Africa Knows

Halima Ben Umar on the Rights of Women in Islam

Hajiya Halima Ben Umar is a Nigerian public intellectual and the Executive Director at Women in Media Communication Initiative. She is based in Kano, northern Nigeria, where she also co-anchors the popular TV programme Mata A Yau, Women Today in Hausa, that you will also hear discussed in the conversation. Ben Umar speaks with Gaddafi about fighting for the rights of women in Islam while being a working mother of seven; her tensions and collaborations with Islamic scholars; her Islamically-inspired engagement with a range of social problems such as drug use, mental health, and teenage pregnancies; and the importance of educating young girls - and what happens if a society fails to do so.

Julie Sanda on storytelling, partnership ethics, and life as a Nigerian academic

In this episode, Henry speaks with Dr Julie Sanda, a political scientist and the director general of the Plateau Peace Building Agency in Jos. In a very open and frank conversation, they explore the ethics of international partnerships, the impact of the difficulties of life on Nigerian academics, the importance of storytelling in science, being a “pocket psychologist”, and what the Nigerian academy looks like when it is intellectually vibrant and exciting.

Nzioka John Muthama on teaching climate science after COVID

This week, you will hear Dr Nzioka John Muthama, a professor at the University of Nairobi. Dr Muthama is an applied meteorologist with an interest in climate change and sustainability, and long experience teaching university students from the BA to the PhD. In this episode, he talks to Charity about the drastic changes in the University of Nairobi’s teaching methods after COVID, the impacts of his research on the ozone layer and climate change, the four questions of methodology, and writing a thesis that everybody wants to read.

Ibrahim Sani Kankara on Bandits, Community Policing, and Boko Haram

In this episode, Gaddafi is speaking to Ibrahim Sani Kankara, an associate professor and pioneer head of the department of anthropology, faculty of history and development studies at Bayero University Kano, northern Nigeria. In this conversation, Dr Kankara talks about historians always being afraid of numbers, teaching students to mould their character, the importance of collaboration when researching conflict, and more.

Abdourahmane Idrissa on wrestling with the state in West Africa and the Sahel.

This week, we get to hear Dr Abdourahmane Idrissa, a Nigerien philosopher and political scientist based in Leiden but who has worked and lived all around the world. Idrissa’s areas of research expertise include the state, Islam, democracy, and security in the Sahel and West Africa more broadly. In this episode, he speaks with Henry and Gaddafi a truly wide range of subjects, from the impact of 9/11 on his academic path to the birth and death of the Songhai empire, and from the intellectual prophets of the 1960s to West African social structure - and, of course, the security crises in the Sahel.