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A selection of Merisphere Review essays and critical readings available in native English reading editions.

100 multilingual reading editionsMerisphere Review

The selection

100 / 100

  1. Research article · Epistemology and Science
    Are Science and the Irrational Incompatible?
    Can science examine what does not yet present itself in a rational, measurable or stabilised form without abandoning its own standards? In mathematics, the term “irrational” has a precise technical meaning: it refers to numbers that cannot be expressed as the quotient of two integers. Philosophy, however, gradually gave the word a broader negative charge by opposing it to Reason, measure and order. This study revisits the role of Greek thought in that semantic shift, then traces several moments when objects first regarded as unproductive, impossible or disturbing found a place within the work of knowledge: approximation, complex numbers, fractals and quantum indeterminacy. The aim is not to praise the irrational, but to ask whether excluding it in advance may close off possible paths of inquiry. Science is not the same thing as the irrational; it can nevertheless investigate what still resists established forms of rationality, provided that such objects are subjected to examination, criticism and control.
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  2. Current affairs and critical analysis · International Relations and Geopolitics
    Ethiopia — Renewed hostilities in Tigray put the Pretoria Agreement under strain
    THREE YEARS AFTER THE PRETORIA AGREEMENT, RENEWED FIGHTING IN NORTHERN ETHIOPIA IS ONCE AGAIN TESTING THE FRAMEWORK THAT BROUGHT TWO YEARS OF WAR TO AN END. THE AFRICAN UNION HAS CALLED FOR AN IMMEDIATE RESUMPTION OF TALKS BETWEEN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND THE TIGRAYAN LEADERSHIP.
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  3. Current affairs and critical analysis · Law
    Nigeria — Thirty-seven die in custody in Minna as cause of death remains unestablished
    AROUND 37 PEOPLE SUSPECTED OF INVOLVEMENT IN ARTISANAL MINING DIED AFTER BEING TAKEN INTO CUSTODY IN MINNA, NIGER STATE. NIGERIA’S NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION IS CALLING FOR INDEPENDENT FORENSIC POST-MORTEM EXAMINATIONS AND THE PRESERVATION OF EVIDENCE.
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  4. Current affairs and critical analysis · Economics
    African debt — Revised sustainability criteria reshape borrowing headroom
    THE IMF AND WORLD BANK ARE REVISING THE FRAMEWORK USED TO ASSESS DEBT IN LOW-INCOME COUNTRIES. THE REFORM IS INTENDED TO DISTINGUISH MORE CLEARLY BETWEEN THE RISK OF DEBT DISTRESS AND DEBT THAT IS ACTUALLY UNSUSTAINABLE, WHILE GIVING GREATER WEIGHT TO DOMESTIC DEBT AND LONG-TERM INVESTMENT NEEDS.
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  5. Current affairs and critical analysis · Political Science
    Morocco — Coalition-building begins after an election marked by low turnout
    THE AUTHENTICITY AND MODERNITY PARTY LEADS THE PRELIMINARY RESULTS WITH 97 SEATS, AHEAD OF THE NATIONAL RALLY OF INDEPENDENTS AND THE ISTIQLAL PARTY. NO PARTY HAS A MAJORITY ON ITS OWN. WITH NATIONAL TURNOUT REPORTED AT 38.02%, ELECTORAL PARTICIPATION REMAINS A CENTRAL ISSUE.
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  6. Current affairs and critical analysis · Economics
    Sudan — War fractures the economy and weakens the currency
    THE SUDANESE POUND IS TRADING AT AROUND 7,500 TO THE US DOLLAR ON THE PARALLEL MARKET IN AREAS CONTROLLED BY THE ARMY. TERRITORIAL FRAGMENTATION IS ERODING REVENUE, DISRUPTING ACCESS TO FOREIGN CURRENCY AND MAKING MONETARY STABILISATION INCREASINGLY DIFFICULT.
