Pambazuka News is produced by a pan-African community of some 2,600 citizens and organisations - academics, policy makers, social activists, women's organisations, civil society organisations, writers, artists, poets, bloggers, and commentators who together produce insightful, sharp and thoughtful analyses and make it one of the largest and most innovative and influential web forums for social justice in Africa. 
literature
Government as a driver of migration
Angella Nabwowe
2011-07-27, Issue 541
cc S TUganda ‘is seeking to come up with a law that will make it impossible for sexual minorities, or even those who know about them, to live within the country. Consequently this is going to lead to an increase in the number of people seeking asylum based on their sexual orientation,’ writes Angella Nabwowe.
Manning Marable and the march towards a socialist America
Horace Campbell
2011-04-07, Issue 524
cc G LManning Marable, African American activist, scholar and author, passed away on April 1. Horace Campbell pays tribute to a man who dedicated his life to the struggle against oppression.
Manning Marable and Malcolm X
Michael Dyson, Bill Fletcher Jr
2011-04-07, Issue 524
cc WikipediaRenowned African American historian Manning Marable passed away on April 1 at the age of 60, days before the publication of his new biography of Malcolm X. Sociologist Michael Dyson and Bill Fletcher Jr, founder of the Black Radical Congress, discuss Marable’s legacy with Democracy Now! Watch the interview. Read the transcript.
The Dar es Salaam Renaissance
Chambi Chachage
2011-03-01, Issue 519
cc K Z‘Dar es Salaam is abuzz. It’s giving birth to a novel artistic landscape,’ says Chambi Chachage. ‘Well, at least new in scope.’
Pambazuka Samir Amin Award
2011-01-27, Issue 514
Pambazuka News is pleased to announce the call for submissions for the first annual Pambazuka Samir Amin Award. This award, launched to mark Samir Amin’s 80th birthday in 2011, pays tribute to the extraordinary contribution Samir Amin has made to our understanding of the exploitation of the peoples of Africa and the global South.
Pambazuka Press: New titles for 2011
2011-01-13, Issue 512
Pambazuka Press is pleased to announce the release of its new titles for 2011, available at www.pambazukapress.org.
Pambazuka Samir Amin Award
2011-01-13, Issue 512
Pambazuka News is pleased to announce the call for submissions for the first annual Pambazuka Samir Amin Award. This award, launched to mark Samir Amin’s 80th birthday in 2011, pays tribute to the extraordinary contribution Samir Amin has made to our understanding of the exploitation of the peoples of Africa and the global South.
'Go into the jungle of my mind'
Paperbacks, pictures and poetry
Sokari Ekine
2010-10-14, Issue 500
Inspired by the nomination of Ngugi Wa’Thiongo for this year’s Nobel Prize for literature, Sokari Ekine reviews a selection of Africa’s art, music and literary blogs.
African Women Writing Resistance
Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez, Pauline Dongala, Omotayo Jolaosho and Anne Serafin
2010-09-23, Issue 497
The following article is an extract from 'African Women Writing Resistance', which Pambazuka Press will be publishing in January 2011. For customers in Africa and Europe, the book is available at a special pre-publication price of £13.00 when ordering from our website, with orders to be fulfilled in January (customers in North America and India should please order from the University of Wisconsin Press website).
Achebe: A true master of the word
Review of Chinua Achebe’s ‘The Education of a British-Protected Child’
Peter Wuteh Vakunta
2010-01-21, Issue 466
Chinua Achebe’s latest book,‘The Education of a British-Protected Child’, a ‘compendium of seventeen skilfully written non-fictional pieces’, is an ‘acerbic lampoon on the propagation of colonial stereotypes via the medium of literature,' writes Peter Wuteh Vakunta.
Is Petina Gappah ashamed of being an African writer?
Chielo Zona Eze
2009-12-17, Issue 462
Petina Gappah isn’t betraying her roots by objecting to ‘being labelled the voice of Zimbabwe’, Chielo Zona Eze writes in this week’s Pambazuka News, she just doesn’t want to be pigeon-holed into the ‘transcendental role of saving the African, by telling his or her story’.
