From leapfrogging optimism to warnings of a new extraction economy, the frameworks now defining Africa’s AI moment will decide who gets to shape the future and who is shaped by it
Latest
Odyssey to Africa’s last colony
Backed by Moroccan state subsidies, Christopher Nolan’s decision to film The Odyssey in occupied Western Sahara is the latest and highest-profile chapter in a five-decade campaign to normalize colonial rule.
The World Cup
Our coverage of the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup in North America.
Culture
Always searching
Abdullah Ibrahim was difficult, suspicious, and brilliant. And beneath all of it, he was searching for home.
TV
From IMF history to astrophysics, Nairobi’s Drunken Lectures turn casual drinkers into an engaged public.
Politics
Kicking out migrants won’t create jobs
The leaders of South Africa’s anti-migrant movement claim that Black African migrants are primarily responsible for unemployment, crime, and failing public services. None of these claims is supported by evidence.
Technology
The stories shaping Africa’s AI future
From leapfrogging optimism to warnings of a new extraction economy, the frameworks now defining Africa’s AI moment will decide who gets to shape the future and who is shaped by it
The trouble with ‘showing the real Africa’
iShowSpeed’s Africa tour is widely celebrated as respectful and refreshing, yet it operates within a long tradition of racialized spectacle that turns Africa into content and Blackness into performance.
Leapfrogging literacy?
In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.
The demise of curiosity
In an era when AI delivers the answer before the question is even asked, the sanctity of wonder is slipping away, and soon the act of asking might vanish entirely.