I’m asking you to vote for a true global feminist revolution My Oxford Union talk is live. What a great honour it was. I wanted to use the opportunity to not only address the debate but to also make a case for a conscientious and critically conscious global feminism that “smashes the patriarchy”. I admit…
Post-Brexit, time to question neocolonialism.
The arguments that Africa will be worse off post-Brexit are everywhere. To give just a few examples, Foreign Policy writes that “Brexit Is Bad News for Africa. Period.” Newsweek explains “Why Brexit is bad for Africa.” Quartz is all doom and gloom in “Afrexit – Brexit will be terrible for Africa’s largest economies. While the titles…
Future Forward – Lights, Camera, Africa Film Festival
I’m excited to share that I am a media partner with the Lights, Camera, Africa Film Festival with the theme: Future Forward. The 5th edition of the festival is taking place from 30 September, 2015 to 4 October, 2015 at Federal Palace Hotel, Lagos, Nigeria. The aim of the partnership is to expose African and global audiences to quality independent African cinema…
When Obama addressed the African Onion
In his sales pitch aka his “address to the African Union” last week, US president Barack Obama gave Africans a worse deal than Amazon.com, Inc. gives book publishers on any given day. Obama’s pitch was pally, persuasive and punchy as any skilled salesperson’s. Terms like ‘partnership’, ‘development’, ‘co-operation’ and ‘opportunity’ were abundantly used. But make no mistake, its intention was…
Intellectual development is as important as economic development
If I could change only one thing when it comes to African affairs, it would be that we focus on intellectual development as much as we focus on economic development. I made this argument, among others, in an interview with Charles Aniagolu on “Talking Africa”, ARISE TV’s weekly programme on current affairs last week. Check it out below….
Oyalogy – a poetic approach to African feminism
On April 1st 2003, Leymah Gbowee, an activist who would later win the Nobel Peace Prize, learnt that fighting was nearing Monrovia, her country’s capital. There were clashes between rebels and then president Charles Taylor, and the scheduled presidential elections seemed increasingly unlikely to take place. Distressed, Gbowee began to make calls to her colleagues at WIPNET, the…
Afropolitanism and identity politics
I presented a radio essay “Afropolitanism – the cosmopolitanism that focuses on Africa” for Swedish Radio’s culture and ideas programme, OBS P1. You can listen to my reading here but it is in Swedish. I am sharing a translation below with some edits for clarity. Cosmopolitanism – the idea that people are both citizens of the world at…
The paintings of Manuela Sambo
Manuela Sambo’s art makes me feel the same way that Yvonne Vera’s novels do. Her pieces make me (longingly) identify with a kind of primal power that women possess but, following centuries of brainwashing, that we are unaccustomed with. Like Vera’s, Sambo’s work seems to be in search of a world of poetic essence, caring deeply…
On Afropolitanism and westernisation
While reading Olufemi Taiwo’s book “Africa Must Be Modern”, I came across the following: It is almost required of an African intellectual that she or he be hostile to modernity and it suppositions. It is almost as if an African like me who deliberately embraces modernity as a way of life that promises at the…
African Cosmopolitanism part I
At the 15th summit of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1978, then Lieut. General Olusegun Obasanjo said, “no African nation is about to embrace communism wholesale any more than we are willing to embrace capitalism.” In 2013 such a statement seems alien. Rejecting capitalism is not a real option for African nations, right?…