This essay written by Mike van Graan, the Executive Director of the African Arts Institute (AFAI) based in Cape Town, is the first of a mini-series we hope to publish on the role of arts in democracy, protest, and human rights movements in Africa. It aims to explore how arts are used to advance freedom of expression and representation throughout the region, and highlight these important stories of pro-democracy arts activism – Eds.
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tag: neoliberalism
Africa as a Mirror of Democratization
Africa as Subject v. Africa as Object
Too often, academic approaches to the subject of democracy in Africa confine themselves to static and quantitative approaches that emphasize ordinal rankings, national units of analysis, and institutional presence or absence, rather than grapple with inevitably messy and complex subjective and interpretive approaches to the topic. Read More…
Democracy in Mali: A True Festival of Robbers
The political crisis in Mali, precipitated by a military coup d’état on 22 March that toppled the country’s increasingly unpopular president, Amadou Toumani Touré (popularly known as ATT), continues to deepen. Up until the coup, Mali had long been regarded as a bastion of democracy in an otherwise volatile region. Several observers of Malian politics […]