One of the highlights of a recent trip to Istanbul–dominated by run-ins with operatives of a secretive Turkish political group–was a quick stop at the Istanbul Modern. What I remember most were a set of photographs taken in the 1960s in East and West Africa by the legendary photographer, Goksin Sipahioglu. This link takes you to 2008 interview with Sipahioglu, who founded the SIPA Press Agency, in Paris where he lives.
The SCO summit in Beijing revealed cracks in Western dominance—but whether they become openings for justice depends on African agency, not new patrons.
Colonial urbanism cast African neighborhoods as chaotic, unplanned, and undesirable. In postcolonial Dar es Salaam, that legacy still shapes who builds, who belongs, and what the middle class fears the city becoming.
From the colonial classroom to today’s exam halls, student strikes in Kenya are less outbursts than acts of political imagination—insisting that schools live up to their promise of justice and transformation.
Floating power plants from Turkey promise to solve blackouts in the Global South. But easy fixes come with political risks.
At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.
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.
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.
On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.
A new opposition coalition in Nigeria claims to speak for the people, but its architects are from the same old political class seeking another shot at power.
In her latest novel, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie examines the contradictions of women’s desires, while leaving her own narrative blind spots exposed.
The French narrative of the Enlightenment still struggles to contend with the country’s racialized hierarchy in its cultural artifacts.
As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.
The reopening of a border between Eritrea and Tigray masks a deeper realignment. As old foes unite against Ethiopia’s government, the risk of renewed war grows.
K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.
Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.
As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.
Delayed, underfunded, and undermined, this year’s Women’s Africa Cup of Nations has exposed not just neglect but active sabotage from CAF and national federations.
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.
As Mozambique faces escalating climate disasters, it is shut out of the very funds meant to protect it.
The 2025 Kenyan protests once again declared themselves “tribeless, leaderless, partyless.” But what does the idiom of unity hide?