John Aerni-Flessner

Exciting news! My book on the history of the #Lesotho Highlands #Water Project (#LHWP) is now available as an Open Access (free) ebook. White Gold and Thirsty Communities. Create a free account with @HSRCPress and you can read it! hsrcpress.ac.za/product/whit...

JOBURG WATER Joburg Water says residents may have to wait another three months for relief from persistent supply problems. Long-term improvements will require greater investment in water infrastructure. #CarteBlanche #southafrica #news

Obviously this is racist and gross, but it's also shockingly historically illiterate? No one who has taken a single high school world history course would deny that Arab culture has produced incredible science and literature. This is why we need basic humanities education.

It is a sad time in our household, as Frank Gagliano passed yesterday. We love him and will miss him dearly. Here’s an obit I wrote for Runner’s World www.runnersworld.com/news/a742478...

Here’s the petition, in case there are any St.X alums on here. www.change.org/p/st-xavier-...

Come work at MSU as our Secretary for Academic Governance. If you love governance, parliamentary procedure and bylaws, this is the job for you! I am on the search committee as the position works closely with Faculty Senate. Pls ask questions! careers.msu.edu/jobs/secreta...

Flock and hard place Mokoto Masotsa watches over his sheep above a gorge near Semonkong, in Lesotho. About a third of the country’s school-age boys work as shepherds, often spending months away in isolated mountain pastures. Photo: Tommy Trenchard/Panos Pictures

The main thing that this study shows is that because of underfunding and underinvestment in the humanities, we as a society have less and less research knowledge about culture and history. That's a significant finding. academysciencesletters.org/wp-content/u...

Seasoned ASA presenter Bernard Moore shares tips from one emerging scholar to another on giving a polished and professional conference presentation (pg. 23). Share with your students preparing for ASA in just six weeks! https://africanstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/ASA-News-Spring-2026.pdf

Well damn

James Barker, a brilliant photographer, shared some of his work in this book. He recently passed away and will be loved for generations to come for his amazing body of work. His photos are a beautiful window into the world I grew up in.

Excerpt from @zakesmda.bsky.social new biography of #Comrade Chris #Hani is up on the @dailymaverick.co.za And it makes me want to read the book even more! The #Lesotho connections of Comrade Chris loom large www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026...

"The University of Oregon is considering phasing out ... some or all of the master’s and doctoral programs offered in History, Romance Languages, Folklore, Comparative Literature, Classics, and German and Scandinavian" bit.ly/4eCYxvx

At the peak of the HIV epidemic, AIDS caused more than half of all deaths in some countries. The HIV epidemic — which started in the early 1980s and progressed rapidly in the 1990s — has had lasting impacts that continue today. More than 800,000 people still die from HIV/AIDS every year.

Happy 4th anniversary to the night in Svalbard when my phone took this unedited photo of a giant lunar halo over the glaciers of Svalbard to which the only response was to fall into hysterical laughter, serially taken up by each shipmate, how else to respond to such outlandish, annihilating beauty

Shocking article in this issue that asbestos is still being used in construction in Zimbabwe. Few places have suffered as much from asbestos as Zimbabwe as it was mined extensively there, but it is somehow still legal.

I totally DO NOT want to kick a vital coalition while it's down, so to speak. But I do want to say to organizers in the current environment: Choose your platforms wisely. Use infrastructure you trust not to blow your work away because its owners have an ideological ax to grind. +

You can still use the big corporate platforms to amplify your message, of course, but you need to own (or at least trust the owners of) your primary working spaces. As much as you can, be sure the platforms you rely on share your values. Love, your friends at Knowledge Commons ()

Tribute to Prof. Godfrey Muriuki by John Kamau in the Sunday Nation. A preeminent Kenyan historian and researcher. University of London PhD graduate (1969). His magnum opus was 'A History of the Kikuyu, 1500-1900' (1974). He supervised many MA and PhD research students at the University of Nairobi

I honestly have no sense of whether or not this is likely to be effective in terms of persuading voters, but damn it’s a good answer on the merits.

