Music Break / Fatoumata Diawara
Easy listening. ‘Bassa’ is a song by the Côte d’Ivoire-born, Mali-raised and now France-based artist Fatoumate Diawara. We could use a translation — because maybe it’s no easy listening at all. Anyone?
Further Reading
Whose transition is it anyway?
Africa’s first G20 presidency could mark a turning point for the continent—or simply another performance of green-washed extraction led by mining elites.
Elimination by other means
From Iraq to Gaza, empire no longer needs to annihilate populations when it can dismantle the very structures that make collective life possible.
The mirror and becoming
In Najaax Harun’s paintings, the self confronts its own reflection—haunted, tender, and unafraid to transform.
Filming what survives
Made just as Sudan descended into war, ‘Khartoum’ captures the beauty, pain, and humanity of a city shaken by violence—and the filmmakers who became refugees alongside their subjects.
The invention of foreigners
From indirect rule to Operation Dudula, the lines dividing citizen from stranger trace back to the way empire organized identity and labor.
When solidarity becomes spectacle
Francesca Albanese’s visit to South Africa exposed a truth we prefer not to face: that our moral witness has hardened into ritual. We watch, we clap, we call it solidarity.
Global Africa for whom?
Nairobi’s cultural moment reflects both the promise of continental imagination and the anxiety of performing arrival for the world’s gaze.
The geography of a storm
Hurricane Melissa made clear what COP30 obscures: the climate crisis still follows the lines of empire.
After the coronation
In Tanzania, the Gen Z uprising meets a state whose old bargains have collapsed.
Raila Odinga’s Kenya
The death of Kenya’s most enduring opposition leader invites a reckoning—not only with his contradictions, but with what his long struggle reveals about the unfinished work of liberation.
The architecture of power
Inside the crumbling walls of Nigeria’s Old Secretariat, echoes of colonial governance and national awakening meet the silence of decay.
The people want to breathe
In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.
The myth of Christian genocide
Far-right and pro-Israel actors are recasting Nigeria’s insecurity as sectarian extermination to distract from Palestine.
After Paul Biya
Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.
Mali’s sovereignty dilemma
Assimi Goïta’s regime has built its legitimacy on defiance of the West and promises of renewal. But with increasing internal pressure, a turn to Moscow risks deepened dependency.
An island nation, everywhere
When Cabo Verde qualified for the World Cup, celebrations erupted from Praia to Rotterdam. The Blue Sharks’ rise shows how a scattered people built a global team rooted in home.
Hospitals versus stadiums
As Morocco prepares to host AFCON and the 2030 World Cup, a decentralized youth movement is demanding real investment in public services over sporting spectacle.
Leapfrogging literacy?
In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.
We must learn to sit in the dark together
At our first workshop from our festival in Nairobi, The Elephant’s Joe Kobuthi, reflected on a year since #EndFinanceBill.
Entries, exits, permits
A reflection on traveling through the globalized walled city.