You’ll excuse our South African focus today here and on Twitter. A burger chain writes in braille; author JM Coetzee writes about cricket; “a gym member tells of racist insults”; “Minister of Arts and Culture supports boycott, disinvestment and sanctions against Israel”; and here cartoon artist Mdu Ntuli wraps up the first month of the new year on his Izikohko Show taking a jab at Trevor Noah and the DA’s Benetton campaign. A laugh helps, sometimes.
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?
Emmanuel Macron’s recognition of Morocco’s claim to Western Sahara is a calculated pivot in a decades-old plan to reassert French influence across the Sahel.
In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.
In echoing the anti-trans panic sweeping the Global North, South African political heavyweight Helen Zille joins a reactionary tradition of racialized sex policing.
Once a symbol of anti-imperial unity, BRICS now risks becoming the very thing Bandung opposed: a club of powerful states reproducing global inequality in a new key.
A new season of the African Five-a-side podcast asks, “what is the greatest match in the history of men’s African football?”
Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.
Development agendas framed around “resilience” promise empowerment but often reproduce colonial power dynamics in the guise of climate adaptation.