Cote d'Ivoire: Request for country condition research and expert advice
2009-05-28, Issue 435
The Hong Kong Refugee Advice Centre Ltd.(HKRAC) is assisting a male, Muslim asylum claimant from central Cote d'Ivoire with family origins in northern Cote d'Ivoire. The claimant was involved in the local branch of the Rassemblement des Republicains ...
Lessons in Liberation: Remembering Tajudeen
The Pambazuka News team highlights 15 of our favourite Pan-African Postcards
Pambazuka News Editors
2009-05-28, Issue 435
Pambazuka News has published Tajudeen’s weekly Pan-African Postcard regularly since 2004. While we joke that Tajudeen’s writing was ‘an editor’s nightmare’, it was first and foremost a source of penetrating, incisive insight into pan-African affairs, expressed with humour and an underlying sense of optimism and belief that, however great the challenges the continent faces, by uniting and organising, we can build Africa into a great place for all its citizens.
In celebration of Tajudeen’s commitment and contribution to Pan-Africanism – and to the Pambazuka community – we have picked a few of our favourite postcards to share with you. These postcards, listed in chronological order, demonstrate Tajudeen’s uncanny ability to see to the heart of the matter, to understand the workings of the human heart, to clarify complex and controversial issues and to inspire people to work for change.
Censorship in Nigeria
Interview with Hausa novelist Sa’adatu Baba
Amina Koki Gizo
2008-09-10, Issue 395
While formal publishing companies in Nigeria languished through the economic crises that accompanied the structural adjustment programmes of the late 1980s and early 1990s, young Hausa writers began writing about their lives and contemporary problems they faced. Bypassing formal publishers, they self-published their novels, often with the help of a writers' cooperative....
Binyavanga Wainaina: The writer in a time of crisis
Aurelie Journo
2008-07-09, Issue 386
Aurelie Journo (PhD Literature student) talks to Binyavanga Wainaina, the founder of Kwani? about this year's Kwani? Litfest that will take place in Nairobi and Lamu from the 1st to the 15th of August. As the discussion went on, they found themselves broaching several subjects ranging from the state of the media in Kenya, to the role of the writer in times of crisis, with digressions on post-colonial theories and ideology.
African writing in our time
Mukoma Wa Ngugi
2008-07-09, Issue 386
Each generation of writers is confounded by the simple and clichéd paradox – the more the world changes the more it remains the same. The imagination wants to be freed from the hold of the past, and yet it finds that the present and the material worlds are indelibly tied to that past. I believe it is to this tension that James Baldwin was speaking when he wrote that a writer cannot write outside his or her times.
Is the pen mightier than a machete?
Arno Kopecky
2008-07-09, Issue 386
Is the pen mightier than the panga? This was the question confronting Kenya’s literary establishment in the opening days of 2008, as war spread throughout Kenya’s urban centers and across the fertile Rift Valley in the nation’s heartland. As belligerent armies of unemployed youth paraded before news cameras armed with the one weapon all Kenyans have access to, pangas (machetes) once again became the symbol for death and destruction in Africa. Spoken words, it seemed, coming from the podiums of politicians of every stripe, were what helped ignite this chaos in the first place; was it possible that written words from a more thoughtful source might help reverse the spread of violence? Or barring that, could it at least make sense of the chaos and thereby ensure that when peace returned, it stayed?
Putting on the Kwani Lit Fest
Shalini Gidoomal
2008-07-09, Issue 386
As dusk descends, preparations continue apace outside the main entrance of the National Museum. Trees planted in sturdy plastic bags brought in for the occasion are being wrap-dressed in gold shimmery fabric. A disco set of powerful spotlights altern...
Remembering Kenya
Mukoma Wa Ngugi
2008-01-04, Issue 334
Inside looking out, snow is falling and I am thinking how happy we once were, when promises and dreams came easy and how when we, lovers covered only by a warm Eldoret night, your slender hand waved a prophecy - a shooting star and you said...