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  7. Current affairs and critical analysis · International Relations and Geopolitics
    Mali — War and the difficulty of accounting for its losses
    THE ATTACK ON THE DIOURA MILITARY CAMP ON 10 SEPTEMBER CAUSED HEAVY LOSSES AMONG MALIAN FORCES. SOURCES CITED BY REUTERS PUT THE DEATH TOLL AT MORE THAN ONE HUNDRED. THE ARMY HAS ACKNOWLEDGED LOSSES WITHOUT PUBLISHING A COMPARABLE FIGURE, SO THE EXACT NUMBER CANNOT BE TREATED AS ESTABLISHED.
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  8. Current affairs and critical analysis · International Relations and Geopolitics
    Red Sea — The war in Yemen reaches the Horn of Africa directly
    NEARLY 3,000 PEOPLE REACHED DJIBOUTI IN EIGHT DAYS AFTER CROSSING THE BAB EL-MANDEB. THE YEMENI CRISIS IS A REMINDER THAT THE HORN OF AFRICA IS NOT A DISTANT SHORE OF THE CONFLICT. ITS HUMAN, ECONOMIC AND STRATEGIC CONSEQUENCES ARE ALREADY BEING FELT THERE.
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  9. Current affairs and critical analysis · Economics
    South Africa — Automotive industry faces the electric transition in its export markets
    SOUTH AFRICA EXPORTED 414,271 LIGHT VEHICLES IN 2025. MORE THAN 70% OF ITS LIGHT-VEHICLE PRODUCTION IS EXPORTED, AND FOUR OUT OF FIVE EXPORTED VEHICLES ARE DESTINED FOR THE EUROPEAN UNION AND THE UNITED KINGDOM. THE ELECTRIC TRANSITION IN THOSE MARKETS IS FORCING SOUTH AFRICAN INDUSTRY TO ACCELERATE ITS OWN TRANSFORMATION.
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  10. Current affairs and critical analysis · Political Science
    South Sudan — Elections move ahead without a permanent constitution or census
    AN AMENDMENT TO THE ELECTORAL LAW ALLOWS ELECTIONS TO BE HELD WITHOUT WAITING FOR THE PERMANENT CONSTITUTION OR NATIONAL CENSUS TO BE COMPLETED. THE GOVERNMENT INTENDS TO PRESERVE THE DECEMBER TIMETABLE. THE CREDIBILITY OF THE POLL WILL NOW DEPEND HEAVILY ON HOW IT IS ADMINISTERED IN PRACTICE.
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  11. Current affairs and critical analysis · Sociology
    DR Congo — Ebola reaches new areas as the outbreak continues to exact a heavy toll
    AS OF 20 SEPTEMBER, WHO HAD RECORDED 7,733 CONFIRMED CASES AND 3,732 CONFIRMED DEATHS FROM BUNDIBUGYO EBOLAVIRUS DISEASE IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO. DUNGU, IN HAUT-UÉLÉ, HAD BECOME THE 63RD HEALTH ZONE AFFECTED SINCE THE OUTBREAK BEGAN.
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  12. Current affairs and critical analysis · International Relations and Geopolitics
    Sahel — Sovereignty policies confronted with the constraints of regional geography
    The temporary reduction in fuel deliveries from BOST Energies to Mali and Burkina Faso highlights the constraint imposed by access to the sea. Being landlocked requires Sahelian states to pursue sovereignty while relying on infrastructure and territories belonging to their neighbours.
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  13. Current affairs and critical analysis · International Relations and Geopolitics
    Sudan — When humanitarian aid chooses its beneficiaries
    Nearly 19.5 million Sudanese people are facing acute hunger. The resources available do not allow humanitarian organisations to meet all identified needs. Targeting, designed to direct assistance towards the most vulnerable, has also become a way of managing its scarcity.
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  14. Current affairs and critical analysis · Sociology
    South Africa: Has femicide become an ‘epidemic’?
    The successive discovery of women’s bodies in Ekurhuleni comes in a country where gender-based violence and femicide are now classified as a national disaster. Investigations have yet to determine whether these cases are connected. Their succession has once again brought to the fore the scale of violence against women in South Africa and the measures being taken to prevent, investigate and punish it.
