Frames of reference
At the 61st Venice Biennale, the late Koyo Kouoh’s decolonial vision shaped a landmark exhibition, even as questions of representation, solidarity, and cultural authority continued to haunt the African pavilions.
Blog
Who's afraid of Michael Jackson?
The new Michael Jackson biopic turns a politically conscious Black artist into a raceless fantasy figure, erasing the civil rights struggles, global solidarities, and histories that shaped him.
Walking through the ruins of French Cameroon
A new documentary revisits how Mongo Beti used literature and political writing to confront the suppressed history of French colonial violence in Cameroon.
Anticolonialism in the age of fragmentation
The violence unfolding in Mali reflects a deeper political impasse: how to sustain popular aspirations for emancipation without collapsing into military authoritarianism.
Branches without roots
Across Africa, governments are elevating STEM education while sidelining the humanities. But science and technology are never neutral, and technical expertise alone cannot transform society.
Against the ropes
In Ghana, women boxers continue to pursue the sport despite the economic hardship and institutional inequalities they face in and out of the ring.
Arsenal is an African club
Under Arsène Wenger, Arsenal FC transformed English football’s relationship to African players, becoming a symbol of diaspora identity, Black internationalism, and global modernity.
Do Ghanaians ‘still believe’ in Kurt Okraku?
Under the leadership of the president of the Ghana Football Association, the country’s football has become a study in contradiction, combining administrative modernization with competitive decline.
How to read postcolonial writing
The Granta controversy surrounding a Commonwealth Prize-winning story tells us less about AI than about the enduring metropolitan expectation that writing from the South should sound opaque, excessive, and primitive.
Moral clarity is not enough
Gustavo Petro’s “economy for life” speaks to real crises. But without a rigorous political economy behind it, progressive movements risk mistaking the symptoms for the disease.
Tanzania’s national sound?
What happens when singeli, a genre born in Dar es Salaam’s working-class underground, becomes a symbol of national culture, embraced by the very state that once distrusted it?
How to build a just green future
From Latin America to Africa, the struggle over minerals, energy, and sovereignty is forcing a deeper reckoning with capitalism, climate change, and the unequal architecture of the global economy.