Revolution without illusion
The Marxist historian Mohammed Harbi spent a lifetime dismantling the myths of Algeria’s national movement and warning that anticolonial victories could harden into bureaucratic rule.
Blog
Who owns Ghana’s mission schools?
A constitutional challenge over religious practice reveals the unresolved colonial and postcolonial politics of Ghana’s mission-founded secondary schools.
Gen Z’s electoral dilemma
Long dismissed as apathetic, Kenya’s youth forced a rupture in 2024. As the 2027 election approaches, their challenge is turning digital rebellion and street protest into political power.
A world reimagined in Black
By placing Kwame Nkrumah at the center of a global Black political network, Howard W. French reveals how the promise of pan-African emancipation was narrowed—and what its failure still costs Africa and the diaspora.
The trouble with ‘showing the real Africa’
iShowSpeed’s Africa tour is widely celebrated as respectful and refreshing, yet it operates within a long tradition of racialized spectacle that turns Africa into content and Blackness into performance.
Securing Nigeria
Nigeria’s insecurity cannot be solved by foreign airstrikes or a failing state, but by rebuilding democratic, community-rooted systems of collective self-defense.
Co-opting African literature
Can a festival meaningfully applaud African creativity while its sponsor profits from African death?
Repression by other means
The shooting and prolonged detention of Serrote José de Oliveira expose how Angola’s legal order is not merely breaking down, but being deliberately replaced by a system of impunity and police power.
Who gets to tell the history of Mau Mau?
David Elstein’s attack on David Olusoga’s docuseries on the legacy of the British empire reveals less about historical error than about the enduring impulse to rehabilitate British colonial rule.
What Kwame Nkrumah knew about profit shifting
From colonial accounting tricks to modern tax havens, Nkrumah understood how capital escapes, and why political independence was never enough.
Labor without boundaries
In Chad, domestic labor between Chinese employers and local workers unfolds in private spaces where rules are missing and conflict fills the gap.
When charity poses for a Grammy
Burna Boy’s highly publicized Lagos prison visit looked like generosity, but it also looked like content. Who was it really for?