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  15. Current affairs and critical analysis · International Relations and Geopolitics
    South Africa–United States — The visa as an instrument of political pressure
    Washington has announced new visa restrictions targeting certain individuals associated with South African policies that the US administration considers discriminatory. Pretoria disputes this interpretation of its domestic policies. The United States is thus imposing on individuals the consequences of a political disagreement with South Africa.
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  16. Essay and commentary · Sociology
    Is concern for others declining across the world?
    In his 1981–82 lectures at the Collège de France, published as The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Michel Foucault returns at length to an ancient notion: epimeleia heautou, the care of the self. It is not a matter of withdrawing into oneself, but of working on one’s way of being, thinking and acting.
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  17. Essay and commentary · Economics
    Should we help ‘poor’ countries?
    In his Essay on the Gift, Mauss shows that giving creates a relationship. The recipient is not free of obligation simply because nothing has been paid. The gift calls for a response and can create an obligation. It brings people closer, but it also binds them.
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  18. Current affairs and critical analysis · Economics
    Senegal: what an IMF programme changes in the management of public finances
    Senegal has just passed an important stage in its negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). On 1 September 2026, IMF staff and the Senegalese authorities reached an agreement on economic policies that could form the basis of a thirty-six-month programme worth about US$2.2 billion. The agreement is not yet final: it still requires approval by IMF management and then by the Executive Board, and several conditions remain to be met, particularly on debt treatment and financing assurances.
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  19. Current affairs and critical analysis · Law
    DR Congo: can the rules of presidential succession be changed without breaking the constitutional order?
    The Democratic Republic of the Congo is going through a new period of tension over its Constitution. On 15 September 2026, demonstrations held in Kinshasa and several other cities were dispersed by the police, at times with tear gas and warning shots. Protesters denounce constitutional reform plans which they suspect could open the way to a third term for President Félix Tshisekedi. The authorities respond that any change would have to pass through the will of the people and, where appropriate, a referendum.
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  20. Current affairs and critical analysis · Economics
    Expensive oil: very different effects across African economies
    On 16 September 2026, Brent crude was still trading at around US$105 a barrel, despite falling by more than 3% during the day. The easing mainly reflected the partial restoration of some Saudi exports. Tensions in diesel and other refined-product markets nevertheless remained severe.
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  21. Research article · Education and Educational Sciences
    African Schooling: Why Does It Fail?
    To understand the problem, educational statistics must be distinguished from the purposes that African education systems are expected to serve.
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  22. Research article · Education and Educational Sciences
    Translating Knowledge into African Languages
    Knowledge becomes socially powerful only when people can question, reformulate and transmit it in the languages through which they live and think.
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  23. Research article · Political Science
    African Political Parties and Fanon’s Enduring Critique
    Fanon’s critique helps explain why political pluralism can coexist with centralised power, dependence and the weak participation of citizens.
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  24. Research article · Philosophy
    Towards an African Ontology of the Relational Field
    The individual is not an isolated substance: personhood emerges within relationships, obligations, places and shared histories.
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  25. Essay and commentary · Sociology
    Being Happy amid Catastrophe: Social Nihilism and the Inversion of Happiness in Central Africa
    This article analyses the gradual accommodation of collective consciousness to political, social and moral deterioration in Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
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  26. Research article · Education and Educational Sciences
    Asynchronous Learning and the Flexibility of Time in Africa
    Flexible learning can respond to African realities only if it is designed around learners’ actual access, rhythms and responsibilities.
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  27. Essay and commentary · Political Science
    Alternation and Democracy: A Necessity against the Stagnation of Power in Cameroon
    The claim that Cameroon needs a political alternative rather than political alternation raises a fundamental question: can democracy remain alive when power never changes hands?
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  28. Research article · Philosophy
    On Arturo Escobar’s Concept of the ‘Pluriverse’: Questioning the Concept of the Universe Inherited from Galilean-Copernican Physics
    The history of Western cosmology invites us to question the centrality built into the idea of a single universe and to explore Arturo Escobar’s pluriverse as a space in which many worlds can coexist.
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  29. Essay and commentary · Political Science
    Cameroon: Rekindling the Mystique of Independence to Bring the Nation Together
    Cameroon is not merely a colonial boundary: a shared history, the struggle for freedom and the ideal of independence transformed yesterday’s strangers into a nation.
