Howard W. French

Naipaul’s Unreal Africa

A Bend in the River was acclaimed for its brave truth-telling, but it fails to imagine Africa as anything other than unchanging, untamed, and primitive.

December 22, 2022 issue

Slavery, Empire, Memory

For nearly two centuries Britain has attempted to minimize the importance of slavery to its economic prosperity.

Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain

by Padraic X. Scanlan

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

by Sathnam Sanghera

April 7, 2022 issue

Enemies of Progress

France’s obsession with retaining influence over its former West African colonies has led to brutal dictatorships in Burkina Faso and Chad.

Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa

by Brian J. Peterson

France’s Wars in Chad: Military Intervention and Decolonization in Africa

by Nathaniel K. Powell

Living by the Gun in Chad: Combatants, Impunity and State Formation

by Marielle Debos, translated from the French by Andrew Brown

The Trial of Hissène Habré: How the People of Chad Brought a Tyrant to Justice

by Celeste Hicks

October 7, 2021 issue

A Dispatch from Our Correspondent

“The US must learn to discover the sense of purpose that comes from achieving things of virtue, things that have an objective social need.”

April 10, 2021

Can America Remain Preeminent?

The global influence of the US is threatened by the potentially chaotic unraveling of a political, security, and economic architecture that has structured the world for the past seventy or so years.

An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for Twenty-First-Century Order

by Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper

Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order

by Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon

A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order

by G. John Ikenberry

April 29, 2021 issue

Journalism in a Time of Crisis

How has the work of journalists been altered by pandemic, protests, political violence, and the transformation of the news business?

March 4, 2021

Treasures of the Sahel

Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara

an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, January 30–August 23, 2020

May 14, 2020 issue

A propaganda photo showing Mao with people from African, Arab, and South American countries, 1959

Mao’s Shadow

Maoism: A Global History

by Julia Lovell

China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong

by Jude Blanchette

March 12, 2020 issue

Mansa Musa, the king of Mali, approached by a Berber on camelback; detail from The Catalan Atlas, attributed to the Majorcan mapmaker Abraham Cresques, 1375

Africa’s Lost Kingdoms

Africa has never lacked civilizations, nor has it ever been as cut off from world events as it has been routinely portrayed.

The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages

by François-Xavier Fauvelle, translated from the French by Troy Tice

African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa

by Michael A. Gomez

African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic

by Herman L. Bennett

A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution

by Toby Green

Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange Across Medieval Saharan Africa

an exhibition at the Block Museum of Art, Evanston, Illinois, January 26–July 21, 2019; the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, September 21, 2019–February 23, 2020; and the National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C., April 8–November 29, 2020

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June 27, 2019 issue

Nelson Mandela after his release from prison, Soweto, 1990; photograph by Inge Morath. It appears in Linda Gordon’s Inge Morath: An Illustrated Biography, just published by the Magnum Foundation and Prestel.

Notes from Underground

The prison letters of Nelson Mandela

The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela

edited by Sahm Venter, with a foreword by Zamaswazi Dlamini-Mandela

February 7, 2019 issue

A History of Denial

‘Empires in the Sun: The Struggle for the Mastery of Africa’ by Lawrence James

Empires in the Sun: The Struggle for the Mastery of Africa

by Lawrence James

April 19, 2018 issue

Notes from Rangoon

Officially, I had come to Burma—ruled by one of the world’s most opaque and repressive regimes—to teach a one-month documentary photography course to local photojournalists. But it was the only country in Southeast Asia I had never managed to visit and I was very eager to explore the place for myself.

December 14, 2010