Al Fatah
By Anthony James Ratcliff Al Fatah was an extremely popular organisation at the Algiers festival, where it had sought to develop connections with African and Afro-North American revolutionaries. As one of Al Fatah’s leading creative intellectuals, Mahmoud Darwish received the Lotus Prize for Literature from the Union of Afro-Asian Writers in 1969, an affiliate organisation of […]
Islam between Françafrique and Afrabia
By Wendell Hassan Marsh Upon his invasion of Egypt in 1798, Napoleon had a message for those Muslims suffering under Ottoman dominion. He would liberate Egypt and Islam and make them liberal, modern. Using rhetorical formulae and forms of argumentation put together by his army of Orientalists, Napoleon superficially provided the material that his critics at […]
Lotus Magazine
[hr] By Nida Ghouse In the wake of Youssef El-Sebai’s death, the streets of Cairo swelled in protest. On 19 February 1978, as his body arrived from Cyprus to be wrapped up in a flag and readied for a state-sponsored service, the newspapers had spread a rumour that the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) was responsible and this, in turn, had […]
Trajectories of the Sudanese Gulf
By Michael Vasquez There is a lot of concern about how to narrate the history of the Gulf and the Sudanese. The sort of soft power of the Sudanese and their role in quietly and, in some ways, invisibly administering the state at the crucial moment of its first independent articulation is very little talked […]
Timbuktu: An Old African Saying
By Akin Adesokan The news comes through to enthusiasts of African cinema eagerly following events at the 2015 Festival Panafricain du Cinéma de Ouagadougou (FESPACO) in real time: according to the magazine Jeune Afrique, the organisers of the famous festival have decided to withdraw Timbuktu, the much praised new film by director Abderrahmane Sissako, from […]