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  30. Research article · Sociology
    Cameroon: The Perverse Illusion of Media Pluralism
    Cameroon’s abundance of newspapers, radio stations and television channels creates an appearance of freedom, yet the fragmentation of public opinion may neutralise criticism and consolidate political power.
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  31. Essay and commentary · Philosophy
    Reflections Inspired by Francis Fukuyama’s ‘The End of History?’
    Fukuyama’s announcement of liberalism’s final victory overlooks major critiques of consumer society, the colonial history of liberal powers and the continuing plurality of political experience.
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  32. Essay and commentary · History
    Cheikh Anta Diop: Egypt as the Cultural Centre of the Black African World
    Cheikh Anta Diop places ancient Egypt at the centre of African cultural continuity and turns the recovery of history into an intellectual, cultural and political undertaking.
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  33. Review and critical reading · Literature and Literary Studies
    Understanding Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (excerpt)
    A close reading of several passages from Aimé Césaire’s poem: dawn, rupture, revolt and the recovery of a world buried beneath colonial disaster.
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  34. Essay and commentary · Religions and Religious Studies
    God Is Not a Christian
    Beginning with Desmond Tutu’s plea for religious inclusiveness, this essay examines the political history of faith in Africa and argues for a decolonised theology rooted in African memory.
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  35. Research article · Philosophy
    The Figure of Being, Figures of Non-being: Towards an African Critique of Western Ontology
    An African critique of the hierarchy of being produced by Western modernity, from the Black Code to economic liberalism, contrasted with a relational temporality of transmission.
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  36. Current affairs and critical analysis · International Relations and Geopolitics
    Candour and Prospects at the Close of the Russia–Africa Summit
    A contemporary commentary on the Russia–Africa summit, African diplomatic agency and the changing international balance of power.
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  37. Research article · Education and Educational Sciences
    Hexis and the Education of Elites in Africa: An Aristotelian Reading
    Using Aristotle’s distinction between diathesis and hexis, this essay argues for an African pedagogy that transforms accumulated knowledge into stable judgement, ethical conduct and action.
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  38. Current affairs and critical analysis · Sociology
    The World Cup, France and Its Minorities
    Can sporting victory transform the position of minorities, or does it merely suspend inequality for the duration of a celebration?
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  39. Essay and commentary · International Relations and Geopolitics
    Francophonie, or the Illusion of a Shared Destiny Through Language
    Does sharing French create an equal literary community when circulation, teaching and recognition remain profoundly asymmetrical?
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  40. Research article · Philosophy
    Is Freedom Essentially Inaccessible to Peoples Without Culture?
    Must freedom be learned through scholarly culture, or can dominated peoples recognise and pursue it through historical experience?
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  41. Review and critical reading · Literature and Literary Studies
    The Unfinished Metamorphosis: Revisiting Senegalese Writer Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure
    Samba Diallo’s unfinished transformation reveals how colonial schooling can transmit knowledge while erasing the learner’s presence in the world.
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  42. Research article · Literature and Literary Studies
    The Question of the Periphery in Francophone Literature
    Why does African writing remain peripheral inside a literary space that presents French as a shared language?
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  43. Essay and commentary · Sociology
    Is Africa the Continent of Dreamers Par Excellence?
    The accusation that Africans live in dreams conceals the founding dreams through which the West imagined, conquered and possessed the world.
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  44. Review and critical reading · Literature and Literary Studies
    The Nightmare of Joe the Pushcart Man, by Mansi-Dongi Dokoma
    Melissa Hanford reads Joe’s circular nightmare as a lucid political allegory of waiting, bureaucracy and the difficult possibility of choice.
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  45. Essay and commentary · Sociology
    African Football as a Mirror of ‘Primitive Societies’
    Beyond spectacle and commerce, African football reveals urban kinship, demographic change and rivalries inherited from collective history.
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  46. Research article · Sociology
    Cameroonian Journalism and the Triumph of Regimes of Truth
    When media performance replaces critical inquiry, who still establishes the conditions of truth in Cameroon’s public sphere?
