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International Affairs

Nairobi

Nairobi in a Song A Boy, His Father, and Old Tunes

‘To Kenyans, 2023 feels like the year the country dies. But within this Rhumba and Jazz establishment in Nairobi’s Tao, it could as well be 1970,’ Ogwa writes. ‘Perched behind a corner table with two cold bottles of beer sweating before me, I pass a quintessential moment, watching folks of all ages waltz elegantly to Cabo Verde Barefoot Diva, Cesária Évora’s “Partida”... For me, old music is not just entertainment, it’s a compass with which I always find my way back to me.’
February/March 2024Kenya
Nigerian Student

The Unseen Struggles of a Nigerian Student in the UK Gig Economy From 80-Hour Work Weeks to Fatherhood

In the aftermath of Brexit, the UK experienced a notable shift in migration patterns, attracting previously eschewed non-EU citizens, especially those from former colonies like Nigeria. But this opportunity is a double-edged sword, with immigrants having to resort to illegal employment—at great physical, psychological and legal risk—to cope with the high costs of living.
February/March 2024
Afro-Complicity United Nations

Afro-complicity in the United Nations ‘They Are Not a Part of Us’

What Robert A. Wood, Ralph Bunche and Linda Thomas-Greenfield represent is known in the discourse of African ontology as Black complicity—Afro-complicity, if you please. This is a distinct kind of complicity reified when a Black person tries to dispel racist oppressive hegemonic constructs but due to his inability to be critical of the underlying subtleties of Black stereotypes, he ends up becoming the instrument for its advancement.
AfricaFebruary/March 2024
Israel

To Be in the World: Notes Against Forgetting A Case for New African Internationalist Politics

Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine has unveiled and deepened ideological divides in debates about state power and the use of violence; ethnonationalism and the ‘right to exist’; mass mobilization and solidarities across difference. At the heart of these debates is a growing awareness of the limits of Western liberal democracy and a call for new vocabularies and frameworks for political action that echo and extend Black internationalist and Third-Worldism movements of the twentieth century.
AfricaBest of 2023: EssaysOctober/November 2023