K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.
Latest
When things fall apart
Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.
The General sleeps
As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.
Enemies of progress
Delayed, underfunded, and undermined, this year’s Women’s Africa Cup of Nations has exposed not just neglect but active sabotage from CAF and national federations.
Gen Z and the spirit of Mau Mau
Kenya’s largest-ever protests have drawn striking comparisons to the Mau Mau uprising. But for today’s movement to endure, it must move beyond the streets and invest in political education.
The climate finance crisis
As Mozambique faces escalating climate disasters, it is shut out of the very funds meant to protect it.
TV
The CAF Champions League final and the politics of North-African football ultras.
Culture
Matchday 2: The Battle of Omdurman
A new season of the African Five-a-side podcast asks, “what is the greatest match in the history of men’s African football?”
Whose game is remembered?
The Women’s Africa Cup of Nations opens in Morocco amid growing calls to preserve the stories, players, and legacy of the women who built the game—before they’re lost to erasure and algorithm alike.
The sound of black identity
A landmark documentary uncovers the radical soul scene that electrified 1970s Rio, inspired Black consciousness, and terrified Brazil’s military dictatorship.
Struggle and archive
The formerly exiled ANC activist and later judge Albie Sachs is archiving his life, including a new film that forms part of a larger project of legacy-making.
A barren sowing
Donato Ndongo’s latest collection of short stories portrays African exile and diaspora in Spain and France.
Revolutionary Papers
A year long series on the archival remnants of African and black diaspora anti-colonial movement materials to retrieve a politics and pedagogy that challenge the contemporary cooptation of radical histories. Guest editors: Mahvish Ahmad, Koni Benson, and Hana Morgenstern from the Revolutionary Papers project (revolutionarypapers.org)
Nigeria's archives of revolutionary printmaking offers us insights into the dissident voices of the country's old left, which are surprisingly relevant today.
Christian theology was appropriated to play an integral role in the justifying apartheid’s racist ideology. Black theologians resisted through a theology of the oppressed.
Politics
All pull together
The 2025 Kenyan protests once again declared themselves “tribeless, leaderless, partyless.” But what does the idiom of unity hide?
Eurafrique reloaded
Emmanuel Macron’s recognition of Morocco’s claim to Western Sahara is a calculated pivot in a decades-old plan to reassert French influence across the Sahel.
The grift tank
In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.
Helen Zille’s transphobia
In echoing the anti-trans panic sweeping the Global North, South African political heavyweight Helen Zille joins a reactionary tradition of racialized sex policing.
The specter of Bandung
Once a symbol of anti-imperial unity, BRICS now risks becoming the very thing Bandung opposed: a club of powerful states reproducing global inequality in a new key.
Donald Trump
The quiet violence of peace deals
Trump’s Congo-Rwanda deal is hailed as diplomatic triumph. But behind the photo ops lies a familiar exchange: African resources for Western power.
Sovereignty or supremacy?
As far-right politics gain traction across the globe, some South Africans are embracing Trumpism not out of policy conviction but out of a deeper, more troubling identification.
The end of AGOA
A postmortem on the African Growth and Opportunities Act.
Between Washington and Beijing
Amid Trump’s tariffs, Africa faces trade disruptions, corporate power, and emerging partnerships in its quest to control its economic destiny.