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  47. Review and critical reading · Religions and Religious Studies
    Simon Kimbangu’s Transcendental Nationalism
    Although fundamentally religious, Kimbanguism acquired from its beginnings a nationalism that never allowed itself to be confined within colonial borders.
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  48. Current affairs and critical analysis · Political Science
    The ‘Meaninglessness’ Bringing People and Armies Together in Africa
    Support for military takeovers reflects neither a love of violence nor contempt for institutions, but rejection of an exhausted political order.
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  49. Essay and commentary · International Relations and Geopolitics
    The North, or the Part of the World That Exists Only in Dreams
    The tragedy of a North Korean refugee in Seoul exposes the gap between an idealised North and the difficult lives awaiting many migrants.
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  50. Research article · Sociology
    The Return of Race as a Structuring Concept in the West
    Museum displays, political discourse and demographic policy reveal the persistence of racial classifications beneath claims of equality.
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  51. Research article · Anthropology
    The Regime of Time in Black Africa
    Against time experienced as decline, African societies value ageing as the accumulation and transmission of wisdom—an ethic with political consequences.
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  52. Review and critical reading · Political Science
    Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth: A Hermeneutic for Understanding Politics in Black Africa
    Fanon helps explain how urban elites imported metropolitan party models and how political concepts subsequently produced African realities.
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  53. Essay and commentary · Political Science
    Sham Intellectuals and Misgovernance in Black Africa
    When learning becomes an instrument of conformity and power, intellectual prestige survives while the obligation to seek truth disappears.
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  54. Essay and commentary · Sociology
    The Planned Obsolescence of Borrowed Culture in Africa
    School programmes designed for examinations rather than social continuity place African learners inside the short life cycle of imported objects and ideas.
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  55. Research article · Philosophy
    African Relational Ontology and Leibniz’s Monadology: From Metaphysical Correspondence to the Co-Constitution of Beings
    Leibniz offers a metaphysics of universal correspondence; relational ontology goes further by making relation the field in which beings are constituted.
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  56. Essay and commentary · Sociology
    Broadening the Spectrum by Including Difference: My Vision of African History
    History does not advance in a straight line; its only genuine progress lies in broadening its perspective and including difference.
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  57. Research article · Philosophy
    Was Marcien Towa Right to Claim That African Ethnophilosophy Drinks from the Dregs of History?
    Towa’s rejection of myth and defeated culture sharpened African philosophical critique, but may have left the categories of Western domination insufficiently examined.
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  58. Essay and commentary · History
    Marcus Garvey: Why War?
    Garvey traces war to enduring injustice and unequal power, anticipating conflicts more destructive than those of his own time.
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  59. Research article · Political Science
    Newspeak and Doublethink in Cameroonian Political Discourse: When Words Overturn Reality
    Political language no longer illuminates social reality when repression becomes peace, poverty becomes emergence and division becomes national cohesion.
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  60. Essay and commentary · Political Science
    Where Did Cameroonians’ ‘Fighting Spirit’ Go? Obstructed Memory, Broken Transmission and Citizens without a Memorial Inheritance
    Cameroonians did not simply forget a tradition of resistance: state censorship, family silence and the absence of public rites prevented its transmission.
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  61. Essay and commentary · Literature and Literary Studies
    Do You Speak French in Africa?
    Who is allowed to feel at home in French, and why is African writing still treated as foreign inside a supposedly shared language?
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  62. Research article · Philosophy
    Thinking Beyond Senghor: Is Emotion Black as Reason Is Hellenic?
    Senghor’s racial polarisation of emotion and reason must be rejected, without losing sight of their real interdependence in knowledge, creation and political history.
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  63. Research article · Philosophy
    Thinking Philosophy in Africa Beyond Marcien Towa
    Towa’s demand for conceptual rigour remains decisive, but African philosophy cannot be judged solely by a European definition presented as universal and self-contained.
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  64. Essay and commentary · Political Science
    Thinking the World from Africa: Why Geopolitics Must Change Its Perspective
    Geopolitics remains largely constructed from European and North Atlantic historical experiences elevated into universal norms.
