Last month, Mali’s trio SMOD (consisting of DJ Sam, Ousco and Donski) released a second single, Les Dirigeants Africains, taken from their new self-titled album. Sure, producer Manu Chao’s stamp is all over it, but SMOD’s lyrics and director Chris Macari* make up for that. And if you think DJ Sam looks a bit like Amadou or Mariam, you might very well be onto something…
* If you’ve never heard of Chris Macari, then his 2003 short movie The Letter is a good place to start.
Trump’s threats of military action against Nigeria are not about Christian genocide, but are about rare earths, China, and the scramble to control Africa’s mineral future.
Davido’s appearance at ‘Amapiano’s biggest concert’ turned a night of celebration into a study in Afrophobia, fandom, and the fragile borders of South African cultural nationalism.
Drawing on his forced migration from Rwanda, Serge Alain Nitegeka reflects on the forms, fragments, and unsettled histories behind his latest exhibition in Johannesburg.
A photo essay on Nigeria’s Durbars and the power of royal pageantry.
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.
The country that once produced some of Africa’s fiercest moral voices now struggles to sustain independent thought.
Jean Maxime Baptiste’s latest film listens to how grief and history reverberate across generations in French Guiana.
Across the continent’s new coup belt, young officers are stepping into power, casting themselves as guardians against corrupt civilian elites.
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.
Trump’s aid cuts have gutted HIV programs across Nigeria—forcing local women-led groups to rebuild health and dignity from below.
Africa’s first G20 presidency could mark a turning point for the continent—or simply another performance of green-washed extraction led by mining elites.
From Iraq to Gaza, empire no longer needs to annihilate populations when it can dismantle the very structures that make collective life possible.
In Najaax Harun’s paintings, the self confronts its own reflection—haunted, tender, and unafraid to transform.
Made just as Sudan descended into war, ‘Khartoum’ captures the beauty, pain, and humanity of a city shaken by violence—and the filmmakers who became refugees alongside their subjects.
From indirect rule to Operation Dudula, the lines dividing citizen from stranger trace back to the way empire organized identity and labor.
Francesca Albanese’s visit to South Africa exposed a truth we prefer not to face: that our moral witness has hardened into ritual. We watch, we clap, we call it solidarity.
Nairobi’s cultural moment reflects both the promise of continental imagination and the anxiety of performing arrival for the world’s gaze.
Hurricane Melissa made clear what COP30 obscures: the climate crisis still follows the lines of empire.
In Tanzania, the Gen Z uprising meets a state whose old bargains have collapsed.
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.