Tag: Africa

In the wake of childbirth and postpartum complications affecting her mental health and her marriage, Ukamaka Olisakwe picks herself up and starts over — in grad school.

Closed borders and closed minds are trapping African LGBTI asylum seekers in hostile countries.

“Like, wow. This is another family I have found.”

“I joke that this is the great Zambian novel you didn’t know you were waiting for.”

Man Booker winner Marlon James immersed himself in African myths and history, so he could use that world as a springboard for a new fantasy series.

As Joy Notoma grapples with uterine fibroids, harmful biases in the medical establishment, and a move from Brooklyn to West Africa she wonders where, as a black woman, she can find safety.

Under the Trump administration, African immigrants are experiencing increasing deportations, though these deportees receive less media attention than deportees from Mexico and Central America.

After a trip to Durban, Chibundu Onuzo discovers that Nigerians are not always popular with South Africans, and that where some black South Africans see a history of oppression, Nigerians see opportunity.

Rachel Pieh Jones, a Christian American living in Djibouti, reflects on her friendship with a Muslim woman there, and the more universal aspects of faith.

As climate change dries Central Africa’s massive Lake Chad, extremists and militant governments distrupt the lives of the tribes who once made their life here.

“For me it’s about recognizing that great art comes in all kinds of forms.”

Under the Global Gag Rule, medical professionals cannot counsel a woman to seek an abortion — even in cases where it will save her life.

Building a fashion empire in a country that’s still conservative about sexuality and female agency.

At Guernica, Katherina Grace Thomas turns a lens on the years Nina Simone spent in Liberia in the mid-1970s.

Taiye Selasi, Yaa Gyasi, and Toyin Ojin Odutola expand notions of blackness with layered, nuanced artwork.

A small group of park rangers help protect Congo’s wetlands from poachers and smugglers.

South African students of color are working to improve the conditions of education in a country that, twenty years after apartheid, is still rigged for the white minority.

When a West African symbol vanishes, its loss is felt in the ocean — and on land.

In her essay in Pacific Standard, Rahawa Haile writes about identity, the anxiety of origins, and the search for a grounded life in unstable, isolating locales. Born to Eritrean parents, Haile grew up in Miami, Florida, speaking English and Tigrinya in a low land of built of hurricane deposits that felt doomed to rising sea levels. […]

But the Maasai of Loliondo are not alone in disputing these supposed benefits. Worldwide, 8 million square miles—a landmass almost as large as the entire African continent—have been classified as protected areas by governments and conservation groups. In turn, the locals have mostly been pushed off their lands. Though no one formally counts people displaced […]

Yes, I remember: boiling leaves to eat; rubbing leaves on your skin because you have no soap; crushing leaves under your arms so that you don’t smell bad. Leaves and dirt, sticks and rocks: these are the only things a refugee can count on. Even if the exiles go home, the average wage in Liberia […]

The key to solving hunger in Africa starts with improving the soil. An overview of agricultural subsidies and the debate over whether the best approach is through inorganic fertilizers or greener, cheaper (but more difficult) solutions like no-till farming: Fertilizer use in Africa is at the mercy of precarious politics. Although Rwanda’s fertilizer programme is […]

Africa is changing—but when it comes to conflict, the battles are smaller, messier and not necessarily driven by a specific purpose: This is the story of conflict in Africa these days. What we are seeing is the decline of the classic wars by freedom fighters and the proliferation of something else—something wilder, messier, more predatory, […]