• Yatta Zoker

What becomes possible when the psychic weight of labor, migration, and extraction is, even briefly, set down?

• Michal Petros

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.

• Garhe Osiebe

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.

• Ngozi Nwosu-Juba

From the Women’s War of 1929 to the Anlu uprising three decades later, African women were organizing and resisting long before donors arrived to ‘give them a voice.’

• Gathanga Ndung’u

Kenya’s youth uprising was documented in real time through music, murals, memes, and essays. Publishing that history became an act of resistance in its own right.

• Robert Philipson

Long before modern sexual identities reached the East African coast, the Swahili shoga occupied a recognized place in women’s society, until colonialism and later Western frameworks remade them.

• Faraaz Mahomed

How do the struggles of one generation echo, decades later, in another’s?

• Jummai Bulama-Ashebu

Kenneth Nnebue made 27 Yoruba-language films before Living in Bondage. Why does Nigeria still only remember the one he made in Igbo?

• Lucas Souza
• Matthew Kirwin

Joseph O’Neill’s new novel follows a Pittsburgh writer chasing a West African wonderkid. It’s also a story about who profits every time the world goes looking for the next Eusébio.

• Njuki Githethwa

Binyavanga Wainaina was cremated in a private ceremony in 2019. In his final year, the writer kept returning to a colonial chief’s grave beneath a sacred fig tree in Nairobi — as if contemplating what remains of a life.

• Lee Nxumalo

From the Epstein files to a World Cup trailed by rape charges and a hush-money settlement, the public has gotten remarkably good at feeling outrage. What it hasn’t learned is what to do with it.

• Sarah Setlaelo

Although Nelson Mandela lacked the oratory of Nkrumah and the theory of Senghor, his contribution to the world of ideas was something rarer: pragmatism.

• Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh
• Scott Timcke

From leapfrogging optimism to warnings of a new extraction economy, the frameworks now defining Africa’s AI moment will decide who gets to shape the future and who is shaped by it

• Eoghan Gilmartin

Backed by Moroccan state subsidies, Christopher Nolan’s decision to film The Odyssey in occupied Western Sahara is the latest and highest-profile chapter in a five-decade campaign to normalize colonial rule.

• Furaha Ruguru

For a century, African musical heritage was recorded, boxed, and shipped to museums abroad. In Nairobi, a new generation of archives is bringing cultural memory home — and putting it online.

• Sabeeka Al-Kuwari

In apartheid South Africa, Drum magazine showed Black readers what it meant to be modern. But not everyone got to be modern in the same way.

• Mery Vieira

Cabo Verde’s historic run and the breakthrough performances of fellow African and Caribbean nations changed the conversation about visibility, opportunity, and the future of African football.

• Gerard Akindes

Can a continent dominate global football while losing control of its own game?

• Olufemi Terry

Football’s three mixed Maghrebi and Black African stars are not emissaries of a new pan-Africanism. And the continent doesn’t need them to be.

• Giovanni Wanneh

Part performer, part cultural ambassador, and increasingly, a political flashpoint.