CAMFRANGLAIS – a lexicon
By Stephane Akoa (translated by Karen Press) Avoir la godasse: avoir le bras long To own shoes/soccer boots: to be powerful C’est gâté : en panne, cassé, abîmé [une voiture ou un fruit] It’s rotten (fruit), a wreck (a car); to start a fight. Djonss Pilé: un gars chaud comme Michael Jackson quand il chantait: […]
Love and Learning Under the World Bank
Stacy Hardy recounts seventeen stories of the hierarchies, the anti-heroes, the hard knocks and the histrionics that have been visited upon universities as a result of decades of decidedly imperialist structural adjustment. Additional research by Oddveig Nicole Sarmiento. 1. At a meeting of African university vice chancellors held in Harare in 1986, a World Bank […]
Land Homeland
Q&A with Mahmood Mamdani Chronic: Your book Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity is a short but fascinating study on the development of key terms in colonial administration, specifically ‘tribe’ and ‘native’. You argue that these terms become important in developing indirect rule and rather than (British) colonialism depending on the strategy known as […]
The Sahara is not a Boundary
Ziad Bentahar is an assistant professor of French and Arabic at Towson University in the United States. He grew up in Morocco, where his interest in the country’s competing relationships to “the Arab world” and to rest of the continent began. His recent scholarship looks at reasons why the identities of “Arab” and “African” seem, […]
Jeune Afrique
By Moses Marz In 1968, Béchir Ben Yahmed launched his first attempt at establishing an anglophone version of Jeune Afrique by producing annual “Reference Volumes on the African Continent”. The books are up to 450 pages thick and are presented as essential business guides produced by an “impartial team of journalists”. In 1972, Ben Yahmed […]