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Africa Talks Community Lectures

Africa Talks is a monthly community lecture series organized in collaboration with the UW African Studies Program. The goal is to provide a platform to discuss insights, perspectives, and current events related to the African continent and diaspora. We believe this series can facilitate meaningful engagement within our diverse community around issues of mutual interest and importance.  Africa Talks provides a platform for sharing and celebrating the rich and diverse cultures of Africa, promoting cross-cultural understanding and appreciation of African traditions, languages, art, and music.

Media coverage: Africa Talks in the News

We look forward to hearing from you. Contact us.

Call at (608) 294-0066

Email: info@africancentermadison.org

Past Lectures

2025 Lecture Series​

Speakers

  • Ali Baba Sanchi & Voronica Bading

Topic: “We are Alive”: Narrating Memories of traumatization among IDPs in Host communities in Zamfara State of Northwest, Nigeria.

Description

The ongoing crisis in Zamfara State, Northwest Nigeria, has resulted in a significant number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) seeking refuge in host communities. These individuals carry the heavy burden of traumatic memories that affect their mental health and social integration. This talk will examine the narratives of recognizing the fear and anxiety faced by individuals, along with how physical violence and displacement affect their social, cultural, and economic well-being. These IDPs live but anticipate what will happen next, explaining that having lived through attacks, “we are alive” yet cannot undo the horrors we have seen. (Source: https://africa.wisc.edu/africa-talks/)

Voronica Bading will be sharing her experience as a survivor, refugee and citizen, and also talk about her trajectory from South Sudan to Egypt and finally to Madison, Wisconsin.

About the speakers

Ali Baba Sanchi is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at UW-Madison. His research focuses on the cultural manifestations of trauma among the victims of Boko Haram’s insurgency, banditry, and kidnapping in Northwest Nigeria.

Voronica Bading is our community co-panelist. She came to Madison as refugee from South Sudan. She worked as a custodian at UW-Madison for 5 years before becoming a CNA. A single working mother of six, Voronica has worked hard to make a home for her children. 
  • Dr. Linda Vakunta & Irène Tombo

Topic: Everyday Citizenship from Africa to Wisconsin

Description

In a context where the state often appears dysfunctional and remote, though not always absent, what is the nature of the relationship between rulers and those who are ruled? To shed light on this question, this talk will examine the nature of state-citizen relationship in the DRC and Wisconsin. (Source: https://africa.wisc.edu/africa-talks/)

About the speakers

Irène Tombo is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at UW-Madison. Her research is centered on norms and practices of citizenship (la citoyenneté) in polities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Her dissertation specifically focuses on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Dr. Linda Vakunta is a Deputy Mayor of the City of Madison, Wisconsin. She holds a PhD in Environmental Studies, a Master’s Degree in Rehabilitation Psychology ,and a Bachelor’s Degree in psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Africa Talks with Dr. Linda Vakunta and Irene Tombo

2024 Lecture Series

Speakers

  • Eric Boansi Agyekum​

Topic: Political Polarization, Fact-Checking, and Misinformation in Ghana

Description

Recent presidential and parliamentary elections in Ghana show that the country is increasingly becoming politically polarized. Beyond politics, there are other lines of division such as ethnicity, religion, cultural and territorial differences. Dis/misinformation thrives in countries with deep ideological and political differences. In this talk, I explore the complex interrelationship between political polarization, misinformation, journalism practice, and fact-checking. (Source: https://africa.wisc.edu/africa-talks/)

About the speaker

Eric Boansi Agyekum is a PhD student at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UW-Madison. His research interest lies in fact-checking, media representation, and misinformation. Before joining UW-Madison, he was a lecturer in the Journalism and Media Studies Faculty at the Ghana Institute of Journalism. He has extensive knowledge in media and communication from both academia and industry, having worked in journalism and advertising before joining GIJ.
Eric Agyekum
  • Dorothy Lsotho​

