The Amílcar Cabral Prize 2022 was awarded to the scholar of African literature Sakiru Adebayo, in the second edition of the award promoted by the Institute of Contemporary History and the Padrão dos Descobrimentos / EGEAC.

Selected from ten applications, Adebayo’s paper, “The black soul is (still) a white man’s artefact? Postcoloniality, post-Fanonism and the tenacity of race(ism) in A. Igoni Barrett’s Blackass“, was published in the journal African Studies (TF). The jury of the competition, consisting of Manuela Ribeiro Sanches, Victor Barros, and Rui Gomes Coelho, considered that the article highlights “the persistent shadows of European imperial cultural domination in Nigeria, its legacies and its effects on the Nigerian post-colonial imaginary; and insists on the global interconnections that the idea of race and contemporary racism weave as part of the global structure of political, economic-capitalist, social, and cultural domination that goes beyond the simple question of nationality and geography.”

Sakiru Adebayo was born in Nigeria and graduated from the University of Ibadan before moving to South Africa, where he completed his PhD in African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

The jury also attributed two honourable mentions: to Merve Fejzula, of the University of Missouri, for her article “Gendered Labour, Negritude and the Black Public Sphere,” published in the journal Historical Research (OUP); and to Burak Sayim, of New York University Abu Dhabi, for his article “Transregional by design: The early communist press in the middle east and global revolutionary networks,” published in the Journal of Global History (CUP).

The Amílcar Cabral Prize was created in 2021 to “promote scientific research and public debate on anti-colonial resistance and colonial processes that mark the history of the world, from the 15th century to the present day”. The winner of the first edition was Esmat Elhalaby, from the University of Toronto, with a paper on Wadi’ Al-Bustani.