Wandia Njoya's blog

I commend Ndugu Horace Campbell and Ndugu Eusi Kwayana for the best insight I've seen so far into how Africans can view Zimbabwe's crisis.  read more »

The following is an adaptation of a presentation I made at a conference organized in April 2007 by the French Graduate Students of the State University of New York at Albany. The conference's theme was centered on postcolonial theory and a concern that the "new" generation of African authors did not seem to be as politically "engagés" (the French term for "committed") as Jean-Paul Sartre urged his intellectual contemporaries in the late 1940's.  read more »

One of my favorite contemporary authors, Pearl Cleage, centers her novels on the interaction of women's lives with the decay of black masculinity instigated by the consumerist, racist era in which we live today. Babylon Sisters, my least preferred of her novels, contains the statements that aptly capture this dynamic.

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Like Mwalimu Zeleza, when I heard of the outbreak of violence directed at African non-citizens in South African townships, I recognized the pathology of Africans attacking fellow Africans, of our self-hatred and an apparent blindness to the European originators and primary beneficiaries of Africa's biggest problems.

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Conventional wisdom, at least in the academic world, states that the colonial "divide and rule" policy created the acrimonious institution of "tribes" by freezing African identities and favoring one group frozen in that identity to the detriment of the others. The Tutsi of Rwanda and the Agikuyu of Kenya are often cited as examples of those who were favored; but upon close examination of history, this thesis reveals some loopholes.

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