Africa Archives - Public Seminar

Colonization

Frantz Fanon and Africa’s Postcolonial Predicament

A plea for a blank slate and a new beginning

October 9, 2025 • by Kwach Abonyo

Of all the ways Frantz Fanon has been misinterpreted, none is more persistent or consequential than the misunderstanding of his theory of violence. His reflections, especially as represented in The Wretched of the Earth, have drawn intense debate and condemnation, particularly from liberal and post-Enlightenment humanist circles. Among his most notable ...

Frantz Fanon and Africa’s Postcolonial Predicament

Colonization

How My Grandmother Ceased to Be African

How East African Asians have been written out of African history

May 11, 2022 • by Shivani Somaiya

And in the pre-independence era, a new racial politics emerged, one that has, for far too long, encapsulated much of East Africa’s postcolonial thought, in which families like ours were increasingly depicted as foreigners to a place that had long been our home....

History

Promise and Peril: Mass Vaccination in Colonial Africa

How a yellow fever vaccine in French West Africa may have killed thousands

April 21, 2021 • by Aro Velmet

_____ In 1944, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) mandated that all travelers arriving in regions where yellow fever was endemic should be inoculated against the disease. Two immunization options were on offer: a vaccine developed by the American Rockefeller Foundation, known as 17-D, or one with a ”French ...

Promise and Peril: Mass Vaccination in Colonial Africa

Climate & Ecology

Chimpanzee Culture Wars

Cultural primatology in the Anthropocene

October 20, 2020 • by Nicolas Langlitz

Photo Credit: Observing chimpanzee cultures in the wild, Bossou, Guinea / Nicolas Langlitz ————— As the culture wars became more heated in the 1980s, significant parts of American cultural anthropology broke ties with evolutionary anthropology. Supposedly, the evolutionists’ Panglossian perspective regarded human life as perfectly adapted and thereby naturalized the status quo ...

Public Health

The Hidden Structural Racism in the American Response to Public Health Emergencies

Facing a disproportionate death rate among Black people from COVID-19, President Trump shrugs: “What, me, worry?”

July 23, 2020 • by R. Drew Smith

When faced with emerging epidemics related to HIV/AIDS in the 1970s, to crack cocaine in the 1980s, to Ebola in 2014 and 2018, the U.S. government was slow to intervene on behalf of homosexual populations, or urban poor populations, or African populations, who respectively were most-affected by those public health ...

The Hidden Structural Racism in the American Response to Public Health Emergencies

Feature

Learning to Hate Shakespeare

What are the implications of being engaged with Shakespeare at the expense of what could otherwise be regarded as a black or African authenticity?

June 17, 2019 • by Jordan Mubako

Looking at Literature syllabi across former British colonies, Shakespeare has persisted to this day. The recent syllabus from the West African Examinations Council (including countries like Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone) has Othello as a compulsory text, with Shakespeare granted equal status as “Non-African Drama” and “African Drama.” Paper 3 of the ...

Feature

Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto

An Excerpt

January 30, 2018 • by Bryan W. Van Norden

The following article is an edited excerpt from Chapter 1 of ‘ Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto’(2017), by Bryan W Van Norden, with a foreword by Jay L Garfield, published by Columbia University Press. The canon of mainstream philosophy in the Anglo-European world is narrow-minded, unimaginative, and even xenophobic. I know ...

Feature

Patriot Soldiers from Sh*thole Countries

Remembering African-American and Haitian soldiers in the American Revolution

January 29, 2018 • by Zara Anishanslin

Just over a week ago, it was reported that President Trump referred to Haiti and Africa as “sh**hole” countries, suggesting that immigrants from both places were undesirable. It seems timely to remember that thousands of Patriot soldiers of African descent from both America and Haiti helped the United States win its war of ...

Patriot Soldiers from Sh*thole Countries

Feature

Translating Non-Western Philosophy

Barriers to philosophical research in the Global South

January 25, 2018 • by Ryan M. Nefdt

Philosophy is an all-encompassing discipline. As a field of inquiry, it has both direct and indirect foci. The latter often involves engaging with other fields, e.g. the philosophy of physics, or biology, psychology etc. The former, on the other hand, aims directly at the human condition. Questions of consciousness, agency, ...

Feature

Sing the Rage

Listening to Anger after Mass Violence

July 27, 2017 • by Sonali Chakravarti

The words of Godfrey Xolile Yona, who appeared before the TRC in October 1996, exemplify the type of testimony that is the catalyst for my thinking about the significance of anger in testimony after mass violence and its relationship to restorative justice. Detained for his involvement with the anti-apartheid organization ...

Uncategorized

Africa contra Hegel

September 24, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

There was once a fantasy, shared by left and right alike, that the states of the under-developed world could come, whether by leaps or by steps, to approximate those of the so-called developed world, as if they represented some kind of historical destiny. This idea belongs to what one might ...