The arrest protocol on my fridge
A year after ICE detained Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil, pro-Palestinian organizers in the United States are living under the threat of arrest, detention, and deportation.
Blog
Slow death by food
Illegal gold mining is poisoning Ghana’s soil and rivers, seeping into its crops and seafood, and turning the national food system into a long-term public health crisis.
The Imam against the insurgents
The potential return of exiled cleric Mahmoud Dicko to Mali could challenge jihadist movements by reopening political space and contesting their claim to religious authority.
A sick health system
The suspension of three doctors following the death of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s son has renewed scrutiny of a health-care system plagued by impunity, underfunding, and a mass exodus of medical professionals.
From Mogadishu to Minneapolis
The Trump administration’s crackdown on Somalis in Minnesota ignores a longer history: decades of US intervention that helped produce the violence and displacement Somalis fled.
The empire strikes Iran
The US-Israeli war on Iran is the latest expression of a long imperial pattern—one shaped by opportunistic intervention, Western alignment, and the enduring racialized logic of empire.
Afrobeats after Fela
Wizkid’s dispute with Seun Kuti and the release of his latest EP with Asake highlight the widening gap between Afrobeats’ commercial triumph and Fela Kuti’s political inheritance
Whose language is the nation’s?
Senegal’s bilingual education reforms challenge the dominance of French—but foreign aid dependence and internal linguistic politics complicate the path to decolonizing the classroom.
À qui appartient la langue de la nation?
Les réformes de l’éducation bilingue au Sénégal contestent la domination du français, mais la dépendance à l’aide étrangère et les rivalités linguistiques internes compliquent la décolonisation de l’école.
There is no vernacular
The architecture of southeastern Nigeria unsettles the neat binary between “indigenous” and “foreign.”
Progress is exhausting
Pedro Pinho’s latest film follows a Portuguese engineer in Guinea-Bissau, exposing how empire survives through bureaucracy, intimacy, and the language of “development.”
The rubble of empire
Built by Italian Fascists in 1928, Mogadishu Cathedral was meant to symbolize “peaceful conquest.” Today its ruins force Somalis to confront the uneasy afterlife of colonial power and religious authority.