Africa Past & Present » Podcast Feed

Dr. Claudia Gastrow (Anthropology, North Carolina State University) on her new book, The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda (University of North Carolina Press, 2024). Dr. Gastrow reflects on her winding path from South Africa to Switzerland, Angola, and the United States. The conversation then delves into the main thrust of the book, doing r[…]

Dr. Benjamin Talton (Director, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University) on his eclectic intellectual journey as an historian of Africa and the Diaspora. The interview begins with a discussion of his early work on ethnicity and politics in northern Ghana and then turns to his award-winning book, In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics. In the fin[…]

Afis Ayinde Oladosu (Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of Ibadan) on being and becoming Muslim in Nigeria and Africa. Dr. Oladosu reflects on his journey to academia, positionality at Ibadan, and experiences as a Gates Fellow in the U.S. He then discusses his MSU African Studies Center seminar presentation and comments on the role of religion in Nigerian politics. The i[…]

Lauren Jarvis (History, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) on her new book, A Prophet of the People: Isaiah Shembe and the Making of a South African Church (Michigan State University Press, 2024). Dr. Jarvis discusses the remarkable life of Shembe, the building of a religious community of people left behind by industrial capitalism, strategies of evasion, and the key role of women […]

Michelle Sikes (Kinesiology, African Studies and History, Penn State University) on her new book, Kenya’s Running Women: A History (Michigan State University Press, 2023). The conversation begins with Sikes's journey from NCAA champion and professional runner to Rhodes scholar and academic. She then delves into the book's main arguments and sources and methods. Sikes elaborates on women[…]

Neo Lekgotla laga Ramoupi (History, University of the Free State) on his new book, Cultural Resistance on Robben Island: Songs of Struggle and Liberation in South Africa (Skotaville 2024). After discussing the genesis of his scholarly interests, Dr. Ramoupi describes prisoners’ music— instruments, genres, styles—and its impact on surviving apartheid’s harshest prison. He then refl[…]

Peter Mark (Emeritus, Art history, Wesleyan Univ.) on his personal and scholarly journeys through precolonial Mande worlds. He shares insights from decades of experience working with an eclectic range of primary sources and archives. He then discusses the history of a Portuguese Jewish diaspora in Senegal and Afro-European identities. The interview closes with Mark’s preview of his late[…]

Marissa Moorman (Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison, African Cultural Studies) on Angolan social history and media studies. We discuss the evolving trajectory of her scholarship, research in southern Africa and Portugal, and her latest book, Powerful Frequencies: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931–2002. The interview features a musical interlude (courtesy of Paulo Flores). It […]

Historian Jessica Marie Johnson (Johns Hopkins Univ.) digs into her award-winning new book, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World. The conversation brings out how Black women in Senegambia, the Caribbean, and Louisiana devised ways to gain control over parts of their lives and defined freedom for themselves in the age of slavery and the slave trade. The in[…]

Dr. Gerard Akindes discusses his experience playing and coaching basketball in West Africa and Europe, and the new Basketball Africa League. He considers the role of “electronic colonialism” in the sport media landscape and then reflects on his work advancing African scholarship through research publications and through Sports Africa, a coordinate organization of the U.S. African Stud[…]

Dr. Chambi Chachage (Princeton) discusses his intellectual journey from Dar es Salaam to Cape Town, Edinburgh, and Cambridge, Mass., his book manuscript on the history of Black entrepreneurs in Dar, and the changing role of digital humanities in the field of African studies. The interview concludes with Chachage’s insights on the controversial recent elections in Tanzania.[…]

Cherif Keita (French and Francophone Studies, Carleton College) reflects on his life as a scholar from Mali and on his documentary films about John Langalibalele Dube and Nokutela Dube, founding figures of the African National Congress of South Africa. The interview closes with a discussion of musician Salif Keita’s journey from social outcast (as an albino) in Mande society to icon of […]

Kim Yi Dionne (Political Science, UC Riverside) on her recent book, Doomed Interventions: The Failure of Global Responses to AIDS in Africa; the controversial May 2019 elections in Malawi, where she served as an observer; and hosting the Ufahamu Africa podcast and co-editing the Monkey Cage politics blog at the Washington Post. Follow her on Twitter at @dadakim.[…]

Elizabeth Schmidt (History, Loyola Maryland) on her activist beginnings and professional trajectory as an historian, first of Shona women in colonial Zimbabwe and later of Guinea’s independence movement. The second part of the interview focuses on Schmidt’s recent books on foreign intervention in Africa since 1945—a complex story driven by multiple geopolitical and economic interest[…]

Didier Gondola (IUPUI, History and Africana Studies) on his book, Tropical Cowboys: Westerns, Violence, and Masculinity in Kinshasa. He reflects on how Hollywood Westerns shaped a performative young urban masculinity expressed through nicknames and slang, cannabis consumption, gender violence, fashion, and sport. Gondola also offers insights on Jean Depara’s photography, the recent Demo[…]

Alex Thurston (Miami University) discusses his recent book, Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement. Taking local religious ideas and experiences seriously, Thurston sheds light on northeastern Nigeria and the main leaders of Boko Haram; relationships with the Islamic State; the conflict’s spread to Niger, Chad, and Cameroon; and US foreign policy in the region. The inte[…]

Msia Kibona Clark (African Studies, Howard University) on her new book, Hip-Hop in Africa: Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers. Clark describes how her personal passion became academic expertise. She highlights African women emcees and the role of local languages and Pan-African elements in the music. In the final part of the interview, Clark reflects on her Hip-Hop African po[…]

Cal Biruk (Oberlin, Anthropology) on the politics of knowledge production in African fieldwork. We talk about her new book, Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World, based on HIV and AIDS research in Malawi. The discussion explores the social and cultural cleaning (“cooking”) of survey data and its implications for demographers and the public. Biruk then draws a[…]

Bonny Ibhawoh (McMaster Univ.) and Christian Williams (U. Free State) on historicizing refugees in Africa. Looking at children evacuated from the Biafran War to Gabon and Ivory Coast, Ibhawoh discusses the politics of “refugee” labeling. Williams’s biography of a woman born in a SWAPO camp in exile in Tanzania shows how displaced people are agents of history, not just faceless victi[…]

David Coplan (Wits, Emeritus) takes us on a journey from New York to Soweto and into the making of his ethnographic studies of music and popular culture in West and South(ern) Africa. Coplan then turns to his recent book about The Bassline jazz club in Johannesburg. The interview concludes with insights from his new research on African borderlands and its contributions to global Border Th[…]