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zorblax wrote

tbh I just don't know anything about Africa. News sources available on the English-speaking internet are almost silent about everyday life, and good luck finding anybody online living in sub-saharan Africa.

Even the history available to mere casuals such as myself are pretty sparse, and almost all of them are written by/for Europeans, informed primarily by European study and so on.

All I know is, Africa is basically an entire continent that has been used and abused by every form of shitty government, turned up to 11.

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An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote

Africa's an elided continent. Part of the point of this article is to demonstrate that it is a political circumstance that causes your lack of knowledge; not an mere silence but a centuries-long silencing, built into a global continental hierarchy.

And there's an increasing amount of good scholarship and media coming from some places in the continent, among some amazing work that already exists. I try to put some of it in f/Africa.

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Naokotani wrote

I spent some time editing a thousand or so abstracts for a social justive archive (http://connexions.org/) a few years ago, and I noticed that the struggle against South African apartheid was very prominent in the past. There was also a lot of criticism against the behaviour of the west in both Somalia and Rawanda, but there does seem to have been a reduction in social justice topics in the last decade or two.

I don't think its because people don't care, and I agree that there is a general lack of knowledge about African social justice topics.

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