In Johannesburg, a new generation of Black cyclists is redefining joy, movement, and solidarity—taking over the streets to ride, to reclaim space, and to reimagine freedom.
Latest
What to do about Kenya’s femicide problem?
A lack of reliable statistics and coherent strategy to address femicide in Kenya, has left a culture of everyday insecurity for women in the country.
How to unmake the world
In this wide-ranging conversation, para-disciplinary artist Nolan Oswald Dennis reflects on space, time, Blackness, and the limits of Western knowledge—offering a strategy for imagining grounded in African and anti-colonial traditions.
A migrant’s tale
On his latest EP, Kwame Brenya turns a failed migration into musical testimony—offering a biting critique of ECOWAS, broken borders, and the everyday collapse of pan-African ideals.
The global gateway to nowhere
Europe’s flagship development plan promises investment and partnership—but delivers debt, displacement, and old colonial patterns dressed up in green.
What Portugal forgets
In the film ‘Tales of Oblivion,’ Dulce Fernandes excavates the buried history of slavery in Portugal, challenging a national mythology built on sea voyages, silence, and selective memory.
TV
The CAF Champions League final and the politics of North-African football ultras.
Culture
Afropolitans and the fantasy of a digital nation
Web3 utopians promised a sovereign future for the African diaspora—but what they delivered was a networking club for elites, wrapped in crypto-libertarian hype and Afro-futurist aesthetics.
Velvet rebellions
The oppositional sartorial lens of Congolese sapeurs exposes the limits and frailties of representation work in New York’s Met Gala.
Cinema against silence
A new Malian film takes on the tradition of forced marriage with humor, intimacy, and defiance—reimagining African cinema as both tribute and rupture.
Re-writing the rules of Tunisian rap
Blending Tunisian rap with Egyptian mahraganat, Lully Snake defies sexist norms, blurs borders, and opens a new space for feminist rebellion in North African popular culture.
Art is a place for rehearsal
What happens when art steps into the gaps left by official history? A conversation on race, memory, and the unfinished work of making meaning.
Revolutionary Papers
A year long series on the archival remnants of African and black diaspora anti-colonial movement materials to retrieve a politics and pedagogy that challenge the contemporary cooptation of radical histories. Guest editors: Mahvish Ahmad, Koni Benson, and Hana Morgenstern from the Revolutionary Papers project (revolutionarypapers.org)
Nigeria's archives of revolutionary printmaking offers us insights into the dissident voices of the country's old left, which are surprisingly relevant today.
Christian theology was appropriated to play an integral role in the justifying apartheid’s racist ideology. Black theologians resisted through a theology of the oppressed.
Politics
After the digging, who remembers?
In the aftermath of the Stilfontein mining tragedy, South Africa must confront not just policy failure but a deeper amnesia: the erasure of women, memory, and indigenous ethics from its extractive economy.
South Africa’s American refugees
Cape Town’s digital nomads chase cheap luxury and scenic backdrops—but behind the matcha lattes and “social impact days” lies a deeper story of economic power, displacement, and global inequality.
The other route to the American dream
With Europe increasingly closed, West African migrants are turning to the US—via Latin America. But the journey is long, dangerous, and brutally expensive, raising urgent questions about global responsibility.
The politics of class from above
In Tanzania and beyond, political elites manage informal workers not by ignoring them—but by shaping their identities, dividing their ranks, and using class to tighten their hold on power.
Green hydrogen, old colonialism
The EU’s hydrogen push in North Africa is sold as climate progress, but beneath the green gloss lies a familiar story of extraction, debt, and dispossession.
Donald Trump
Trump tariffs and US Imperialism
Trump’s April 2025 tariff blitz ignited market chaos and deepened rifts within his own coalition. Beneath the turmoil lies a battle between technocrats, ultranationalists, and anti-imperial populists, all vying to reshape—or destroy—American global power.
The end of US empire is not the end of the world
As American hegemony unravels, the Global South must resist both nostalgia and passivity. Multipolarity won’t arrive on its own—it must be built through struggle.
Tariffs, Trump, and the Global South
Trump’s trade war is framed as a battle with China—but its fallout is exposing just how little power African economies have in a rigged global system.
Why the far right needs violence
Javier Milei rose to power promising freedom—but his government is unleashing economic violence, criminalizing dissent, and testing the limits of Argentina’s democracy.