As Ghana heads to the polls, its democratic promise fades amid economic turmoil, corruption, and disillusionment, leaving voters to choose between two flawed options.
Latest
Brazil is an African country
After marking its first federal National Black Consciousness Day, Brazil confronts its deep African heritage and enduring racial inequalities.
Gen Z, Riggy G, and the Kenyan pornocracy
In a political landscape defined by opportunism, spectacle, and betrayal, Kenya’s youth-led protests offered a fleeting glimpse of change—only to be ensnared by the same system they sought to challenge.
Beats of defiance
From the streets of Khartoum to exile abroad, Sudanese hip-hop artists have turned music into a powerful tool for protest, resilience, and the preservation of collective memory.
Reading List: Adam Hanieh
Materially speaking, oil is simply a sticky, black goo. It doesn’t have any innate power separate from the kind of society we live in—capitalism.
Taking a stand
The CAF Champions League final and the politics of North-African football ultras.
PODCASTS
2024 has been the ultimate election year. Just Us Under A Tree rejoins the Africa Is a Country Podcast to reflect on South Africa’s May poll and what it reveals about contemporary democratic politics.
Culture
Drawing the line
How Sudanese political satirist Khalid Albaih uses his art and writing to confront injustice, challenge authority, and highlight the struggles of marginalized communities worldwide.
Bored of suppression
Colonial-era censorship bodies continue to stifle African creativity, but a new wave of artists and activists are driving a pan-African push for reform.
Reading List: Dotun Ayobade
What can the lives of the women behind Afrobeat tell us about creativity, resistance, and the interplay of power and pleasure in 1970s Nigeria?
Reading the present as history
In his debut novel, Thaer Husien remixes genre and takes readers on a psychedelic ride through a dystopian yet disturbingly familiar future Palestine.
Why are African artifacts everywhere but Africa?
The countless African artifacts that continue to be held in Western institutions after being obtained illegally send a violent message that makes efforts toward reconciliation inconsequential.
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
Americans, after all
End of the year reflections on the United States of America, from the Global South.
Russian and waiting
Western missteps in Africa are creating an opening for Russia to deepen its influence.
No more business as usual
What can the complete civil disobedience of the Sudanese Professionals Association teach us at a moment when belief in the efficacy of nonviolent protest is in decline?
The Nigerian people must own their resistance
When rising against ruling-class corruption, Nigerians must reject the hero culture that has historically undermined genuine activism.
Liberation is not propaganda
At Africa Energy Week, the language of resource sovereignty disguised a new form of climate denial that appropriates progressive rhetoric in service of fossil fuel companies.
Donald Trump
Hopium kills but hope seeds
Reflections on Trump’s 2024 US presidential victory.
The mine dumps of Silicon Valley
While it might be cathartic to compare Elon Musk’s tech firms to apartheid-era mines, the connection between ex-South Africans and American capitalism is complicated.
The dangers of white totalitarianism
Why is the US ultra-right turning to Rhodesia as their model for a white supremacist state?
On Safari
On our annual publishing break, we ask: if the opposite of “weird” is normal, what if normal is equally problematic?