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Africa is big. How big? Like, really, really big! Africa is big, like covering 11.7 million mi² (30.4 million km²), roughly the size of 30 countries, including some of the world’s largest, such as the (contiguous) United States, China, and India. That sort of big. Mapped: Visualizing the True Size of Africa gives us a visual idea of what this means. The distance from Africa’s northernmost point to its southern tip is about 8,000 kilometers, comparable to the distance from L

Portable pouches and carrying bags have ancient roots in Africa, evolving from prehistoric hunter-gatherer tools to deeply symbolic cultural and spiritual items. They are evidence of Elizabeth Fisher’s Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution. Medicine man's bag, Congo, West Africa, 1871-1910 In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, sci-fi fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin draws on Elizabeth Fisher’s Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution, set out in her 1979 book Women’s Creation: Sexual Evolut

I invite you to rethink how you understand the world. You have probably been deeply influenced by linear and hierarchical accounts of human development. Over the last century, a clear plan to bring prosperity to all humans was proposed within a Liberal framework. In these accounts, progression towards a better life followed a set of clearly established steps. Modernisation, Westernisation, industrialisation, good governance, free markets and liberal democracies. The Washingto

In the blurb, Strings sets out that poor black women in the US are being stigmatized as “diseased” and a burden on the public health care system. Her argument is that this racist fatphobia is the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat black women, which took root more than two hundred years ago. This book does something remarkable that no other book I have read does. It brings into conversation loose, circulating fragments of my lived experience that I did not know were i

Ibrahim Traoré is gathering admiration far and wide. Enthusiastic undergraduate students know his name. And they cautiously nurture a growing interest in this young African leader. Why? Because Traoré is doing the seemingly impossible. A warrior and a just leader, fighting for the Burkinabe, taking big mining and businesses to task, building new industries, providing free health care for women, agricultural reforms, and throwing out colonial-style white wigs in courts as part