The king of Kinshasa
Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.
Blog
Drip is temporary
The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.
Making space for the ordinary
MADEYOULOOK’s 'Dinokana' debuted at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Now back home, Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho reflect on sound, place, and why their work is always meant for South African audiences first.
Cameroon’s last election
The outcome of the October 12 elections may make or break the resource-rich Central African nation.
Armed with October
From Sudan to Toronto, a revolutionary poem echoes across time, showing how people’s movements confront militarism, mining, and imperial order with the enduring force of collective struggle.
Rethinking the boundaries of blackness
South Africa’s visual culture reveals that its racial categories were never fixed, while the history of indenture complicates the terms of solidarity and exclusion.
Reading List: Olufemi Terry
What does it mean to imagine a city with no fixed essence, only shifting histories and unstable forms of power?
Energy for whom?
Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.
Framing otherness
Rungano Nyoni’s latest film challenges audiences to confront the collective complicity that sustains abuse.
The mourning of a man, the mirror of a nation
Charlie Kirk was not a household name in South Africa. Yet, as evidenced by the local outpouring of grief that followed his death, South Africans must confront the truth: his ideas were already at home.
Who pays for Africa’s food future?
A new movement is challenging the financial stranglehold of agribusiness and foreign lenders, arguing that Africa’s future lies not in extractive monocultures but in agroecology, sovereignty, and collective resistance.
Back on track
A Johannesburg-Cape Town high-speed line could turn apartheid’s corridors of extraction into a green spine of connection, industry, and justice.