In line with the popular movie-based expression ‘I know what you did last summer’, since last Friday we may be popularizing ‘I know what you did last evening’. For many this would imply the obvious—namely football (soccer)! Yes, the EURO 2016 has started, which means watching football matches, discussing teams’ odds to win, and reading…

Lagos is full of street vendors (see an earlier post about their frenzy activity!). It can get overwhelming! One of my Nigerian friends explained to me “Yeah! We’re traders! There’s hardly any manufacturing, and there are historical reasons for this: the Brits were interested in selling overseas what they manufactured at home…” This seems to…

For many of us in Western European and in the United States, politics seems to have lost its appeal and hit a new low in terms of trust. Perhaps this isn’t entirely surprising  after watching the leaders TV debates on both sides of the Atlantic and the British debate on Brexit. One commentator last week…

I’ve visited some of the African Anglophone countries (Kenya, Tanzania and parts of Nigeria) over the last eight years, but this is my first time in Abidjan, the “capital” of the West African Francophone. I would like to share with you my field notes which contain my first and lasting impression of the idiosyncrasies of…