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  I argue here that Black-centred speculative fiction is not just entertainment but a vital method for imagining our way beyond the racial and colonial structures that Euro-modern law struggles to overcome. As such, it should be an integral part of legal education. https://folukeafrica.com/law-racial-justice-black-centred-sci-fi-imagining-an-antiracist-future/

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  One thing I want to add to my professional bio is that I probably have the longest titles in academia: Exhibit A: Black/African science fiction and the quest for racial justice through legal knowledge: How can we unsettle Euro-modern time and temporality in our teaching? Exhibit B: Seeking the university that is ours: understanding, unpacking and unsettling Black students' racialised (un) belonging in UK law schools Exhibit C: The Sea Casts Its Net of Justice Wide: A Speculative Judgm...

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  I finally found a YouTube video that pronounces my name correctly! Try it out. It's only 3 syllables. Did you get it right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukQHhboq94s

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  This essay explores African history, collective memory, and why Africa's past is central to understanding our shared world. It also includes an African history quiz. How much do you know about Africa before colonisation? Take the quiz and share your score. https://folukeafrica.com/african-history-quiz-i-pre-colonial-years/

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  I argue that we cannot celebrate 60 years of the passing of the Race Relations Act as a win for racial justice because such gains remain fragile, contested and continually threatened. With the incited rise in racial violence, what exactly are we celebrating? https://folukeafrica.com/what-is-there-to-celebrate-60-years-after-the-passing-of-the-race-relations-act-1965/

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  39 DAYS TO GO! How do we teach the histories and legacies of race, empire, and colonialism in law? What would legal education look like if race, empire, and colonialism were treated as central rather than peripheral to the study of law? Join us for the launch of the Critical Legal Pedagogies of Race and Empire Network as we explore new approaches to teaching, research, and collaboration. Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/launching-the-critical-legal-pedagogies-of-race-and-empire-ne...

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  Resharing this essay in which I reflect on what it means to be labelled an "activist" as an academic, why racialised scholars are often described this way when others are not, and whether the distinction between scholarship and activism can ever be a good-faith one grounded in our scholarly purposes. https://folukeafrica.com/activist-or-academic-or-both-the-quandary-of-scholactivism-for-the-minoritised-in-the-ivory-tower/

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  I decided to make a video version of my text review of the documentary, "Soundtrack to a Coup d'état". Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat is an archival essay film examining the lead-up to the 1960 assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba and the exploitation of the Congo's resources. Utilising a fast-paced, non-narrative style, the film highlights the intersection of Cold War geopolitics, CIA-backed covert operations, and the role of "Jazz A...

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  Using the Turkish series Vatanım Sensin as a lens, I explore what it means to love a country and why so much contemporary patriotism seems to depend on fear, exclusion, and the manufacture of enemies. Can you really love a country if you cannot love another person? https://folukeafrica.com/lessons-on-love-patriotism-and-revolution-from-vatanim-sensin/

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  This #blogpost is a reflection on the simple premise of the Critical Legal Pedagogies of Race & Empire Network: we need spaces to think together. To reverse the "colonial disconnect", we need to intentionally build relationships and imagine otherwise worlds. "We cannot address this crisis if progressive critical thinkers and social critics act as though teaching is not a subject worthy of our regard. The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility...

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  "'We are all already here, and that answers the question of whether or not we belong.'" https://www.ted.com/talks/olutimehin_adegbeye_who_belongs_in_a_city

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  30 Days to Go! In 30 days, we'll be launching the Critical Legal Pedagogies of Race and Empire Network. How do law schools teach the histories, legacies, and afterlives of race and empire? What innovative approaches are emerging to address colonialism, racialisation, and global inequalities in legal education? Join us for the launch of a new interdisciplinary network dedicated to conversation, collaboration, resource-sharing, and research-informed teaching on race and empire. The event w...

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  Decolonisation and the rush to adopt GenAI are driven by fundamentally different logics, means and ends. What happens when a project aimed at reclaiming humanity, time and collective flourishing meets a technology built on extraction, automation and prediction? https://folukeafrica.com/being-human-once-more-some-reflections-on-decolonisation-and-genai/

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  Does anyone remember watching this movie? There’s Something Wrong In Paradise (1984) https://nostalgiacentral.com/movies/movies-l-to-z/movies-t/theres-something-wrong-in-paradise-1984/

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  Black/African Science Fiction begins from a recognition that colonialism, enslavement, racial capitalism, and law remain deeply entangled. Yet rather than accepting the futures these systems predict, Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism ask us to imagine otherwise. I explore the convergences and tensions between these genres and argue that they do far more than imagine alternative futures. They challenge the colonial ordering of time, expose the limits of Euro-modern law, and create space to reimagi...