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  65. Essay and commentary · International Relations and Geopolitics
    Having Been So Often Deceived by the White Man, Africans Should Accept the Risks of Experiencing the World Directly
    Africans must be free to recover their own experience of the world beneath the accumulated layers of foreign knowledge.
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  66. Essay and commentary · Sociology
    Ending the Conception of Africa through the Paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise
    Development discourse turns Africa into an Achilles condemned never to overtake nations whose historical head start is continually protected.
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  67. Research article · Education and Educational Sciences
    Towards a Metapolitics of Reading in Africa
    Reading is not passive reception: it is the free and reasoned acquisition of meaning by a reader seeking an answer.
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  68. Research article · Philosophy
    When Philosophy Reconsiders the African Palaver
    The African palaver rests on a political myth of compromise and shared authority, opposed to myths of permanent cunning and war of all against all.
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  69. Review and critical reading · Religions and Religious Studies
    When Cardinal Malula Denounced the Crisis of Role Models
    Cardinal Malula saw conscience, self-mastery and exemplary conduct as answers to a crisis deeper than economics.
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  70. Research article · Philosophy
    What Is Philosophy?
    From Socrates to contemporary criticism, philosophy joins the search for truth to the difficult task of making one’s life answer to one’s thought.
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  71. Essay and commentary · Philosophy
    Rethinking Originality through Creative Repetition: Shanzhai According to Byung-Chul Han
    Shanzhai is not simply counterfeit production: it reveals how imitation may adapt, transform and recreate an inherited model.
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  72. Essay and commentary · Anthropology
    Reconsidering Two Supposed African Handicaps: Linguistic Diversity and Rapid Population Growth
    Africa’s linguistic plurality is not an obstacle to development but an existing infrastructure for knowledge, creation and national renewal.
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  73. Essay and commentary · Education and Educational Sciences
    Reply to Mr Laurent Enoga Concerning My Article ‘Hexis and Elite Formation in Africa’
    Knowledge becomes an emancipatory hexis only when it is embodied, socially mediated and capable of resisting the autonomous market of credentials.
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  74. Review and critical reading · History
    Thabo Mbeki: A Season of Hope for Africa
    In a 2005 speech in Singapore, Thabo Mbeki called for an ambitious Africa–Asia partnership inspired by the Bandung Conference.
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  75. Research article · Philosophy
    Are All Human Beings Destined to Inhabit the Same Perceptual Space?
    A universal perceptual space becomes illusory when global exchange preserves dominant powers and dissolves difference only in their favour.
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  76. Review and critical reading · Philosophy
    Reading Immanuel Kant’s ‘Letter of Consolation to a Mother’: Discovering the Foundations of Kantian Thought
    Written before Kant’s great Critiques, this letter already reveals convictions about life, death and human destiny that would endure throughout his work.
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  77. Current affairs and critical analysis · Political Science
    Violence in South Africa: Globalisation Tested by Territorial Belonging
    Violence against African migrants reveals the unresolved tension between global economic circulation and territorial forms of belonging.
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  78. Current affairs and critical analysis · Education and Educational Sciences
    Students: The Great Absentees from Cameroon’s Post-Election Crisis. Why?
    The apparent silence of Cameroonian students does not signify depoliticisation, but a profound displacement of political identity towards the condition of precarious youth.
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  79. Essay and commentary · Literature and Literary Studies
    Weaving Voices, Building a Living Memory
    Merisphere Review brings African and diasporic voices together so that books, ideas and stories may form a living, shared memory.
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  80. Review and critical reading · Literature and Literary Studies
    Edward Said: The Orient as a Discursive Invention
    Orientalism shows how scholarship, literature and political power jointly produced an imagined Orient that could be described, classified and governed.
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  81. Review and critical reading · Philosophy
    Mudimbe: The Invention of Africa
    V. Y. Mudimbe examines the intellectual library through which Africa was made into an object of Western knowledge and colonial administration.
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  82. Essay and commentary · Political Science
    Achille Mbembe: Africa against a False Cartography
    Thinking Africa requires breaking with maps that isolate the continent from the circulations, connections and histories through which it has always participated in the world.
