The July 2011 viral video from the University of Benin and its violent aftermath reveal how “lesbian” sex, digital voyeurism, and so-called corrective rape become public sites for contesting sexual citizenship and personhood in Nigeria. Through digital circulation, intimate queer pleasure is transformed into moral evidence, rendering embodied aliveness perilous under conditions of surveillance and communal judgment. Grounded in online commentary and Igbo moral philosophy, the concept of mmadu (personhood) illuminates how visibility authorizes discipline and extrajudicial violence, reframing queer pleasure not as transgressive resistance but as a condition of personhood itself.

Women’s labor in African urban centers permeates every sphere of urban life, yet its full scope remains understated in scholarly accounts. Akinwole introduces “holistic articulation” as a method for reading African women’s discursive labor. Holistic articulation names an analytical strategy of linking discursive fragments about women’s labor across multiple archives: social history, African literature, popular journalism, mythography, and everyday expressions. By tracing these connections, holistic articulation highlights the breadth of African women’s space-making and performative labor. This approach extends existing frameworks for analyzing African women’s labor by foregrounding its discursive and imaginative dimensions.

In Zambia, religious nationalists exploit legal and policy ambiguities to construct abortion and LGBTI+ rights as un-Zambian and un-Christian. This delegitimization narrows the scope of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) to family planning. Drawing on forty-five in-depth interviews with Zambian stakeholders and international aid officials, we argue that while these ambiguities constrain reproductive justice, they also allow activists to advance SRHR by building coalitions that connect advocacy for abortion rights, LGBTI+ rights, and reproductive justice to promote health service access and bodily autonomy for all. In Zambia and elsewhere, such activism and coalition building merit greater attention and support.

In South Sudan, the rumor that the Murle people suffer from infertility evolved into a politically instrumental myth used to justify child abduction, securitization, and systemic exclusion. Rooted in colonial misrepresentations, the claim pathologizes Murle reproduction and legitimizes violence. Drawing on ethnography and archival, medical, and humanitarian sources, the article conceptualizes this narrative as a rumor-myth: a necropolitical discourse that transforms speculation into governance. Though lacking evidence, the infertility narrative endures through repetition and political utility. Counter-oral histories challenge these racialized fictions, revealing how communities contest exclusion and expose the broader structures of power that sustain scapegoating, violence, and inequality.

Washington’s leverage over political and military actors in post-Bashir Sudan has been limited. There is little agreement on whether this results from changing international and regional geopolitics, America’s foreign policy priorities and its miscalculations, or a combination of all these factors. Moving beyond these explanations, I argue that the US approach remained deeply shaped by long-standing dilemmas in its democracy promotion doctrine, bureaucratic dynamics, and the decline in domestic advocacy. Understanding these variables contributes to broader debates on US Africa policy and to democracy promotion scholarship by foregrounding domestic drivers and the limits of external support for democratic transitions.

This essay examines the challenges and possibilities of mobilizing the African Diaspora as the African Union’s “6th Region,” drawing on the author’s diplomatic experience as Ghana’s Ambassador to Brazil accredited to twelve South American states. Using the Sankofa symbol as a conceptual framework, the paper explores the historical complexity of the African Diaspora, distinguishing among multiple diasporic formations shaped by migration, exile, and the transatlantic slave trade. It assesses institutional tensions between diaspora communities, civil society organizations, and formal structures of the African Union, in relation to the Pan-African Congresses and nation-state representation, arguing for stronger transnational engagement, institutional clarity, and sustained educational and cultural exchange to strengthen Global African solidarity.

Project a Black Planet: Art and Culture of Panafrica was co-organized by the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) and MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, in collaboration with KANAL-Centre Pompidou Bruxelles. The exhibition, held at the Art Institute of Chicago, ran from December 15, 2024 to March 30, 2025 and was curated by Antawan I. Byrd, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Adom Getachew, and Matthew S. Witkovsky. It was partly funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), a relevant detail within the context of my viewing.

African historiography is most persuasive when it refuses to let the state’s archive dictate the story of the nation. Across the last two decades, historians and historical anthropologists have widened the evidentiary field beyond bureaucratic texts—toward oral histories, ritual grammars, sacred ecologies, newspapers, vernacular maps, and the grainy everyday of rumor and reputation. This scholarly review exemplifies that methodological turn while voicing a shared theoretical wager: African political and social life is not best explained by models of institutional consolidation but by moral economies, spatial counter-imaginaries, and religious idioms through which communities fashion accountability and meaning.

After nearly two decades of documenting Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s life and work, this reflection situates my conversations with him within a broader canvas—one that allows us to hear him in dialogue with fellow writers, activists, and global artists.