• B Camminga

Trans and gender diverse people are routinely told that what they are is new. In South Africa, they have not merely survived history, but they have also shaped it.

• Benjamin Fogel

As Bolsonarismo outlives Bolsonaro, what does Brazil reveal about where politics everywhere is heading?

• Joshua W.J. Brown

What happens after abolition, when control over human movement still has a price?

• Husam Mahjoub

The UAE shares no border with Sudan and faces no refugee crisis from its war. It has only an interest in the country’s gold, ports, and in making sure a popular revolution doesn’t spread.

• Aidan Huang

A dispute inside a household in N’Djamena becomes a lesson in what money cannot substitute for: recognition, trust, and everyday human dignity.

• Ayoola Babalola

Dangote’s refinery ended Nigeria’s dependence on imported fuel and became Africa’s most important energy asset overnight when Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz. But it also became the country’s most powerful monopoly.

• Richard Seymour

Warnings from researchers at Anthropic and OpenAI that their own products could end humanity distract from the real damage AI is already doing.

• 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.’

• Sushovan Dhar

A joke born from a Chief Justice’s insult grew to 22 million followers and forced out a cabinet minister in eight weeks. What does this reveal about India and about the limits of leaderless revolt everywhere?

• Ahlam Chemlali
• Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde

European officials are calling the EU-Mauritania migration deal a success. Here’s what the numbers don’t count.

• Markus V. Hoehne

Washington’s own record of intervention in the Horn of Africa — not Mogadishu’s — is the strongest case against recognizing Somaliland now.

• Mahbub Abdillahi

As the UN and the US pull back from Somalia’s security architecture within months of each other, Mogadishu insists it is ready. The gap between that confidence and the country’s political reality tells a different story.

• Nabil Ferdaoussi

When thousands of young Moroccans stormed Ceuta last week, it was not an invasion, but the latest in a five-year pattern of coercive migration diplomacy on a border with five centuries of colonial history behind it.

• Hilmelda Tenkeu

A charter twenty African governments just endorsed defends seed sovereignty and economic independence in one breath, and moves to gut abortion and queer rights in the next. 

• Obongodu Paul Unanam

Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency secures thousands of convictions every year, but when it comes to politically-connected elites, it’s a different story.

• Ninu Sonuga

From Eko Atlantic to the Niger Delta, elite enclaves have become the defining spatial expression of Nigeria’s political order.

• Awonusi Ayomide Jesudamilare

Africa’s new AI factories promise digital sovereignty. Their electricity deals may instead create private power islands inside public systems.

• Sada Malumfashi

Nigeria’s democracy has become dangerously fixated on capturing the presidency. Reviving regional politics may be the country’s best hope for rebuilding democratic accountability.

• Shreya Parikh

Behind Tunisia’s panicked headlines about falling birth rates is the darker demand that reproduction itself be policed in the name of racial purity.

• Kawthar Jeewa

A landmark housing ruling in Cape Town and anti-migrant marches in Durban look like opposite stories. But they are two extremes of the same colonial question: who is permitted to occupy space?