Essential1952
Black Skin, White Masks
Frantz Fanon
A psychiatrist's clinical study of what colonialism does to the inner life of the colonised — and to the colonist's image of himself.
XThe Library
What to read. What to watch. What to refuse to forget.
If the curriculum lied to you, the bibliography is where you start the repair. None of this is obscure. All of it has been deliberately under-circulated.
Essential Books
The shelf they should have given you in school.
Essential1961
The Wretched of the Earth
Frantz Fanon
The founding text of revolutionary decolonisation. Read the preface by Sartre after, not before.
Essential1972
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Walter Rodney
Still the clearest single-volume answer to the question 'why are these countries poor?'
Essential1978
Orientalism
Edward W. Said
How the West constructed 'the East' as something to be studied, governed and rescued — never met as an equal.
Essential1998
King Leopold's Ghost
Adam Hochschild
The Congo Free State, reconstructed from the archives the Belgian state tried to burn.
Essential2007
Late Victorian Holocausts
Mike Davis
How British free-trade ideology turned droughts in India, China and Brazil into engineered famines killing tens of millions.
Essential2014
The Half Has Never Been Told
Edward E. Baptist
American capitalism, traced to its source: the cotton plantation and the bodies that worked it.
Essential2017
Inglorious Empire
Shashi Tharoor
A precise and pitiless accounting of what Britain actually did to India.
Essential2017
The Origin of Others
Toni Morrison
Six short lectures on race as a tool of self-definition for those who invented it.
Essential2019
How to Hide an Empire
Daniel Immerwahr
The United States as the colonial power it has always insisted it is not.
Essential2020
Caste
Isabel Wilkerson
American racial hierarchy reframed as a centuries-old caste structure with Indian and Nazi cousins.
Essential2021
Time Shelter / Empireland
Sathnam Sanghera
How British imperial nostalgia organises British politics today, often without naming itself.
Essential2021
The Dawn of Everything
David Graeber & David Wengrow
Dismantles the Eurocentric story of 'civilisation' as a one-way escalator from savagery to us.
Essential1903
The Souls of Black Folk
W.E.B. Du Bois
The double-consciousness essay alone reorganised how race could be discussed in English.
Essential1938
The Black Jacobins
C.L.R. James
The Haitian Revolution as world history, by the Trinidadian historian who refused to let it be a footnote.
Essential1955
Discourse on Colonialism
Aimé Césaire
Sixty pages. The single most devastating short text on what Europe did to itself by doing it to others.
Essential2014
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
U.S. history retold from the people who were already here.
Essential2010
The New Jim Crow
Michelle Alexander
Mass incarceration as the latest phase of American racial caste.
Documentaries
The footage the broadcasters keep at the back of the archive.
Documentaries2004
Concerning Violence
Göran Hugo Olsson
Archive footage from Africa's liberation wars, narrated with the words of Fanon.
Documentaries2011
Hidden Colors (series)
Tariq Nasheed
A popular survey, controversial in places, of the African presence excised from Western history.
Documentaries2016
I Am Not Your Negro
Raoul Peck
James Baldwin's unfinished manuscript, animated into one of the great essay films of the century.
Documentaries2016
13th
Ava DuVernay
The Thirteenth Amendment, the prison-industrial complex, and the legal continuity from slavery to today.
Documentaries2003
The Fog of War
Errol Morris
Robert McNamara, very late in life, almost saying what he did in Vietnam.
Documentaries2019
Exterminate All the Brutes
Raoul Peck
Four hours. The history of European expansion told without the usual flattering edits.
Documentaries1988
Hôtel Terminus
Marcel Ophüls
Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo, and the post-war Western intelligence services that put him to work.
Documentaries2014
The Look of Silence
Joshua Oppenheimer
The 1965 Indonesian massacres, revisited by the brother of one of the victims.
Documentaries2022
Africa Rising (BBC) / Lumumba: Death of a Prophet
Raoul Peck (1990)
Two complementary studies: a continent on its own terms, and the murder of one of its founding leaders.
Documentaries2017
Whose Streets?
Sabaah Folayan & Damon Davis
Ferguson, Missouri, from the inside.
Documentaries1973
The Battle of Chile
Patricio Guzmán
Filmed as Allende's government fell. The U.S. role is documented in the camera's own footage.
Documentaries2019
When They See Us
Ava DuVernay
The Central Park Five — a four-part dramatisation that is, in evidence, a documentary.
Films
Fiction that does the work history class wouldn't.
Films1966
The Battle of Algiers
Gillo Pontecorvo
A film studied by both liberation movements and counter-insurgency staff colleges. Both groups understood what it was about.
Films1969
Burn! (Queimada)
Gillo Pontecorvo
Marlon Brando as a colonial agent provoking and then crushing a Caribbean slave revolt.
Films1987
Cry Freedom
Richard Attenborough
Steve Biko and South African apartheid, dramatised within reach of mainstream Western audiences.
Films1997
Lumumba
Raoul Peck
The most accurate dramatic film made about the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.
Films2006
The Wind That Shakes the Barley
Ken Loach
The Irish war of independence, with Black and Tan reprisals filmed in full.
Films2013
12 Years a Slave
Steve McQueen
Solomon Northup's 1853 memoir, restored to American screens with the violence the originals declined to show.
Films2014
Selma
Ava DuVernay
The march on Montgomery, including the parts of Lyndon Johnson the country prefers to forget.
Films2016
Hidden Figures
Theodore Melfi
Three Black women mathematicians at NASA. The film is gentle; the underlying facts are not.
Films2018
BlacKkKlansman
Spike Lee
A real 1970s police investigation of the Klan, edited so that the present cannot pretend to be elsewhere.
Films2018
Black Panther
Ryan Coogler
A blockbuster that took a clear position on reparations and stolen artefacts, and that the global audience understood instantly.
Films2019
Atlantics
Mati Diop
Senegalese migration and class, told as ghost story. Cannes Grand Prix.
Films2022
The Woman King
Gina Prince-Bythewood
Dahomey's Agojie, on the eve of the colonial wars.
Articles & Essays
Long-form journalism that survives the news cycle.
Articles1955
Notes of a Native Son
James Baldwin
The essay, and the collection it gives its name to, remains the gold standard of American writing on race.
Articles2014
The Case for Reparations
Ta-Nehisi Coates · The Atlantic
The single most-cited modern argument in English for material redress.
Articles2018
How Britain stole $45 trillion from India
Jason Hickel · Al Jazeera
A short summary of Utsa Patnaik's research; a number that has not been seriously refuted.
Articles2019
The 1619 Project
Nikole Hannah-Jones et al. · NYT Magazine
An attempt to reset the American origin story around the arrival of the first enslaved Africans.
Articles2020
The Empire's New Clothes
Pankaj Mishra · LRB
On the British political class's inability, in a crisis, to think outside imperial idiom.
Articles2021
Why We Need a Decolonised Curriculum
Kehinde Andrews
On the political stakes of what universities choose to teach.
Articles2023
The illusion of moral decline
various · post-Gaza coverage
A flood of post-October 2023 essays in which Western journalists begin, in real time, to lose faith in their own institutions' framing.
Articlesongoing
Africa Is a Country
editors
A continuous corrective to lazy Western coverage of the continent.