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  I decided to do a video version of my text review of the documentary, "Soundtrack to a Couple d'etat". https://youtu.be/Lvq1A89uRdA?is=iVPHwQ4lKv7XOV6z

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  RE: https://c.im/@folukeifejola/117008959227394135 When people complain about Africans/Black people in period drama on stage, screen and page, it is as if they assume Black Africans blinked into human existence at the moment Europe entered into the picture. Main character energy much?

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  In this essay, I argue that contemporary uses of the term "decolonisation" (including its seemingly unalterable location in the granting of independence to former colonies) are much narrower than the radical histories and struggles from which it emerged. https://folukeafrica.com/the-trouble-with-defining-decolonisation-a-table-analogy-and-some-reading/

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  This #newblogpost is a reflection on the simple premise of the Critical Legal Pedagogies of Race & Empire Network: we need spaces to think together. To reverse "colonial disconnect", we need to intentionally create spaces to learn from one another, share resources, build relationships and imagine otherwise worlds. https://folukeafrica.com/reimagining-legal-education-building-a-global-community-for-critical-legal-pedagogies-on-race-and-empire/

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  Join us for the launch of the Critical Legal Pedagogies of Race and Empire Network on 14 Sept 2026 at the University of Bristol (hybrid event). We'll explore how legal education can engage with race, empire, colonialism, and global justice https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/launching-the-critical-legal-pedagogies-of-race-and-empire-network-tickets-1993600465659?aff=oddtdtcreator

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  This #newblogpost explores how colonial ideas of race, property, and humanity have shaped and continue to shape international law, privileging capital over protecting human life. A reflection on law, power, decolonisation, and the possibility of anticolonial futures. "The logics that underwrote lawful colonial brutalities continue to violently disregard the integral value of human life as they are used to retain colonial gain and refuse justice for colonial violences." "Legal hi...

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  This poem emerged from me in the middle of the night as I tried to make sense of a world marked by personal grief and collective violence. It is about mourning, memory, humanity, and the fragile act of continuing to live... somehow. I hope it helps you if you need it https://folukeafrica.com/to-those-who-have-gone-ahead-grieving-while-breathing/

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  Kofi Awoonor's "The Weaver Bird" captures the violence of dispossession, cultural domination, and the destruction of indigenous ways of being. The poem's closing lines invite us to answer the enduring question: How do we build "new homes" in the ruins of colonialism? https://folukeafrica.com/the-weaver-bird-by-kofi-awoonor-as-postcolonial-commentary-on-loss-of-home/

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  I wrote this poem in 2020, around the time the Colston statue was thrown into Bristol Harbour. It began as a meditation on our attachment to statues, monuments, symbols... the strange contradictions in how we judge them. Whose idols actually survive "enlightenment"? https://folukeafrica.com/idols/

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  Patrice Émery Lumumba was born on the 2nd of July 1925. He is widely remembered as a symbol of anti‑colonial struggle and a martyr for the pan‑African cause. He is commemorated in street names, in song, and in stone and human statues. Through our memories Lumumba lives. https://folukeafrica.com/patrice-lumumba-may-africa-breathe-the-air-of-freedom/

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  On Lumumba's birthday, through this review, I reflect on the key players in Lumumba's assassination, the meanings of modernity & decolonisation, the denial of time & humanity, the politicisation of memory, the disUnited Nations and why we must tell our own stories. https://folukeafrica.com/soundtrack-to-the-continuing-coup-detat-re-remembering-lumumba/

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  One of the reasons I started writing a blog was to address my deep dissatisfaction with the way Africa is studied or talked about outside the continent, especially. This is mostly marked by absence. But when it is not, most interlocutors ignore the impact of external interference. https://folukeafrica.com/how-we-study-africa/

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  I remember a professor who read some of my writing on West Africa was quite shocked to discover that Timbuktu exists... Sankoré, the famous mediaeval mosque-university at Timbuktu (in present-day Mali), was set up around the twelfth century. https://folukeafrica.com/timbuktu-site-of-1st-african-university/

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  Here I ask whether the tools we currently have in legal knowledge are sufficient to achieve racial and environmental justice in the present? What does the Zong case (in its non-identification of harm and uncritical use of language—care and slave) tell us about this question? https://folukeafrica.com/relegislating-the-zong-from-the-perspective-of-the-sea-what-does-it-mean-to-live-in-the-devastation-of-time/