DeSifR — African culture, politics, and history

A dockworker’s evening in a Mindelo tavern, where bare feet were as unremarkable as the chairs and “Sodade” needed no footnote. Europe could not hear the Kriolu, so it fastened on what it could see, and printed an adjective she never asked for.

Haiti paid France for its own freedom until 1947. Britain finished compensating slave owners in 2015. Germany retired its Versailles bonds in 2010. No court called those debts too old. Claims running the other way are always too late, and this essay audits why.

A doctoral candidate in 2126 proves that the people bombed in Gaza were not, after all, human animals. The committee applauds the restraint. This essay asks why that question was ever admissible, and what a discipline becomes when it puts the victim in the dock instead of the accuser.

In 2022 Belgium handed the Kakuungu mask back to Congo as an indefinite loan, because its own law forbids giving anything away. Europe has guarded its patrimony since 1566 with three legal principles. The argument here is that African states should claim the same three, and stop asking.