Not all empires look the same
Although the UAE doesn’t occupy territory, it arms militias, controls ports, and launders violence through the language of development. Sudan is paying the price.
Blog
The left does not need priests of purity
If the South African left cannot engage the messy, contradictory spaces where working class politics are actually happening, then it cannot lead.
Nothing left
A much-anticipated “Conference of the Left” was supposed to unite South Africa’s progressive forces. Instead, it confirmed the harder truth: the left doesn’t need unity, it needs rebuilding.
What is the World Cup for?
The World Cup was born from imperial rivalry and nationalist aspiration. Almost a century later, it still oscillates between mass hope and elite spectacle.
My mother’s buried story
AI tools are built on Eurocentric datasets. For Brazil’s Afro-descendants — whose histories were already marginalised from literature, academia, and media — it poses the threat of industrial-scale erasure.
The right to belong imperfectly
In South Africa, one of xenophobia’s quieter moral mechanisms is the way foreign wrongdoing is made to carry more meaning than citizen wrongdoing.
Frames of reference
At the 61st Venice Biennale, the late Koyo Kouoh’s decolonial vision shaped a landmark exhibition, even as questions of representation, solidarity, and cultural authority continued to haunt the African pavilions.
Who's afraid of Michael Jackson?
The new Michael Jackson biopic turns a politically conscious Black artist into a raceless fantasy figure, erasing the civil rights struggles, global solidarities, and histories that shaped him.
Walking through the ruins of French Cameroon
A new documentary revisits how Mongo Beti used literature and political writing to confront the suppressed history of French colonial violence in Cameroon.
Anticolonialism in the age of fragmentation
The violence unfolding in Mali reflects a deeper political impasse: how to sustain popular aspirations for emancipation without collapsing into military authoritarianism.
Branches without roots
Across Africa, governments are elevating STEM education while sidelining the humanities. But science and technology are never neutral, and technical expertise alone cannot transform society.
Against the ropes
In Ghana, women boxers continue to pursue the sport despite the economic hardship and institutional inequalities they face in and out of the ring.