We are not a novelty
Trans and gender diverse people are routinely told that what they are is new. In South Africa, they have not merely survived history, but they have also shaped it.
Blog
Utopia is not a metaphor
Thomas More’s Utopia was not written as a metaphor for paradise, but for those trying to organize. What would an African equivalent look like?
Brazil’s racket society
As Bolsonarismo outlives Bolsonaro, what does Brazil reveal about where politics everywhere is heading?
Old Nollywood 2.0
Some of Nigeria’s biggest filmmakers now look to YouTube for opportunity instead of cinemas and streamers. But is what looks like a new era really a return to an old one?
What replaced the slave trade?
What happens after abolition, when control over human movement still has a price?
The North African family French critics couldn’t see
Julia Ducournau’s third film places a North African family at the center of a national trauma, but French critics largely missed what that choice makes visible.
Where the mouse eats the cat
Inside Cameroon’s most overcrowded prison, a recording studio turned incarcerated men into artists. Its founders spent six years filming what it became.
The war Abu Dhabi didn’t need to fight
The UAE shares no border with Sudan and faces no refugee crisis from its war. It has only an interest in the country’s gold, ports, and in making sure a popular revolution doesn’t spread.
We are oil to you
What becomes possible when the psychic weight of labor, migration, and extraction is, even briefly, set down?
Who gets to speak for Eritrea?
A diaspora vote won Snit Tewoldemedhin the People’s Choice Award at Miss World. But the freedom to choose is exactly what Eritreans at home don’t have.
The political economy of romance
eLDee’s latest single reignited an old debate about women, money, and dating in Nigeria. But no one really chooses these gendered arrangements shaped by economic insecurity and unequal access to opportunity.
People have to be treated as people
A dispute inside a household in N’Djamena becomes a lesson in what money cannot substitute for: recognition, trust, and everyday human dignity.