Further Reading
From Mogadishu to Minneapolis
The Trump administration’s crackdown on Somalis in Minnesota ignores a longer history: decades of US intervention that helped produce the violence and displacement Somalis fled.
The empire strikes Iran
The US-Israeli war on Iran is the latest expression of a long imperial pattern—one shaped by opportunistic intervention, Western alignment, and the enduring racialized logic of empire.
Afrobeats after Fela
Wizkid’s dispute with Seun Kuti and the release of his latest EP with Asake highlight the widening gap between Afrobeats’ commercial triumph and Fela Kuti’s political inheritance
Whose language is the nation’s?
Senegal’s bilingual education reforms challenge the dominance of French—but foreign aid dependence and internal linguistic politics complicate the path to decolonizing the classroom.
À qui appartient la langue de la nation?
Les réformes de l’éducation bilingue au Sénégal contestent la domination du français, mais la dépendance à l’aide étrangère et les rivalités linguistiques internes compliquent la décolonisation de l’école.
There is no vernacular
The architecture of southeastern Nigeria unsettles the neat binary between “indigenous” and “foreign.”
Progress is exhausting
Pedro Pinho’s latest film follows a Portuguese engineer in Guinea-Bissau, exposing how empire survives through bureaucracy, intimacy, and the language of “development.”
The rubble of empire
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.
Remember AFCON?
Behind the refereeing drama and rising revenues, AFCON 2025 exposed a tournament increasingly shaped by global capital rather than the long-term health of African football.
We, the illegals of France
France’s mass deportation orders reveal how colonial logics persist in migration policy, turning former subjects into administrative problems to be expelled.
Betraying Abuja’s green soul
The Federal Capital Territory’s green belts were designed as flood buffers and cooling lungs. But under its current leadership, they are becoming patronage spoils.
Atayese
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.
Bread or Messi?
Angola’s golden jubilee culminated in a multimillion-dollar match against Argentina. The price tag—and the secrecy around it—divided a nation already grappling with inequality.
The roots of our storytelling
What happens when we stop reading African fiction through European literary history and instead trace its worldmaking through indigenous cosmology?
Where have the Chapungu gone?
What connects Zimbabwe’s chimurenga spirit, the disappearing bateleur eagle, and the stubborn afterlife of colonial capital?
Whose story gets to be heard?
A new film investigates the long-standing land disputes between Kenyans, the government, and multinational corporations, whose expansive plantations are the site of much of the Kikuyu people’s hardship.
Visiting Ngara
A redevelopment project in Nairobi’s Ngara district promises revival—but raises deeper questions about capital, memory, and who has the right to shape the city.
Revolution without illusion
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.
Who owns Ghana’s mission schools?
A constitutional challenge over religious practice reveals the unresolved colonial and postcolonial politics of Ghana’s mission-founded secondary schools.
Gen Z’s electoral dilemma
Long dismissed as apathetic, Kenya’s youth forced a rupture in 2024. As the 2027 election approaches, their challenge is turning digital rebellion and street protest into political power.