• Tari Utele

The architecture of southeastern Nigeria unsettles the neat binary between “indigenous” and “foreign.”

• Claire Dillon

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.

• Ayodele Ibiyemi

Honored in Yorubaland as “one who repairs the world,” Jesse Jackson’s life bridged civil rights, pan-Africanism, empire, and contradiction—leaving behind a legacy as expansive as it was imperfect.

• Muriam Haleh Davis

The Marxist historian Mohammed Harbi spent a lifetime dismantling the myths of Algeria’s national movement and warning that anticolonial victories could harden into bureaucratic rule.

• Ayisha Osori

By placing Kwame Nkrumah at the center of a global Black political network, Howard W. French reveals how the promise of pan-African emancipation was narrowed—and what its failure still costs Africa and the diaspora.

• Lauren Cochrane

David Elstein’s attack on David Olusoga’s docuseries on the legacy of the British empire reveals less about historical error than about the enduring impulse to rehabilitate British colonial rule.

• Achille Tenkiang

A dispatch from Benin City tells the unfinished story of the Museum of West African Art.

• Afolabi Adekaiyaoja

The dispute over Benin City’s museum project shows that returning stolen art does not settle the question of ownership.

• Mbaye Bashir Lo

The post-colonial settlement has left Africa vulnerable to conflict, external pressure, and intellectual dependency. What comes next?

• Moustafa Ahmad

Half a century after the Soviets built their base on the Gulf of Aden, the same strategic coastline is once more drawing in foreign powers, old and new.

• Ngaire Blankenberg

While the world debates restitution, Africa’s own heritage institutions are collapsing. The question is no longer who took our past, but who is keeping it alive.

• Amina Adebisi Odofin

Hurricane Melissa made clear what COP30 obscures: the climate crisis still follows the lines of empire.

• R.M. Anyona
• Brian Mathenge

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.

• Kelechi Anabaraonye

Inside the crumbling walls of Nigeria's Old Secretariat, echoes of colonial governance and national awakening meet the silence of decay.

• Joe Kobuthi
• Boima Tucker
• Maher Mezahi
• Sa’eed Husaini
• Shamira Ibrahim
• Khanya Mtshali

At our first workshop from our festival in Nairobi, The Elephant’s Joe Kobuthi, reflected on a year since #EndFinanceBill.

• Brooks Marmon

The writings of Edson Sithole, Zimbabwe’s forgotten nationalist thinker, reveal both the promise and perils of pan-African politics in the independence era.

• Aziz Salmone Fall

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

• Jonathan Ort

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

• Muoki Mbunga

Kenya’s largest-ever protests have drawn striking comparisons to the Mau Mau uprising. But for today’s movement to endure, it must move beyond the streets and invest in political education.

• Maher Mezahi

A new season of the African Five-a-side podcast asks, “what is the greatest match in the history of men's African football?”