• Faisal Ali

The World Cup was meant to be the culmination of Omar Artan’s remarkable rise. His exclusion from it revealed something equally striking: the magnitude of the admiration he had earned at home and globally.

• Alasdair Howorth

Cabo Verde’s national team is at the World Cup for the first time in their history. To understand why they might surprise everyone, you need to understand morabeza.

• Dawson McCall

The refusal of the US government to admit Somali referee Omar Artan is a reminder that the United States has a long history of using sports as a tool of exclusion, especially when it comes to African and African-descended athletes.

• Momar Dieng

Between the visa bond, the digital surveillance requirements, and the 74 percent rejection rate, the Trump administration has made it nearly impossible for Senegalese fans and journalists to attend the World Cup.

• Maher Mezahi

Against a tournament shadowed by visa refusals and bureaucratic hostility, the unexpected love affair between the Algerian national team and the city of Lawrence, Kansas, is a welcome reminder of what the World Cup is actually supposed to be about. 

• Alex Čizmić

Bosnia’s World Cup squad is built on the descendants of war and displacement, players raised across Europe and North America who are finding their way back through football.

• Buster Kirchner

Why are the religious practices of African footballers treated as strange when athletes around the world turn to faith and superstition to navigate the game’s uncertainty?

• Lee Nxumalo

For decades, Bafana Bafana embodied the disappointments of the democratic era. As the team recovers, South Africans are once again projecting their political aspirations and fears onto the national side.

• Maher Mezahi

The exclusion of Somali referee Omar Artan hardens the contradiction at the heart of the 2026 World Cup: a global tournament increasingly shaped by the politics of exclusion.

• Boima Tucker

The World Cup was born from imperial rivalry and nationalist aspiration. Almost a century later, it still oscillates between mass hope and elite spectacle.

• Guido Melo

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.

• Grace Tabea Tenga

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.

• Sherry L. Zane

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.

• Zahra Moloo

A new documentary revisits how Mongo Beti used literature and political writing to confront the suppressed history of French colonial violence in Cameroon.

• Olaoluwa Olowu

In Ghana, women boxers continue to pursue the sport despite the economic hardship and institutional inequalities they face in and out of the ring.

• Sean Henry Jacobs

Under Arsène Wenger, Arsenal FC transformed English football’s relationship to African players, becoming a symbol of diaspora identity, Black internationalism, and global modernity.

• Fiifi Anaman

Under the leadership of the president of the Ghana Football Association, the country’s football has become a study in contradiction, combining administrative modernization with competitive decline.

• Lina Abushouk

The Granta controversy surrounding a Commonwealth Prize-winning story tells us less about AI than about the enduring metropolitan expectation that writing from the South should sound opaque, excessive, and primitive.

• Karen Chalamilla

What happens when singeli, a genre born in Dar es Salaam’s working-class underground, becomes a symbol of national culture, embraced by the very state that once distrusted it?

• Louis Mukoma Fargues

What’s in store for the Congolese national team, now that they’ve reached the World Cup?