Alexandra Reza

In the late​ 1990s, according to the historian Stewart Lloyd-Jones, Lisbon ‘transformed out of all recognition’. For a long time it ‘resembled little more than a vast construction site’. In 1998, the year Lídia Jorge completed The Wind Whistling in the Cranes, the city hosted Expo ’98, which brought in eleven million visitors (Portugal’s population...

When Maryse Condé was ten, she stood up in front of the guests at her mother’s birthday party to recite a poem she had written. It was late April in Guadeloupe and the ice-cream maker had been churning for hours in preparation. There were bunches of roses everywhere. For weeks, Maryse had woken up early to work on her descriptions of her mother’s quick temper and changing...

A news​ broadcast from 17 November 1986 shows François Mitterrand and Thomas Sankara at an official dinner in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. Sankara had taken power in a military coup three years before. In the clip he is on his feet delivering a speech and Mitterrand is seated. Sankara has established a radical social programme that aims to modernise his country and...