Although Nelson Mandela lacked the oratory of Nkrumah and the theory of Senghor, his contribution to the world of ideas was something rarer: pragmatism.
Latest
No president will save Nigeria
Nigeria’s democracy has become dangerously fixated on capturing the presidency. Reviving regional politics may be the country’s best hope for rebuilding democratic accountability.
The World Cup
Our coverage of the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup in North America.
Culture
The king of soccer
In 1957, three months after Ghanaian independence, the world’s most celebrated footballer came to Accra to teach. What Stanley Matthews left behind changed Ghanaian football forever.
TV
From IMF history to astrophysics, Nairobi’s Drunken Lectures turn casual drinkers into an engaged public.
Politics
Rebranding French imperialism
Although the Africa Forward Summit in Kenya was framed as a partnership, it was actually France desperately looking for a new door into a continent that wants to throw it out.
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.