Series: Verso's Southern Questions

In this groundbreaking work, the essayist and critic Adéwálé Májà-Pearce delivers a mordant verdict on Nigeria’s crisis of democracy. A mosaic of ethnic and religious groups, the most populous country in Africa was fabricated by British colonisers at the turn of the twentieth century. When Nigerians went to the polls to vote in the 2023 elections, they had experienced a...

Legend has it that the end of France’s empire in sub-Saharan Africa was a peaceful affair. This book tells a very different story, exposing the shocking violence of a secret war. Its theatre was Cameroon in the 1950s and ’60s, where a mass movement for self-determination emerged under the leadership of a pro-independence party, the Union of the Peoples of...

Born in French Equatorial Africa, Andrée Blouin played a leading role in the struggles for decolonisation that shook the continent in the 1950s and 1960s. From the colonial orphanage of her childhood, she escaped an arranged marriage to become an avatar of pan-Africanism, advising heads of state from Algiers to Abidjan. Her autobiography retraces this journey. In Guinea, where Blouin...

The poor in India are, too often, reduced to statistics. In the dry language of development reports and economic projections, the true misery of the hundreds of millions who live below the poverty line gets overlooked. In this thoroughly researched study of the poorest of the poor, we get to see how they manage, what sustains them, and the efforts,...