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Heike Becker reflects on an exhibition that foregrounded black subjects in 19th and early 20th century art. The exhibition restored the identities of the black models, often naming them for the very first time. Heike challenges us to face head-on the colonising act of invisibilising the black subject and fieldworker, without whose contributions the celebrated cultural and intellectual accomplishments of ‘Western’ scholars and artists would not have been possible.

Heike Becker writes about Claude Lanzmann’s close encounter with Frantz Fanon in 1961, and his fierce anti-colonial activism. Becker argues that we must remember the French filmmaker for more than his engagement with the European holocaust experience and his controversial support of Israel. Lanzmann took an ardent anti-colonialist stand against France’s colonial war in Algeria.

Heike Becker writes about the many uprisings in Africa’s 1968 and that these protests and revolts highlight the fact that Africa should not be left blank on the map of scholarship that seeks to understand 1968 in a global perspective. Yet, these revolts and protests are still forgotten in the global discourse of commemoration. This week roape.net will focus on the extraordinary African dimensions of the movements in 1968.

Cape Town's water crisis is caused by both global environmental politics and local mismanagement. It is also a matter of social inequality in neoliberal post-apartheid South Africa. In this personal look at the crisis, Heike Becker writes about how the water shortage has exposed the country's deep racial and class inequalities.

Heike Becker reports on the important Rosa Luxemburg conference in Berlin, which focused on Africa. However, the conference left her feeling profoundly uneasy. How can an event that claims to “question power” on the continent ignore the popular movements, mostly of young people, against authoritarian regimes, against enduring racism, austerity, and myriad forms of social inequality? Whose power, she asks, is not questioned?

Thirty years after his murder, Heike Becker writes how Thomas Sankara’s words and his legacy have come to life again with the massive mobilization of Burkina Faso’s youth from 2013 onwards. In the 21st century young Africans with their smartphones are at the forefront of an alternative globalisation from the south.

Heike Becker writes about the recent European Conference on African Studies (ECAS) in Basel, Switzerland, the 7th of the now well-established bi-annual gatherings of the European African Studies network AEGIS. Becker observes that epistemological queries were key to the conference, with important questions raised about how knowledge of the continent is produced.

Heike Becker discusses calls for reparations for the German colonial genocide in Namibia between 1904-1908. These negotiations are complicated and contested. In New York at the beginning of January, representatives of the Ovaherero and Nama people filed a class act legal claim suing Germany for the genocide.

For roape.net Heike Becker interviews the German scholar and activist of Southern Africa Reinhart Kössler. Reinhart unpicks the frustrations of national liberation, the reproduction of the same patterns of inequality and social cleavage in the new states, Germany's colonial genocide in Namibia and solidarity and activism in Europe.

South African writer and academic Heike Becker looks at South Africa's extraordinary student movement that in 2015 brought down symbols of colonialism and exploitation, fought against fee increases in higher education and called for the end of racism and of neo-liberal outsourcing practices of support services at universities. She asks if this was South Africa's 1968.