Zimbabwe’s forgotten football history
Zimbabwe’s national football was under black control decades before independence—but the colonial legacy of racial segregation still haunts.
Blog
Impounded sandwiches
One major historical function of the police in South Africa remains: to manage the poor.
The legend of flying Africans
Adam Sandler’s film Uncut Gems, Black American identity politics, and the narrative appeal of Ethiopian beginnings.
Family politics and the supernatural
A new documentary film tells a tale of everyday class, religious, and educational contestations around land in Kenya.
Point of order
How Julius Malema's Economic Freedom Fighters drive political conversations in South Africa.
Decolonization’s borders
Recent restrictions on refugees—and the limited protests against them—reflect the degree to which many South Africans see “xenophobia” as legitimate hate.
In the name of the king
Authoritarianism, oligarchy, and patriarchy governs the Cameroonian political landscape.
Au nom du roi, des roitelets et de la divine providence
Rémanences autoritaire, oligarchique et mâlecentrée de l’espace politique camerounais.
A ditch to climb
In South Africa, the political class use foreign nationals as scapegoats to obfuscate their role in reproducing inequality. But immigrants are part of the excluded.
A people cannot bid farewell to their history
Remembering Marcelino dos Santos, founder of Frelimo and the former Vice President of the People’s Republic of Mozambique.
Twitter and a new criminal type
What might the fascination in displaying and seeing the body of “the criminal” tell us about South Africa today?
Reading List: Benjamin Talton
The writer, a historian, on scholarly texts, novels, and memoirs that he consulted in writing a political biography of US congressman Mickey Leland and his solidarity politics in Africa.