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  83. Review and critical reading · Literature and Literary Studies
    Djaïli Amadou Amal — The Impatient Women
    Beyond its immediate denunciation, what does the novel reveal about violence, women’s strategies and the transformations of the Sahelian world?
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  84. Review and critical reading · Literature and Literary Studies
    Fatou Diome — The Belly of the Atlantic
    The novel shifts the perspective on emigration and reveals the inequality of the words applied to the mobility of Africans and Europeans.
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  85. Creative writing · Literature and Literary Studies
    A Season in Tunis
    A lyrical journey through Tunis, Carthage and the northern hills, where the city’s beauty carries the memory of history and departure.
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  86. Review and critical reading · Literature and Literary Studies
    A Season in Tunis: A Critical Reading
    Mansi Dokoma’s poem turns a journey through Tunis into a meditation on memory, exile and the survival of places.
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  87. Review and critical reading · Literature and Literary Studies
    Tchicaya U Tam’si (1932–1988)
    An incandescent poet and lucid witness to an Africa both wounded and vibrant.
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  88. Essay and commentary · Literature and Literary Studies
    Mongo Beti: A Fierce Critique of Afro-pessimism
    In Mongo Beti’s work, neither custom nor religion condemns Africans to passivity: literature restores the possibility of willing and acting.
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  89. Review and critical reading · History
    Martin Bernal: Egypt, the Forgotten Matrix of Greek Thought
    Black Athena challenges the story of an intellectually self-sufficient Greece and restores ancient Egypt’s role in the genealogy of Western thought.
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  90. Review and critical reading · History
    Marcus Garvey: Philosophy, Self-Knowledge and Black Emancipation
    Garvey joins philosophy to action: Black emancipation requires self-knowledge, unity, responsible leadership and the recovery of human dignity.
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  91. Essay and commentary · Literature and Literary Studies
    Guy de Maupassant: Dreaming of Africa
    Maupassant’s flight from the Eiffel Tower turns Africa into a poetic counter-image to industrial modernity and its loss of meaning.
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  92. Review and critical reading · Economics
    Thomas Sankara and Jean Ziegler: The Speech on Debt
    Jean Ziegler presents Sankara’s 1987 address on debt as a political testament and a still-burning call for collective African emancipation.
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  93. Review and critical reading · Philosophy
    Derrida: Towards a Freedom of Meaning
    Derrida’s différance frees reading and writing from the illusion of a single meaning and opens inherited narratives to plurality and contestation.
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  94. Essay and commentary · Education and Educational Sciences
    The Educational Failure of African Immigrants’ Children in Europe: Myth or Reality?
    Educational disparities are real, but they are neither a cultural destiny nor a final verdict on children of African origin.
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  95. Essay and commentary · Religions and Religious Studies
    The Need for God in African and Diasporic Communities: Symptom of Crisis or Bond between the Visible and Invisible?
    The growth of revival churches reveals both a response to social collapse and a continuing need to connect visible life with the invisible.
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  96. Essay and commentary · Philosophy
    French Secularism: A Religion without God?
    French laïcité is not only a legal principle of neutrality; it also functions as a civil faith with its own dogmas, rituals and guardians.
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  97. Essay and commentary · Religions and Religious Studies
    God Is Not a Christian: Desmond Tutu and the Unfinished Work of Religious Hospitality
    Tutu rightly affirms that God exceeds every religion, but a decolonised theology must also restore the African spiritual traditions erased by conquest.
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  98. Essay and commentary · Religions and Religious Studies
    Do Traditional African Religions Truly Have No ‘Holy’ Scriptures?
    When writing is understood as embodied trace, ritual, name and memory, African religions reveal a dense and transmissible scriptural order.
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  99. Creative writing · Literature and Literary Studies
    The Beauty and the Wretch
    On the day of his long-awaited marriage, Omog Licabo discovers how violently beauty, custom and public judgement can determine a person’s fate.
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  100. Review and critical reading · Literature and Literary Studies
    The Tales of Amadou Koumba
    Birago Diop’s celebrated collection makes Wolof oral literature a source of humour, moral reflection and philosophical inquiry.
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