Topic: Colonial-Era Air Quality Legacies in Kampala, Uganda

Description

In Kampala, Uganda, British colonial urban planners created segregated neighborhoods for Europeans, Asians, and Africans, under the colonial public health guidance. Today neighborhoods originally designated for African residents have higher levels of air pollution than those for Europeans and Asians, even after accounting for factors like road traffic and fuel use. (Source: https://africa.wisc.edu/africa-talks/)

About the speaker

Dorothy Lsotho is a Ph.D. student studying the persistent colonial city design of Kampala, Uganda, and air pollution inequalities using low-cost air quality sensors. She also works with research groups and policymakers to design targeted air pollution management policies in East Africa. She believes that breathing clean air is the most basic and important human right, and her goal is to see everyone achieve that human right.
Dorothy Lsoto
  • Michael Oshindoro

Topic: The Arts of African Popular Musics

Description

Popular music is not mere lyrics, rhythm, and beat. Our encounter with music is also an encounter with images. In this talk, we will examine how African popular musicians use images to assert themselves as the best in the game. 

About the speaker

Michael Oshindoro is a PhD candidate in African cultural studies at UW-Madison. He studies African visual arts and media including animation, comics, and special effects. 
Michael Oshindoro
  • Oluwayinka Arawomo

Topic: Nigerian Women’s Rhetoric of Sexual Pleasure and Power Online

Description

How do Nigerian women make sense of sex when silence is a cultural and discursive norm? How is the digital media both an alternative and ambivalent space for these women to disrupt silence and critically engage dominant sexual discourses? This talk addresses these salient questions through examining Nigerian women’s sexual discourses online and how their rhetorical practice of dialoguing not only enables knowledge and meaning making, but also articulates the possibilities and experiences of sexual pleasure and power for Nigerian women even in restrictive contexts. (Source: https://africa.wisc.edu/africa-talks/)

About the speaker

Oluwayinka Arawomo is currently a 6th year PhD candidate in the Department of English (Composition and Rhetoric program) at UW-Madison. She is the Vice President of the Oline Writing Centers Association (OWCA). She is the past TA Assistant Director of UW-Madison’s Writing Center. Her research interests include digital writing and rhetoric, Nigerian women’s discourses in digital spaces, and African feminism. Her current research project investigates digital media as alternative and ambivalent spaces for Nigerian women’s rhetoric of sexual pleasure and power. She has taught first year composition for four years and supported her students in the writing classroom and one-to-one tutoring in the Writing Center.
Oluwayinka Arawomo
  • Harry Kiiru

Topic: The Unholy Trinity: Immigrating while Black and African

Description

African migration to the United States has grown significantly in the last several decades, bringing to the fore a number of interrelated socio-historical, cultural, and political processes. Although fairly small, in comparison to other migrant groups who have longer histories and trajectories in the U.S., this growth in African migration has seen a related increase in migrant literature, films, music, art, and other forms of cultural production. In considering this population growth and its corresponding cultural production realities, this talk will investigate two overlapping questions: What does it mean to migrate while Black, and while African in African migrant literature? (Source: https://africa.wisc.edu/africa-talks/)

About the speaker

Harry Kiiru is a PhD candidate in the Department of African Cultural Studies with a minor in African American Studies. His dissertation titled The Culturally and Racially Body in Motion: How Sub-Saharan African Immigrants Become Black in the United States, is a study of the new African diaspora’s racialization processes of incorporation into the ethno-racial hierarchal order within the United States and how they negotiate this identity. The study begins with the 1959-63 East African Students’ Airlift which saw almost eight hundred students attend schools in the U.S. and Canada. The Airlift as a concrete historical moment allows me to construct a periodization that runs from the 1950s to the present. Methodologically, he employs a mixed-method approach, incorporating archival research, African migrant literature and filmic analysis, and self-ethnography.
Harry Kiiru
  • Dr. Kevin Wamalwa

Topic: Smoldering Embers: Negative Peace, Memory of Home, and Environmental Conflict in Mt. Elgon

