We are taking a collective break from blogging until Thursday, January 10th to give us a chance to breathe and catch up with our lives. Till then feel free to read our rich archive of posts from 2012, check in with our “Best …”-lists below and follow us on Facebook and Twitter where we may post occasionally in the interim. Happy New Year!
UPDATE: Apologies, but we’ll be back on Monday, January 14th.
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.
In Nairobi, migrants face not just national frontiers but invisible barriers in policing, housing, and work.
In Nigeria’s media landscape, anti-imperialist commentary captures popular anger without transforming it, turning dissent into spectacle rather than power.
From John Paul II to Benedict XVI, papal visits to Cameroon have often come when Paul Biya’s government faced political turmoil.
Between imperial narratives and state propaganda, debates about the war on Iran often erase the diversity of Iranian society and the voices of its marginalized communities.
A year after ICE detained Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil, pro-Palestinian organizers in the United States are living under the threat of arrest, detention, and deportation.
Illegal gold mining is poisoning Ghana’s soil and rivers, seeping into its crops and seafood, and turning the national food system into a long-term public health crisis.
The potential return of exiled cleric Mahmoud Dicko to Mali could challenge jihadist movements by reopening political space and contesting their claim to religious authority.
The suspension of three doctors following the death of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s son has renewed scrutiny of a health-care system plagued by impunity, underfunding, and a mass exodus of medical professionals.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
The architecture of southeastern Nigeria unsettles the neat binary between “indigenous” and “foreign.”
Pedro Pinho’s latest film follows a Portuguese engineer in Guinea-Bissau, exposing how empire survives through bureaucracy, intimacy, and the language of “development.”
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.
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.
France’s mass deportation orders reveal how colonial logics persist in migration policy, turning former subjects into administrative problems to be expelled.
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.