A joke born from a Chief Justice’s insult grew to 22 million followers and forced out a cabinet minister in eight weeks. What does this reveal about India and about the limits of leaderless revolt everywhere?
Latest
What Europe’s migration deals are really buying
European officials are calling the EU-Mauritania migration deal a success. Here’s what the numbers don’t count.
The World Cup
Our coverage of the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup in North America.
Culture
Africa’s last philosopher king
Although Nelson Mandela lacked the oratory of Nkrumah and the theory of Senghor, his contribution to the world of ideas was something rarer: pragmatism.
TV
From IMF history to astrophysics, Nairobi’s Drunken Lectures turn casual drinkers into an engaged public.
Politics
The grid inside the grid
Africa’s new AI factories promise digital sovereignty. Their electricity deals may instead create private power islands inside public systems.
Technology
The grid inside the grid
Africa’s new AI factories promise digital sovereignty. Their electricity deals may instead create private power islands inside public systems.
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.