Description

From 2005 to 2008, Mt. Elgon, Kenya, experienced the most brutal ethnic land-related conflict in its history, involving murders, disappearances, torture, and sexual assault. My ethnographic study of these violent events highlights the sociopolitical conditions that sustain instability in Mt. Elgon, the possibility of future conflicts, and how these continue to affect the lives of people in the region. I argue that despite the ongoing peacebuilding efforts, only a “negative peace” has prevailed in Mt. Elgon, where the dilemmas of (un)belonging, undressed injustices, and environmental and land crises still put the community on the brink of further conflict. (Source: https://africa.wisc.edu/africa-talks/)

About the speaker

Dr. Kevin Wamalwa is an Anthropologist and African Cultural Studies scholar who studies resource-based conflict and post-violence memory in Kenya. His current work on embodied memories of violence explores situated understandings of victimhood and villainy in Mt. Elgon, Kenya. Kevin also holds an MA in African Languages and Literature from UW-Madison, focusing on Swahili utopian literature. His academic publications include “The Problem of (un)Belonging” (2021) and “Students’ Reparticularization of Chinese Language and Culture” (Co-othered with Amy Stambach, 2018). Kevin is also a published poet and story writer with works including Miale ya Ushairi (2015), a poetry study guide for high school and middle-level colleges; a short story, “Nimerudi Tena” (I have Returned) in Kunani Marekani? (What is there in America? 2015, Iribemwangi, ed.). As a believer in education for all, Kevin founded the Deserv-Ed initiative, which supports needy high school and college students in Kenya to complete their education. Kevin is the current African Studies Fellow teaching the new African and Global Black Studies Course at Madison College.

2023 Lecture Series

Speakers

  • Tolulope Akinwole

Topic: Taking African Cartoons Seriously, Again: The Multimodal Art of Coping with the Postcolonial Incredible

About the speaker

Tolulope Akinwole is a doctoral candidate in English at UW-Madison. His research interests revolve around global Black literatures, African cultural studies, and critical geography. He is currently a dissertation fellow at UW-Madison’s Institute for Research in the Humanities, where he is completing his research on literary and cultural representations of automobility in postcolonial Africa. He obtained master’s degrees in Literary Studies, African Cultural Studies, and English Language from UW-Madison and the University of Lagos, Nigeria. He is associate editor of Africanwriter.com, an online magazine of contemporary African and African diaspora literatures, and he manages Africacartoons.com. His research has been supported by the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers’ Associations, the African Studies Research Award, the Ebrahim Hussein Research Fellowship, and the Graduate School at UW-Madison. 
Tolulope Akinwole
  • Mwita Muinko

Topic: “Manhood today is money”: New Conceptions and Shifting Interpretations of Masculinity among the Kuria People of Western Kenya

About the speaker

Mwita Muinko is a Graduate Teaching Assistant and doctoral candidate in the department of African Cultural Studies. His research examines the relationship between language and gender, with a particular emphasis on how masculinity is constructed and expressed in an African context. He has a keen interest in auto-ethnographic methods and narrative research. He teaches both Swahili language and other Africa-related courses.
Mwita Muinko
  • Tinashé Hofisi

Inaugural Lecture

Topic: Emerging Insights from the 2023 Elections in Zimbabwe

About the speaker

Tinashé Hofisi is a human rights lawyer and doctoral candidate with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. His research examines the emergence of constitutional courts in common law Africa. Tinashé was a constitutional litigator with the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights for seven years and argued several cases in the Constitutional Court. He graduated with an LLM from Loyola University, Chicago and is a Mandela Washington Fellow under the Young African Leaders Initiative. He is also an IFES Manatt Fellow and an ILS Graduate Fellow. Tinashé holds certificates in Constitution-building in Africa and Strategic Human Rights Litigation from the Central European University. Since the fall of 2020, he has been a lecturer in the Centre for Law, Society and Justice, where he developed an interdisciplinary course on courts, constitutionalism and human rights.
Tinashe Hofisi
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