I’m sorry to have to be the bad guy here but we need to recognize that we live in a compressed air thrusters world now. If you’re not finding ways to teach the critical use of compressed air thrusters in your classroom, you’re setting your students up to fail when you could be setting them up to fly

When Grammy-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens begins playing “Old Corn Liquor,” a traditional Black American folk tune, acclaimed Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man recognizes similarities to Chinese pentatonic music and spontaneously joins in. The joy on their faces says it all.

Global medieval trade alert 🚨 “Archaeologists digging in the medieval city of Great Zimbabwe have discovered pieces of jade-green Chinese pottery, suggesting that the enigmatic empire had long-distance connections with East Asia more than 1,000 years ago.” Fab article by Dr. @killgrove.bsky.social

Clement Attlee attended meetings of the African Mineworkers' Union on the Copperbelt but was not impressed and refused to talk to them.

A haunted house where every room has an assistant dean for teaching excellence and vice chancellor for finance

Free advice to anyone looking to interview an expert on the South African milieu that produced Navi Pillay: the person you want to talk to is Shireen Hassim at Carleton University in Canada. Or, although she may be harder to get ahold of bc retired, Uma Mesthrie

In you, in #Michigan, ever wondered why we elect the Boards of #Trustees for UM (Ann Arbor), MSU (East Lansing) and Wayne State (Detroit), @michiganpublic.bsky.social's Dustin Dwyer has some answers for you #HigherEd #Goverance www.michiganpublic.org/politics-gov...

Accusations of appointment of politically-connected but ill-qualified advisors to the #Lesotho Highlands #Water Project (#LHWP) continue under the RFP government. This is not the first time such a claim has been made (under governments of all parties): lestimes.com?p=91670

A very happy 60th Independence Day to all #Basotho ba #Lesotho today. May the day and the year be good ones! #Lesotho60 #Khotso #Pula #Nala

It's the first Saturday night of the (ice) hockey season. For the first time in 56 years, I am not watching Hockey Night in Canada because @rogers denied it to the @cbc. For the first time in 89 years, no one can tune in. Shame on you, @rogers, for privatizing part of our national identity

Here's a chart showing who funds basic research in the US. It's easy to tell that private funding cannot make up for significant cuts to government funding.

NIH makes yet again new LOW number of grants report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/...

3. Calls for tuition free college may be untenable and anyway will likely do less for affordability than addressing housing, healthcare, childcare, and transportation costs which are major drags on affordability for students (and everyone else).

Hegseth freezes hiring of civilian tenured faculty at US military academies thehill.com/policy/defen...

The thing is, also, truth and reconciliation commissions are okay for the “on down” part of the equation. They have a very not-great track record on actually getting anyone in charge to sit down for a chat. If you’re looking for accountability, that’s a different conversation.

Mining Magazine argues my report is "a compelling challenge to Anglo American's position that it is not responsible for the devastating lead pollution that blights the Zambian town of Kabwe." www.miningmagazine.com/safety/news-...

We launched the report earlier this week with residents from Kabwe. It is one thing to research and present what I think is a compelling historical argument. It is another to listen to people who live with the realities of lead poisoning in the soil and their bodies.

The question of responsibility for historic mining pollution can be an extremely difficult and contested one. In a new report for @actsa-uk.bsky.social, I use archive research to examine Anglo American's role in mining in Kabwe, one of the world's most polluted towns: actsa.org/new-report-h...

This is not a very sophisticated response, and I am not a poltical theorists, but I Allen’s has two basic problems here. 1. Shes doesn’t really understand higer education, and 2. She assumes that any elected government’s actions are legitimate if not clearly illegal www.chronicle.com/article/coll...

Schools in #Lesotho for the boys and men who spend much of their time #herding is featured in the USA news source NPR: www.npr.org/2026/09/27/g...