
The journeys of PDP and Atiku, its two-time presidential flagbearer, are as interwoven as they are similar. The 2023 election will likely be their ‘last dance’ together, this author writes. Atiku has no doubt reshaped PDP, but have the years shown a match made in Heaven or a pairing doomed to fail? Read more Read More...