History
From the OAU to the AU Has the African Union Learned to Handle Conflicts Better?
In 60 years as the principal African organization, both as the OAU and the AU, the African Union has been tasked with managing a wide range of conflicts on the continent. The AU has made great strides in diverging from the position of the OAU on peacekeeping intervention. But efforts are all it will remain if the AU does not deal with the holdbacks that hindered the OAU. Read More...
Ethiopian Dream Marcus Garvey, Ethiopia and the Founding of the OAU
Leading up to the founding of the Organization of African Unity in 1963 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia emerged as an unlikely progenitor of the unprecedented moment. Ethiopia’s rise to the forefront of pan-Africanism was sustained by the influence of Black consciousness in the African diaspora, culminating with the far-reaching activism of Jamaica’s Marcus Garvey. Read More...
Concerning Violence How Frantz Fanon Might Interpret Today’s France
Over the last few weeks, France has seen unrest at the death of Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old boy of Moroccan and Algerian origin shot and killed by police officers in a Paris suburb. The events dawn on the 98th birthday of Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist who, educated in Paris, spent a critical part of his life in Algeria supporting its nationalist liberation movement against France, seeing the revolution as a ‘bridgehead’ of a pan-African vision. Read More...
The Artist of Beauty and Mystery Ben Enwonwu’s Indelible Mark on African Art
Ben Enwonwu’s impact on post-colonial African Art was nothing short of revolutionary. His life and work were a bridge between traditional conceptions of African art, and contemporary interpretations of what it means to be an African artist within a global community. Read More...
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...
