Fields of dependency
As the US-Israel war on Iran disrupts fertilizer supply, Africa’s reliance on imported inputs exposes the deeper political economy driving food insecurity.
Blog
More commerce than chaos
In Johannesburg’s Jeppe precinct, what looks like disorder is in fact a dense, transnational system of trade, labor, and survival at the heart of the global economy.
The demographic dividend no one wants to pay
Although increasingly celebrated as an asset, Africa’s youth remain locked out of power and decent work.
The debts our parents left us
The language of fiscal consolidation is meant to sound inevitable. But for Kenya's informal workers, the human cost is anything but abstract.
Whose progress?
A new documentary reveals how Ethiopia’s manufacturing push redistributes land, labor, and opportunity — delivering gains for some while displacing others.
Art has never been innocent
Paulo Nazareth's latest show in Berlin follows the cunning architecture of power, from Germany to Brazil and across continents and epochs.
Between fandom and dissent
Eritrea’s recent progress in AFCON qualifying offered a rare feel-good moment, but new player defections underline how fragile that progress remains amid the country’s political realities.
Who gets to be a civilian?
Often in war, language is twisted and used to change meaning, to dehumanize, to invent enemies, and to justify atrocities.
The making of Arundhati Roy
In revisiting her relationship with her mother, Roy shows how intimacy, violence, and love forged the sensibility behind her uncompromising political life.
The human cost of Kenya’s expanding lakes
As Kenya’s Rift Valley lakes expand, swallowing homes, farms, and infrastructure, what appears as a climate anomaly reveals a reckoning with ecological limits, failed planning, and the illusion that water would stay where it was put.
You can’t kick politics out of football
Despite commercialization and elite capture, the world’s most popular sport still generates forms of collective life that resist the logic of capitalism.
In Guadalajara, we found joy
In Guadalajara, fans from three continents celebrated football together in what was a taste of a World Cup that most won't be able to afford or attend.