BUALA | African Contemporary Culture

Adultery lies there

martalanca — Thu, 07 May 2026 09:56:52 +0000

Edna Matavel

The next day, as usual, the grandmother went to lay flowers in the grave and came across the grandson's body lying on the ground, the servants who were with her manifested themselves and the spirits began to quarrel. His maternal relatives wanted him to be a servant of God, adopting modern practices to represent the family in society. On the other hand, his paternal family wanted him in the hut, serving the family spirits. The shouts reached the village and everyone watched that spectacle of spiritual conflict.

In the name of fraternity and historical, active and combative solidarity

martalanca — Fri, 01 May 2026 16:35:07 +0000

Apolo de Carvalho

Birthplace of one of the greatest Pan-Africanist thinkers of all time, Amílcar Cabral, Guinea-Bissau occupies our collective memory, just like Toussaint’s Haiti, Dessalines, Boukman and Cécile Fatiman, a place reserved for the great luminaries of the history of Pan-African revolutions and struggles. Therefore, we can not be indifferent to the extreme violence that the people of this nation, forged in the struggle, has been facing in the hands of a State ruled by scammers, kleptocrats and murderers, whose Berlin-style agenda has been nothing but the destruction of that ‘broad road of hope’ built by the greatest collective endeavour this people has ever undertaken: the struggle for independence.

After the Jamahiriya

martalanca — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:25:12 +0000

Owen Schalk

For many in Libya, the Jamahiriya remains a reference point of lost sovereignty and stability. Such views are reinforced with every new revelation about Libya’s subjugation to outside forces. One of the latest insights into this subjugation came when the US Department of Justice released documents revealing that, during NATO’s intervention in Libya, Jeffrey Epstein worked with former British and Israeli intelligence officers in an effort to access billions in Libyan state assets frozen in Western countries.

Pope Leo’s visit to Africa: theology scholar outlines 3 realities the Catholic church must face

martalanca — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:21:33 +0000

Stan Chu Ilo

It needs to address the fluid religious imagination of many African Christians who easily migrate from mainline Christian groups like Catholicism to Pentecostalism and African traditional religion. This means the Catholic church needs a moment of self-introspection to ask if it is really meeting the people at their points of need. Is it a church that bears the narratives and wounds of the people?

The situation of women in Angola

martalanca — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:41:58 +0000

Sizaltina Cutaia

Violence such as sexual assault continue to be a factor that inhibits women's full participation in public life and access to employment. But there is also the matter of denial of their existence as citizens of Angola, which manifests itself in the difficulty of accessing civil registry records. Recently, within our women's movement, We conducted a project in the municipality of Cubal where, out of a group of about 300 women, only two or three had identification cards.

Peripheral Citizenships, Muslims in Sintra

martalanca — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 13:47:48 +0000

Raquel Carvalheira

By prioritizing an approach centered on people’s experiences, it presents itself as a humanising discipline that seeks to capture the nuances of everyday life, beyond the statistical cut-outs and social determinisms. Of course, there are structures, tendencies and politics that go beyond people’s will and that must be analysed (consider the processes of racialisation and precarisation), but a closer look at their strategies, dreams and aspirations allows us to understand the choices available to them within socially defined boundaries, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. For this reason, this study takes specific localities in order to gain an understanding of the situation of Muslims in Sintra and does not claim to represent the Muslim population as a whole.

Writing the radical hospitality of dance

martalanca — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:03:01 +0000

Liliana Coutinho

How to embrace these unstable forms, breaking out of other times? To conclude, it is worth returning to the concept of “critical hospitality” mentioned by Brandstetter in the preface. Alexandra Balona puts this concept into practice through the creation of an essayistic methodology and a critical writing that works by approximation and through engagement with the artwork, seeking to remain hospitable to its intensity.

Beyond the Promises: Africa, Power, and the Politics of Climate Action

martalanca — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 07:17:26 +0000

Nelly Madegwa

Renewed uncertainty around US engagement, including signals of potential funding reductions, institutional disengagement, and a second withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, has reintroduced questions about the durability of global climate commitments.

From Student Airlifts to Slave Exports: Kenya’s Economic Decay

martalanca — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 07:13:08 +0000

Keith Ang'ana

Modern-day slavery is the lot reserved for Kenya’s youth by a government once invested in the education of the country’s young but now content to send them to foreign lands as labour exports.

Memory, cinema and reparation: interview with Dulce Fernandes about Tales of Oblivion

martalanca — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:46:25 +0000

Marta Lança

There was also a clear intention of appropriation of the archives, especially the written sources. As Saidiya Hartman points out, for enslaved people, the archive is always an encounter with violence: they appear in the records only when they are bought, shipped or landed. It is never they who leave behind their own writings or their version of the story. It is always the oppressor, the enslaver, who writes. Therefore, this file is inevitably contaminated by this historical violence, and still existing on the present day. But I felt that I had the right to make it my own, to take from it whatever served the film’s purpose: to tell this story in a free, expanded and contemplative way.