Sisi Afrika Magazine

In-depth stories and inspiring features of meaningful advances in art, science, health, technology, economy and politics in Africa.

[Sisi Afrika Magazine @SisiAfrika_]

‘Slave, Interpreter, & Commissioner-General’ starts nearly 200 years ago, when a 12-year old boy, Songoro, was kidnapped by slave-catchers, locked in iron neck rings and chains, and shipped to the slave markets of Zanzibar. https://t.co/TfaBejpuYa

[Pwani Tribune🌴 @PwaniTribune]

Old East Africa Postcards as an entity have been doing great work in this regard.

[African Stream @african_stream]

AFRICAN STREAM IS CLOSING DOWN

This is, sadly, a farewell to you, our loyal followers and supporters. Under relentless attack, we’ve made the painful decision to shut down African Stream—a platform that many of you’ve come to trust and love. This decision was not made lightly.

The smear by then–US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on September 13, 2024, labelling African Stream “Kremlin propagandists”—triggered a wave of censorship. Within days, YouTube, Meta, Google, and TikTok removed our accounts, and we were demonetised on X. These actions shattered our ability to survive financially. Personal accounts were restricted. What followed was a daily uphill battle. Now, we’re left with only one path: closure.

We are deeply grateful for your unwavering support. Your comments, your messages, your shares—you made us stronger, sharper, and more determined.

We are deeply proud of the work we’ve done since 2022: bringing attention to the most underreported and misrepresented continent. The imperalists want to perpetuate the dominant narrative that Africa is underdeveloped due to corruption and the mismanagement of resources. They want to remove colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism from the picture. We refused to play by those rules. For that, we paid the price. But it’s a price we would pay again and again.

Refusing to play by their rules led to NBC saying we spread ‘disinformation’ without providing a single example of what ‘disinformation’ we shared. Voice of America condemned us for reporting a fact: since the George W. Bush administration, every US president has authorised drone strikes on Somalia. As we responded to every smear piece, we just grew bigger and stronger until, finally, those in positions of power realised the smears weren’t working, and the rest is history.

We will cease posting as of July 1, 2025, except for a few remaining documentaries from Liberia and Mali.

With your support, we managed to ruffle many feathers. Please continue the fight and keep the Pan-African flag flying. Thank you for helping us build African Stream. As we always say: #WeAreAllAfricanStream.

[Afritondo @afritondo]

🎉 The 2025 Afritondo Short Story Prize Longlist is Here! 📚✨

Congratulations to the incredible writers who made the list! And to everyone who submitted, thank you for sharing your stories—your voices matter. 💫

See the longlist & their profiles here: https://t.co/07QdLuJ3j0

[Sisi Afrika Magazine @SisiAfrika_]

Narrative Landscape Press Call For Submissions https://t.co/Eg524HvFYj

[Typical African @Joe__Bassey]

Masters of the Universe…

[Sisi Afrika Magazine @SisiAfrika_]

Kenyan Literature and the self-publishing revolution: from the 1960s to ... https://t.co/VdKD7uULI2 via @YouTube

[Physics In History @PhysInHistory]

I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I do not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written.

The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations.

I am fascinated by Spinoza's Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.

-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955), as mentioned in Glimpses of the Great by G. S. Viereck (1930), paraphrased in Walter Isaacsson's Einstein: His Life and Universe

📷 A. Einstein photographed brilliantly at his office in Princeton, N.J. by Ernst Haas in 1951. Source: onlyoldphotography/tumblr

[OPEN COUNTRY MAG @OpenCountryMag]

Wole Soyinka: "The evaluation which has been placed on your style by some criticsthat there is a kind of almost precise workmanship about it—that it's almost a kind of unrelieved competence as opposed to genuine artistic aspiration. How do you react to this sort of...eh?"

[Charles Onyango-Obbo @cobbo3]

A query about the "most honest African leaders ever of the modern era" keeps bringing up mostly these three: Nelson Mandela (South Africa); Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), and Thomas Sankara (Burkina Faso) - and sometimes Julius Nyerere (Tanzania). Agree? Scratch that and list your three if you don’t agree

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

The new tunnel boring machine designed by @boringcompany engineers can immediately start digging a tunnel anywhere with no prior site preparation (this is a really big deal)

[Sisi Afrika Magazine @SisiAfrika_]

The 2024 Miles Morland Writing Scholars are:

Carey Baraka, Kenya

Fayssal Bensalah, Algeria

Yvette Ndlovu, Uganda

Frances Ogamba, Nigeria

Congratulations!

[Otosirieze @Otosirieze]

African literature is fixated on fiction & poetry, and the result is that we have fewer, and less competent, nonfiction writers.

We still have to understand that the real battles of history and culture are waged and won in nonfiction.

And that’s part of why we are behind.

[Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla]

Journalists are meant to speak truth to power. That's our job. But what do you do when that power is your own news org?

This thread (professional suicide note?) is about @guardian & @ObserverUK's future. Because it turns out you can’t believe everything you read on a poster..
1/

[Deutsch Explains @DeutschExplains]

Popper used to begin his lecture course on the philosophy of science by asking the students simply to ‘observe’. Then he would wait in silence for one of them to ask what they were supposed to observe. This was his way of demonstrating one of many flaws in the empiricism that is still part of common sense today. So he would explain to them that scientific observation is impossible without pre-existing knowledge about what to look at, what to look for, how to look, and how to interpret what one sees. And he would explain that, therefore, theory has to come first. It has to be conjectured, not derived.

@DavidDeutschOxf

[Sisi Afrika Magazine @SisiAfrika_]

The Castle Builders: Construction in the Middle Ages | Complete Series |... https://t.co/OFxKfAnEu4 via @YouTube

[Kristy Tillman @KristyT]

People on reddit are reporting the new Vitals app in Watch OS 11 is showing them signs that they were sick days in advance before they felt any symptoms.

[The Nobel Prize @NobelPrize]

BREAKING NEWS
The 2024 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.

[The Nobel Prize @NobelPrize]

Say good morning to our new medicine laureate 🎉

Gary Ruvkun was woken up in the early hours to the news he had been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Stay tuned for our interview with him, coming soon.

[The Nobel Prize @NobelPrize]

This year’s medicine laureates Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun studied a relatively unassuming 1 mm long roundworm, C. elegans.

Despite its small size, C. elegans possesses many specialised cell types such as nerve and muscle cells also found in larger, more complex animals, making it a useful model for investigating how tissues develop and mature in multicellular organisms.

Read how the 2024 medicine laureates’ investigations into C. elegans revealed an entirely new dimension to gene regulation: https://t.co/8RwUplwYQA

#NobelPrize