Counterpoints
ARI recently launched COUNTERPOINTS, a new series which aims to present critical accounts of defining ideas in and about Africa.
Whodunnit in Southern Africa
7th July 2011Detective fiction has long been popular in Southern Africa. African writers have embraced and adapted detective narratives which have come to perform a variety of aesthetic, social and cultural functions. Thrillers offer complex insights into how a...
Talking gender to Africa
7th July 2011International donors have sought to improve the social, political and economic position of women in Africa through an approach known as “gender”. This donor-driven strategy is failing. The jargon of gender programmes is ambigu...
Voices of disquiet on the Malawian airwaves
7th July 2011Human Rights NGOs are considered vanguards in the struggle against injustice and authoritarianism in Africa. But their narrow focus on civil and political rights neglects widely held economic grievances. In Malawi, an audience-driven radio programme ...
Why Africa can make it big in agriculture
8th July 2010Self-sufficiency in food production is the new mantra of donors and policymakers in Africa. But farmers, large and small, can be much more ambitious. Agriculture is the continent’s most neglected – and important – potential competit...
How intellectuals made history in Zimbabwe
8th July 2010The history of Zimbabwe has been revised in the service of the governing ZANU-PF party. A ‘patriotic’ version of history, disseminated by public intellectuals and state media, has distorted legitimate grievances. Critics of patriotic hist...
Africa through my television
8th July 2010The BBC’s three-part series Welcome to Lagos was widely praised, and criticised. Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka castigated the “colonialist idea of the noble savage which motivated the programme”. The stories collected on a rubbish dum...
