Music Break
The old lion of Zimbabwean liberation music, Thomas Maphumo, and his band, The Blacks Unlimited, play Southpaw in Brooklyn next month on Wednesday, July 20. Get there. Samples of his oeuvre here.
Further Reading
Who gets to be a civilian?
Often in war, language is twisted and used to change meaning, to dehumanize, to invent enemies, and to justify atrocities.
The making of Arundhati Roy
In revisiting her relationship with her mother, Roy shows how intimacy, violence, and love forged the sensibility behind her uncompromising political life.
The human cost of Kenya’s expanding lakes
As Kenya’s Rift Valley lakes expand, swallowing homes, farms, and infrastructure, what appears as a climate anomaly reveals a reckoning with ecological limits, failed planning, and the illusion that water would stay where it was put.
You can’t kick politics out of football
Despite commercialization and elite capture, the world’s most popular sport still generates forms of collective life that resist the logic of capitalism.
In Guadalajara, we found joy
In Guadalajara, fans from three continents celebrated football together in what was a taste of a World Cup that most won’t be able to afford or attend.
À Guadalajara, nous avons trouvé la joie
A Guadalajara, des fans venus des trois continents ont célébrer le football ensemble dans un avant-goût de ce que sera, pour eux, la Coupe du monde : une fête à laquelle ils ne pourront pas assister
Being right at the wrong time
Prominent cleric Sheikh Ahmad Gumi’s calls for negotiation reflect practices already in use, but in Nigeria’s polarized digital space, nuance is punished.
Where mining and conservation meet
Far from signaling a break from the past, the convergence of mining and conservation in West Africa underscores a recurring pattern that stretches back to colonialism.
Could expanding protected land undermine biodiversity?
Paradoxically, conservation efforts in Liberia and Senegal are threatening native ecology.
Waiting to believe
After years of heartbreak, Congolese fans are guarding their expectations ahead of a decisive play-off for a place at the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
Trumpism in Nigeria
Why does the anti-Black racism of the US president have defenders in Africa’s largest Black nation?
After the subcontracting state
The withdrawal from the port city of Berbera by regional powers distracted by war, marks the end of an external system that managed the Horn of Africa—and the beginning of a deeper structural collapse.
Cooking up the city
A new history of Mombasa shows how street food, colonial labor migration, and urban capitalism reshaped what—and how—Kenya eats.
Who owns the memory of struggle?
An exhibition in Ibadan recovers Nigeria’s buried history of activism, raising urgent questions about access, erasure, and whether archives can inspire new political action.
Greater Israel and the new regional order
Israel’s campaigns in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran are not discrete crises but interconnected fronts in a broader project of regional dominance.
Senegal’s theater of morality
As debt mounts and police violence on campuses goes unanswered, Senegal’s government is targeting its queer citizens.
A life in struggle
From the Nigerian Civil War to decades of Marxist organizing and scholarship, Biodun Jeyifo’s life traced a tradition of commitment—one that now passes to a new generation.
Where do the borders really lie?
In Nairobi, migrants face not just national frontiers but invisible barriers in policing, housing, and work.
David Hundeyin may not be a false prophet
In Nigeria’s media landscape, anti-imperialist commentary captures popular anger without transforming it, turning dissent into spectacle rather than power.
Pilgrimage to power
From John Paul II to Benedict XVI, papal visits to Cameroon have often come when Paul Biya’s government faced political turmoil.