Taught by Professor Mungai Mutonya, AFAS 1104 challenges familiar portrayals of Africa as a continent defined primarily by crisis, conflict, and instability. Instead, students examine contemporary Africa through the ideas, innovations, movements, and cultural practices emerging from communities across the continent.
From mobile banking and grassroots technologies to environmental activism, the creative arts, entrepreneurship, and youth-led political movements, the course introduces students to Africans responding to local and global challenges in innovative ways. These case studies offer a different lens for understanding the continent—one centered on agency, creativity, historical context, and social change.
Students will also consider the inequalities that shape these stories. How do differences between the Global North and Global South influence development and opportunity? How do class, gender, and generational inequalities operate within African societies? And how can understanding those contexts help us move beyond simplistic narratives about the continent?
Drawing on history, political analysis, journalism, popular writing, and African literature, the seminar encourages students to question the stories they encounter about Africa and to develop a more complex understanding of contemporary African life.
Why Take This Course?
AFAS 1104 offers first-year students an opportunity to rethink what they know—or think they know—about Africa.
Rather than approaching the continent through a single story, students will encounter a range of African experiences, perspectives, and responses to some of the defining questions of the twenty-first century.
The course explores topics including technology, entrepreneurship, environmental conservation, youth activism, popular culture, the arts, inequality, and globalization. Case studies include financially inclusive mobile banking, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Green Belt Movement, grassroots innovation, African artists working as agents of social change, and Gen Z and youth-led movements transforming political and cultural life across the continent.
As a discussion-based first-year seminar, the course also gives students the opportunity to develop skills in critical reading, analytical writing, discussion, and contextual thinking that will be valuable throughout their undergraduate education.
Students will leave the course better equipped to recognize oversimplified representations of Africa, ask more thoughtful questions about the continent, and understand how historical, political, social, and global forces shape contemporary African experiences.
Fall 2026 Course Information
Instructor: Professor Mungai Mutonya
Course: L90 AFAS 1104-01
Semester: Fall 2026
Meeting time: Monday and Wednesday, 1:00–2:20 p.m.
Format: In person
Credits: 3
Enrollment capacity: 20 students
