By Nina Meghji On 14 August 2017, a devastating mudslide claimed the lives of more than 1,000 people in the hillside village of Regent, 6km east of the capital, Freetown. Mudslides are an increasingly frequent occurrence in Sierra Leone. According to Dr Joseph Macarthy, Executive Director of the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre (SLURC), they […]
By Ibrahim Abdullah Arthur Antar Abraham, triple A for short, (aka Karmoh), was unarguably the historians’ historian amongst the first generation of university trained historians that the Sierra Leone academy produced. Not only was he of a leftist/pan-Africanist persuasion amidst mainstream empiricists and middle of the road fellow travelers, Abraham had a much broader research
Triple A Passes On! An Appreciation Read More »
The Africanist Press publishes the following statement from the Lunsar Advocacy Group in the United States of America to express our solidarity in the ongoing defense of the rights of Professor Sheikh Umarr Conteh who is currently detained without charge in Sierra Leone. Read the full statement below: “Our lives begin to end the day
On the detention of Professor Sheikh Umarr Kamara Read More »
By Ibrahim Abdullah Walter Anthony Rodney is arguably the most important theoretician cum activist-scholar—in the mold of C.L.R. James and W.E.B. Dubois—who lived and worked in Africa, and approached the troubling question of African identity and liberation from the vantage point of Pan-Africanism. Born of working class parentage in Guyana in 1942, Walter grew up
Walter Anthony Rodney, Activism, and African Historiography—Forty Years After Read More »
By Chernoh Alpha M. Bah and Matthew Anderson Julius Maada Bio, the president of Sierra Leone finally met with foreign diplomats this past Thursday for the first time since he delivered his now infamous May 8 statement in which he called leaders of the country’s leading opposition party – the APC – as “domestic
Maada Bio and Foreign Diplomats: A Failed Effort to Impress International Support Read More »
By Chernoh Alpha M. Bah and Matthew Anderson Protests, social unrest, violence; these symptoms do not appear in a society without a cause. When democratic expression is repressed, when the voices of oppressed people are suppressed, and when state violence becomes unbearable, the end products are social unrest and mass protests. Today’s crisis in Sierra
State Violence and Political Repression in Sierra Leone Read More »
By Chernoh Alpha M. Bah, Matthew Anderson, & Mark Feldman On March 1 of this year, Africanist Press released the first article in our ongoing investigative series on corruption within the government of Sierra Leone in the two years since Julius Maada Bio assumed power. The first and second installments of our investigation series highlighted
Coronavirus and the Crisis of Democracy in Sierra Leone: An Editorial Position Read More »
By Gbanabom Hallowell Experiences in this travelogue demonstrate that the sensory details of an explosion serves to recreate memories, both real and imagined, twenty years later. Driving on the road from Freetown in Sierra Leone to Harper in Liberia, a journey of 1014 miles and meeting with several conditions, I suddenly fostered a compelling
The Road to Harper and the Reconstruction of War Memory: A Literary Travelogue Read More »
By Babatunde Omilola Like every other pandemic that the world has experienced in the past, coronavirus will eventually come to an end. It will be defeated, and life return to normal. But it will teach us an important lesson: the need to invest in health infrastructure across the world, and particularly in Africa. For
It will not be ‘business as usual’ in Africa after COVID-19 Read More »
By Lionel Zevounou, Amy Niang and Ndongo Samba Sylla The threats that are hanging over the African continent with regards to the spread of COVID-19 demand our individual and collective attention. The situation is critical. Yet this is not about mitigating another ‘African’ humanitarian crisis but to diffuse the potentially damaging effects of a
The Time to Act is Now: Letter to African Leaders Concerning the COVID-19 Crisis Read More »
