The archive
Texts the dominant story under-stocked. Filterable by region, era, and theme. Public-domain works are reproduced in full; in-copyright works are excerpted with source links.
Patrice Lumumba, 1960
Lumumba's unplanned reply at the Congolese independence ceremony, after King Baudouin had delivered a paternalistic speech praising Leopold II. Lumumba, prime minister, …
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Kwame Nkrumah, 1965
Nkrumah's 1965 thesis that political independence in Africa, without economic sovereignty, produces a new form of imperial control — exercised through capital, debt, and…
Read →Editorial, 2026
Kwame Nkrumah's 'Consciencism' attempts a philosophical synthesis of African humanist, Islamic, and Euro-Christian elements grounded in materialist analysis. The project…
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Amílcar Cabral, 1970
Cabral's 1970 address at Syracuse University — the Eduardo Mondlane Memorial Lecture — naming culture as the soil from which armed liberation grows and the ground on whi…
Read →Editorial, 2026
Amílcar Cabral's address 'National Liberation and Culture' frames culture as both the terrain of colonization and the weapon by which colonized peoples reconstitute them…
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Thomas Sankara, 1984
Sankara's October 4, 1984 address to the U.N. General Assembly, given two months after he renamed Upper Volta to Burkina Faso (Land of Upright People). A young president…
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Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, 1986
From the title essay of Decolonising the Mind. Ngũgĩ argues that the choice of language for the African writer is not a stylistic matter but a political one — that to wr…
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Steve Biko, 1978
Biko's 1971 essay defining Black Consciousness — not as a programme for replacing white rule with Black rule, but as the prior work of freeing the colonized mind to imag…
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Cheikh Anta Diop, 1974
Diop's argument, defended at his 1960 Sorbonne doctoral examination and reissued in English in 1974, that ancient Egypt was a Black African civilization — and that the s…
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