How do the struggles of one generation echo, decades later, in another’s?
Latest
Who started Nollywood?
Kenneth Nnebue made 27 Yoruba-language films before Living in Bondage. Why does Nigeria still only remember the one he made in Igbo?
The World Cup
Our coverage of the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup in North America.
Culture
The stories shaping Africa’s AI future
From leapfrogging optimism to warnings of a new extraction economy, the frameworks now defining Africa’s AI moment will decide who gets to shape the future and who is shaped by it
TV
From IMF history to astrophysics, Nairobi’s Drunken Lectures turn casual drinkers into an engaged public.
Politics
Ethiopia’s debt problem
Successive debt regimes in Ethiopia have shown that external finance can protect sovereignty, finance coercion, or build development, sometimes all at once.
Technology
The grid inside the grid
Africa’s new AI factories promise digital sovereignty. Their electricity deals may instead create private power islands inside public systems.
The stories shaping Africa’s AI future
From leapfrogging optimism to warnings of a new extraction economy, the frameworks now defining Africa’s AI moment will decide who gets to shape the future and who is shaped by it
The trouble with ‘showing the real Africa’
iShowSpeed’s Africa tour is widely celebrated as respectful and refreshing, yet it operates within a long tradition of racialized spectacle that turns Africa into content and Blackness into performance.
Leapfrogging literacy?
In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.