Africa
Story Stream
Africa and the History of Civilization July 18, 2024
In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837), Georg Hegel declared that Africa is “no historical part of the World” and that “what we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of m...
Love in the Time of Sickle Cell Disease July 19, 2023
Subomi Mabogunje fell for Nkechi Egonu within hours of meeting her in 2004, in his hometown of Ijebu- Ode, a trading hub in southwest Nigeria. They worked at a state-run broadcast TV station, thrown together by the National Youth Service Corps. He wa...
Bringing the Bacchae to the Bush May 25, 2023
“To me, education based on no Latin is a house built on stilts.” This admirable statement, drawn from early in this new book, was made not by some moth-eaten Classics master desperate for custom. Instead, it is a quotation from Dr Hastings Kamuzu Ban...
King Hochschild’s Hoax May 11, 2023
For the past 25 years, the idea of the Congo has been closely linked in the Western imagination to the 1998 book King Leopold’s Ghost by the American journalist Adam Hochschild. The book is widely assigned in high schools and colleges, and it regular...
When Race Mattered Less November 06, 2020
Among the private drawings of the great Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer are two moving likenesses of African Europeans – so vivid and timeless you half expect them to look up and come to life. In Nuremberg in 1508, he sketched a young man with a sm...
Bred to Be Killed October 13, 2020
Lions are special. The king of beasts, they are at the top of the list of must-see animals for many visiting Africa. But, as Michael Ashcroft relates in Unfair Game, some lions in South Africa are treated in a way that has little regard for nobility....
The Deep Anthropocene October 07, 2020
Humanity’s transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is one of the most important developments in human and Earth history. Human societies, plant and animal populations, the makeup of the atmosphere, even the Earth’s surface – all were irr...
Africa's Lost Kingdoms June 28, 2019
There is a broad strain in Western thought that has long treated Africa as existing outside of history and progress; it ranges from some of our most famous thinkers to the entertainment that generations of children have grown up with. There are Disne...
Africa's Lost Kingdoms June 10, 2019
There is a broad strain in Western thought that has long treated Africa as existing outside of history and progress; it ranges from some of our most famous thinkers to the entertainment that generations of children have grown up with. There are Disne...
Joseph Conrad and the Dawn of Globalization May 25, 2018
“I am glad you've read the Heart of D. tho' of course it's an awful fudge,” Joseph Conrad wrote to Roger Casement in late 1903. Casement, an Irish diplomat working for the British Foreign Office, had just returned to London from Belgium's African col...
Top 10 Books Based in Tangier March 31, 2018
From William Burroughs's Naked Lunch to Paul Bowles's translations of Moroccan authors, here are the best novels set in the city......
