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.
Extraction
After the digging, who remembers?
In the aftermath of the Stilfontein mining tragedy, South Africa must confront not just policy failure but a deeper amnesia: the erasure of women, memory, and indigenous ethics from its extractive economy.
Green hydrogen, old colonialism
The EU’s hydrogen push in North Africa is sold as climate progress, but beneath the green gloss lies a familiar story of extraction, debt, and dispossession.
New route for old exploitation
A US-backed infrastructure project in the DRC is framed as development, but history suggests it’s just another pipeline for foreign powers to profit from Congo’s riches.
Mining, murder, and the machinery of exploitation
The massacre of artisanal miners in Stilfontein exposes the South African state’s violent allegiance to corporate interests and a long legacy of extraction and dispossession.
The price of power
Ghana’s election has brought another handover between the country’s two main parties. Yet behind the scenes lies a flawed system where wealth can buy political office.
Reading List: Adam Hanieh
Materially speaking, oil is simply a sticky, black goo. It doesn’t have any innate power separate from the kind of society we live in—capitalism.
Liberation is not propaganda
At Africa Energy Week, the language of resource sovereignty disguised a new form of climate denial that appropriates progressive rhetoric in service of fossil fuel companies.
The real Rwanda
The world is slowly opening its eyes to how Paul Kagame’s regime abuses human rights, suppresses dissent, and exploits neighboring countries.
Shadowy interventions
The EU’s military involvement in West Africa, the Gulf of Guinea, South Sudan, and East Africa is well-known. But one mission on the continent has gone relatively unnoticed.
Intervenções sombrias
Todos sabem do envolvimento militar da União Europeia (EU) na África Ocidental, no Golfo da Guiné, no Sudão do Sul e na África Oriental. No entanto, uma missão no continente passou relativamente despercebida.
The anti-extractivism of Mdou Moctar
'Funeral for Justice' is a bracing recording that blends the critical sensibility of Frantz Fanon with the melodies of a genre born from an ongoing liberation struggle.
Between M23 and electric vehicles
With regional and global powers keen to take advantage of the DRC’s mineral wealth, it is hard to see how things can get better for the country in the short and medium term.
Imagining counter-futures
The film 'Neptune Frost' reduces the gulf between Africanfuturism and Afrofuturism by connecting their shared vision against violent systems of domination.
Hands off Africa
It is high time that the devastating impact of foreign intervention in Africa be taken as seriously as those in Europe.
The revenge of the subalterns
The second 'Black Panther' film is a fierce critique of the West's (neo)colonial adventures in Africa and the Americas.
The imperial forest
Gregg Mitman’s 'Empire of Rubber' is less a historical reading of Liberia than a history of America and racial capitalism through the lens of a US corporate giant.
The land and the sea
Communities whose land is being targeted for exploration by oil and gas companies are increasingly using the courts. South Africa points to good lessons for social movements about allying with the law.
We need to talk about wage theft
South African companies can afford to pay their workers a living wage—if not for their commitment to profit shifting, as the case of Lonmin and Marikana showed.
A bracing form of political cabaret
'Neptune Frost,' written and co-directed by Saul Williams, knows that extraction is everyone’s problem.