The Granta controversy surrounding a Commonwealth Prize-winning story tells us less about AI than about the enduring metropolitan expectation that writing from the South should sound opaque, excessive, and primitive.
Latest
Moral clarity is not enough
Gustavo Petro’s “economy for life” speaks to real crises. But without a rigorous political economy behind it, progressive movements risk mistaking the symptoms for the disease.
SPORTS
Burundi’s football league rarely draws headlines — making it an easy target for match-fixing networks now entrenched in its top division.
Culture
The heart of the South African film industry
A debut feature set on the Cape Flats turns a familiar crime premise into a quiet study of fatherhood, masculinity, and survival. But its limited reach reveals the deeper problems facing South African film.
Politics
From Mubarak to Sisi
What began as a familiar security state has hardened into something new: a unified coercive order that governs Egypt through violence, surveillance, and permanent emergency.
Worldwide White Supremacy
Trumpism in Nigeria
Why does the anti-Black racism of the US president have defenders in Africa’s largest Black nation?
The mourning of a man, the mirror of a nation
Charlie Kirk was not a household name in South Africa. Yet, as evidenced by the local outpouring of grief that followed his death, South Africans must confront the truth: his ideas were already at home.
Colonize then, deport now
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.
Sovereignty or supremacy?
As far-right politics gain traction across the globe, some South Africans are embracing Trumpism not out of policy conviction but out of a deeper, more troubling identification.