Heritage on horseback
A photo essay on Nigeria’s Durbars and the power of royal pageantry.
6357 Article(s) by:
Fatima B. Derby
Fatima B. Derby is a Ghanaian feminist writer and queer activist.
When Moscow looked to the horn
Half a century after the Soviets built their base on the Gulf of Aden, the same strategic coastline is once more drawing in foreign powers, old and new.
How much does a Nigerian intellectual cost?
The country that once produced some of Africa’s fiercest moral voices now struggles to sustain independent thought.
The sound of what remains
Jean Maxime Baptiste’s latest film listens to how grief and history reverberate across generations in French Guiana.
The coup kids are in charge now
Across the continent’s new coup belt, young officers are stepping into power, casting themselves as guardians against corrupt civilian elites.
Who cares about African heritage?
While the world debates restitution, Africa’s own heritage institutions are collapsing. The question is no longer who took our past, but who is keeping it alive.
Life after aid cuts
Trump’s aid cuts have gutted HIV programs across Nigeria—forcing local women-led groups to rebuild health and dignity from below.
Whose transition is it anyway?
Africa’s first G20 presidency could mark a turning point for the continent—or simply another performance of green-washed extraction led by mining elites.
Elimination by other means
From Iraq to Gaza, empire no longer needs to annihilate populations when it can dismantle the very structures that make collective life possible.
The mirror and becoming
In Najaax Harun’s paintings, the self confronts its own reflection—haunted, tender, and unafraid to transform.
Filming what survives
Made just as Sudan descended into war, ‘Khartoum’ captures the beauty, pain, and humanity of a city shaken by violence—and the filmmakers who became refugees alongside their subjects.
The invention of foreigners
From indirect rule to Operation Dudula, the lines dividing citizen from stranger trace back to the way empire organized identity and labor.
When solidarity becomes spectacle
Francesca Albanese’s visit to South Africa exposed a truth we prefer not to face: that our moral witness has hardened into ritual. We watch, we clap, we call it solidarity.
Global Africa for whom?
Nairobi’s cultural moment reflects both the promise of continental imagination and the anxiety of performing arrival for the world’s gaze.
The geography of a storm
Hurricane Melissa made clear what COP30 obscures: the climate crisis still follows the lines of empire.
After the coronation
In Tanzania, the Gen Z uprising meets a state whose old bargains have collapsed.
Raila Odinga’s Kenya
The death of Kenya’s most enduring opposition leader invites a reckoning—not only with his contradictions, but with what his long struggle reveals about the unfinished work of liberation.
The architecture of power
Inside the crumbling walls of Nigeria’s Old Secretariat, echoes of colonial governance and national awakening meet the silence of decay.
The people want to breathe
In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.
The myth of Christian genocide
Far-right and pro-Israel actors are recasting Nigeria’s insecurity as sectarian extermination to distract from Palestine.