Africa
Algiers’ Pan-African Moment
After a brutal war of independence, Algeria sought to become a mecca for liberation movements across the African continent, welcoming all the “wretched of the Earth” to its capital for training and material support — from financing to arms.
A Lighthouse for Migrants
The route from Western Sahara to Spain’s Canary Islands has become the world's deadliest migratory crossing to Europe, mainly due to tighter controls in the Mediterranean. In the departure zones from the Sahara coast, a humanitarian nicknamed Papa Africa, like a lookout, strives to protect the lives of migrants.
Nairobi Gang Members Turn to Greenery to Change Their Lives and City
"Nature has saved a lot of youths who might have been killed.” In impoverished areas of Kenya’s capital, gang members are putting down their guns and instead creating green spaces in the urban jungle.
Two 19th-Century Tales of Muslims and American Slavery
Western scholarly approaches tend to approach African and Islamic studies in separate lenses: “too Islamic” to be a legitimate subject of study for most anthropologists and Africanists, and “too African” to be of interest to Islamicists, thereby causing African-Muslim scholarly voices to fall through the cracks.
The Bandit Warlords of Nigeria
Northwestern Nigeria is suffering from a devastating conflict that most observers are still struggling to characterize. The violence has received far less international attention than the jihadist insurgency in Nigeria’s northeast, perhaps in part because these militants defy easy categorization.
Nigeria’s Bandit Attacks Continue to Worsen a Humanitarian and Environmental Crisis
This year, hundreds of people have been killed or kidnapped by bandits. Governor Aminu Bello Masari, who spearheaded a failed amnesty deal with bandits, has come up with a new plan: He is now advising citizens to buy weapons in order to defend themselves.
In Search of African Arabic
For Africans, the use of Arabic presents a dilemma: Without the historical role of Arabic, African writers would have been compelled to write in former colonial languages, but many also view the language as the medium of the slave trade that preceded trans-Atlantic slavery. Still, not everything magnificent on the continent must have originated elsewhere.