What Nollywood owes the ancestors
Masquerade custodians in Lagos keep saying no to Nollywood. Nollywood keeps returning to masquerades anyway.
Blog
The radical openness of the popular economy
From traders’ credit circles to self-built water networks, Africa’s urban majority keeps finding ways to thicken city life. Can these popular economies still decouple the future from capital’s calculations, even as they open new frontiers for capture?
Is "khawa khawa" a North African myth?
Political rivalries increasingly overshadow the bonds between Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians, as social media amplifies the contradictions of Maghrebi identity.
Reading List: Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi
What if migrant environments, so often cast as scenes of abjection, border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, are instead repositories of knowledge, craft, and refined domesticity?
Death as liberation
Ousmane Sembène’s and Souleymane Cissé’s debut features end with women who choose death. What is more uncomfortable to confront: their deaths, or the conditions that made life itself unbearable?
Forward, but for whom?
Africa’s football federations stood by Gianni Infantino through FIFA’s sell-off scandal. What would it take for them to spend that leverage on something that lasts?
We are not a novelty
Trans and gender diverse people are routinely told that what they are is new. In South Africa, they have not merely survived history, but they have also shaped it.
Utopia is not a metaphor
Thomas More’s Utopia was not written as a metaphor for paradise, but for those trying to organize. What would an African equivalent look like?
Brazil’s racket society
As Bolsonarismo outlives Bolsonaro, what does Brazil reveal about where politics everywhere is heading?
Old Nollywood 2.0
Some of Nigeria’s biggest filmmakers now look to YouTube for opportunity instead of cinemas and streamers. But is what looks like a new era really a return to an old one?
What replaced the slave trade?
What happens after abolition, when control over human movement still has a price?
The North African family French critics couldn’t see
Julia Ducournau’s third film places a North African family at the center of a national trauma, but French critics largely missed what that choice makes visible.